Wea
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- See the disambiguation page WEA for other instances of WEA.
The Wea were a Native American tribe of Indiana, sometimes considered a subdivision of the Miami tribe. The name 'Wea' is a shortened version of their name for themselves in their own language, waayaahtanwa, which is derived from waayaahtanonki, 'place of the whirlpool', their name for their traditional homeland. This appears in the old French records as the town name Ouiatanon, located in present-day Tippecanoe County, Indiana near the city of Lafayette.
Driven to the West by increased Euro-American settlement and Indian removal, they were confederated with the Kaskaskias, Peorias, and Piankeshaws to form the Confederated Peoria Tribe of first Kansas and now Oklahoma. The tribes blended their cultural traditions and freely accepted whites and blacks into their community.
The Wea spoke a dialect of the Miami-Illinois language, the same language as the Miami and the Peoria.
The bloodline of the last known chief of the Wea prior to relocation continues in the state-recognized tribe of Wea in Indiana. The chief was Jacco Godfrey.
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