Sioux Trivia
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56 free Sioux trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Sioux trivia quiz covers the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires of the Dakota and Lakota peoples of the Great Plains. It starts with names and origins: what 'Sioux' actually means and who coined it, the seven Lakota bands, the emergence story at Wind Cave, White Buffalo Calf Woman and the Seven Sacred Rites, and the arrival of the horse that made the Lakota masters of the northern plains. Then it follows the wars and the treaties: Red Cloud's victory, the Fetterman Fight, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Custer's gold expedition, the Greasy Grass, Sitting Bull's exile in Canada, Crazy Horse's death at Fort Robinson, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, the Mankato hangings of 1862. It ends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Black Elk Speaks, the Crazy Horse Memorial, the 1973 occupation, the billion-dollar Black Hills award the Sioux refuse to accept, and the water protectors of Standing Rock. Our Native American history quiz covers the wider story. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Sioux, the Lakota, their leaders and the events named, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the Sioux name for their own nation, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, mean?
Seven Council Fires
Seven Council Fires counts the nation's seven allied peoples, each keeping its own council fire: four Dakota groups in the east, two in the middle and the Lakota in the west.
Q 02The word 'Sioux' is usually traced to a French rendering of a term in which language?
Ojibwe
Ojibwe is the usual answer, though some linguists point to the closely related Ottawa. The French wrote the name as Nadouessioux, then kept only its last syllable.
Q 03What do the words Dakota and Lakota translate to?
Friend, ally
Friend, ally is the sense of both: they are one name in two dialects. 'Sioux' was an outsiders' label, shortened by the French from a name a rival nation used for them.
Q 04Which English word for a Native American dwelling was borrowed from the Sioux languages?
Tipi
Tipi comes from the Dakota and Lakota word for a dwelling. When a camp moved, the poles became the frame of a travois, a drag sled that carried the folded cover.
Q 05Around which Great Lake did the Santee Dakota live before the 17th century?
Superior
Superior's wooded shores were Santee country, where they gathered wild rice and speared fish from canoes until long wars with a rival nation to the east pushed them south and west.
Q 06Which animal's 18th-century arrival made the Lakota a dominant power on the Northern Plains?
The horse
The horse remade Lakota life around the mounted bison hunt, and they pushed west across the Missouri as far as Wyoming and Montana.
Q 07The Lakota share their other name with which Wyoming mountain range?
Teton
Teton Sioux chiefs confronted Lewis and Clark on the Missouri in 1804, and an armed standoff almost came to a fight before the expedition was let upriver.
Q 08The Lakota origin story says the people first emerged into the world from which Black Hills site?
Wind Cave
Wind Cave 'breathes': air flows in or out of its small natural opening as the pressure outside changes, and Lakota tradition speaks of it as a place where the earth breathes.
Q 09Which figure in Sioux tradition brought the sacred pipe and taught the Seven Sacred Rites?
White Buffalo Calf Woman
White Buffalo Calf Woman is said to have changed into a white buffalo as she left, promising to return, which is why the birth of a white calf is greeted as a sacred sign.
Q 10In Sioux belief, what is Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka?
The Great Spirit
The Great Spirit is addressed through the sacred pipe: the rising smoke is said to carry the smoker's voice to it.
Q 11In Lakota ceremony, what is Inípi?
The sweat lodge
The sweat lodge rite purifies: heated stones are carried into a small dome of bent saplings, and it often prepares people for a vision quest or the Sun Dance.
Q 12The Yankton kept treaty rights to dig at which Minnesota quarry, held sacred by many Plains nations?
Pipestone Quarry
Pipestone Quarry yields the soft red stone carved into ceremonial pipes, and digging there is still reserved for enrolled members of Native American tribes.
Q 13Whose 1866-68 war closed the Bozeman Trail and made the US Army abandon three forts?
Red Cloud
Red Cloud refused to talk peace until the soldiers had marched out of the Powder River country, and the empty forts were burned behind them.
Q 21Where did Sitting Bull lead his band in May 1877 rather than surrender?
