The Dakota Sioux people include the Eastern Dakota people, known as the Santee, and the Western Dakota, known as the Yankton-Yanktonai. Today, the Sioux maintain many separate tribal governments scattered across several reservations, communities, and reserves in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana in the United States; and Manitoba and southern Saskatchewan in Canada.

The two Dakota Sioux groups speak a mutually intelligible dialects. Moreover, the Dakota language and the Lakota language are mutually intelligible.

The Sioux's spiritual worldview consists of aminism, polytheism and shamanism. For them, nature is sacred. Everything exists within Wakan Tanka, "The Great Spirit," that holds power over everything that has and still exists. Wakan Tanka is life itself and manifests in the sun, moon, stars, and earth, and everthing lives in the shelter of the "world tree."