SIGN. _Draw the extended right hand across the throat from left to right as if severing the head from the body. Possibly derived from an old Siouan custom of decapitating their prisoners._[7] _Mallery refers to this branch of the Siouan tribe as “Cut Throats,”[8] or a “Cut Throat” from a curious practice adopted by the Iowa after battle. Mooney also advocates this theory though he suggests it applied only to the Sioux and not to the whole Siouan stock and is doubtful as to the common interpretation of the sign—a sweeping motion of the hand in front of the neck—as the Kiowa and certain other tribes called the Iowa the “Necklace People.” He also says that this tribe was a little too far from the plains to have a special sign and were probably merged with the Oto, Missouri, Sauk and others in the general region of the “shaved heads.”_ The Iowa tribe of Indians forms one of the Southwestern branches of the great Dakota or Siouan stock and has been included both linguistically and ethnographically by careful students, with the Oto and the Missouri tribes, forming the so-called Chiwere group.[9] The real difference existing between the tribes here noted is one of dialect only. Traditional evidence proves conclusively that they sprung originally from that stem which appears to have been the parent stock of certain other southwestern Siouan tribes, notably, the Winnebago, and from direct information obtained from their people as late as 1883, investigators have been told that not only the Iowa, Missouri, and Oto tribes were from the same source but that the Ponca and Omaha could without question be included, having “once formed part of the Winnebago Nation.”[10]