Canada
Canada sheltered him for four years, but it gave his people no rations, and with the buffalo failing, hunger drove him back across the border to surrender in 1881.
Q 22In 1885 Sitting Bull spent a season performing with which touring show?
Buffalo Bill's Wild West
Buffalo Bill's Wild West paid him about $50 a week simply to ride once around the arena, and he earned more by selling his autograph to the crowds.
Q 23Who killed Sitting Bull on 15 December 1890?
Indian agency police
Indian agency police, Lakota men in government service, were sent to arrest him for fear he would back the Ghost Dance, and shot him when his followers tried to stop them.
Q 14What do the Lakota call the Fetterman Fight, which killed an Army column of 81?
Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands
Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands: decoys, Crazy Horse among them, drew the whole column over a ridge into an ambush, the Army's worst defeat on the Plains until the Little Bighorn.
Q 15The 1868 treaty that reserved the Black Hills for the Sioux is named for which Wyoming fort?
Fort Laramie
Fort Laramie gave the treaty its name. Its terms said no land could be given up unless three-quarters of the adult men signed, a rule the later taking of the Hills ignored.
Q 16Whose 1874 expedition into the Black Hills set off the gold rush that broke the 1868 treaty?
George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer's party confirmed gold in the Hills, and the town that prospectors founded at his campsite the next year still bears his name.
Q 17By what name do the Lakota know the 1876 clash at the Little Bighorn?
Battle of the Greasy Grass
Battle of the Greasy Grass is the victors' name, yet the battlefield park bore the defeated commander's name until Congress changed it in 1991 and added a memorial to the warriors.
Q 18Before the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers doing what?
Falling upside down into the Lakota camp
Falling upside down into the Lakota camp, like grasshoppers from the sky: he saw it during a Sun Dance weeks before the fight, and his people read it as a promise that the soldiers coming for them would die.
Q 19Which regiment did the Lakota and their allies defeat at the Little Bighorn?
The 7th Cavalry
The 7th Cavalry lost five of its twelve companies to the last man that day, and fourteen years later it was the same regiment that opened fire at Wounded Knee.
Q 20Which Army horse, found badly wounded after the Little Bighorn, was long famed as its side's only survivor?
Comanche
Comanche was nursed back to health and, by regimental order, never ridden again. Mounted after his death in 1891, he still stands in a University of Kansas museum.
Q 24Which Lakota band did Sitting Bull belong to?
Hunkpapa
Hunkpapa followers of his fled south after he was killed and joined the Miniconjou band that the Army attacked at Wounded Knee two weeks later.
Q 25Crazy Horse was a war leader of which Lakota band?
Oglala
Oglala on his father's side, he rode into battle with a single feather and never a war bonnet, which the best-known account traces to a vision in his youth telling him to go plainly dressed.
Q 26What did the Lakota war leader Crazy Horse refuse all his life?
Being photographed
Being photographed or sketched was something he never allowed, so the vast mountain carving of him in the Black Hills can only guess at his face.
Q 27How did Crazy Horse die in September 1877?
Bayoneted by a guard
Bayoneted by a guard, in most accounts, as he fought to stay out of the Fort Robinson guardhouse four months after his surrender, while an old friend, Little Big Man, held him back.
Q 28Which Northern Paiute prophet's 1889 vision set off the Ghost Dance that swept the Plains?
Wovoka
Wovoka came out of a trance during a solar eclipse preaching a dance that would bring back the dead; Lakota dancers later added the 'ghost shirts' to its ceremonies.
Q 29The Wounded Knee Massacre took place on 29 December 1890 on which reservation?
Pine Ridge
Pine Ridge was where the band hoped to find sanctuary after Sitting Bull was killed; troops intercepted it on the way and camped it beside Wounded Knee Creek for the night.
Q 30By what nickname was Chief Spotted Elk, whose band was attacked at Wounded Knee, later known?
Big Foot
Big Foot was ill with pneumonia on the flight south and gave up without a fight when the Army caught up with his band the day before the massacre.