Assiniboine

Speaking a Siouan language and calling themselves Nakoda (also written Nakota or Nakona), the Assiniboine have lived for centuries on the prairies that straddle today's Canada–US border. Today they are First Nations in Saskatchewan and Alberta and Native American nations in northern Montana and North Dakota. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were among the leading powers of the northern plains and key partners in the fur trade.

Assiniboine is a French rendering of an Ojibwe name, asinii-bwaan, usually translated "stone Sioux"; the Cree name has the same meaning. Neighbours are said to have linked them with stone because they cooked by dropping heated stones into water. The Assiniboine and the closely related Stoney Nakoda of Alberta share their ancestry with the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux). Linguists see the Assiniboine–Stoney group as one branch beside the Santee, Lakota and Yankton–Yanktonai, rather than an offshoot of any one of them. The split from the other Sioux had happened before 1620, when a Jesuit report names the Assiniboine separately.

Pressure from the Ojibwe, armed with French guns, pushed the Assiniboine west from the woodlands of Minnesota onto the plains. There they became mounted bison hunters, obtaining horses through trade and raids. At their height they held land from the North Saskatchewan River to the Missouri, across parts of today's Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, North Dakota and Montana. From before 1692 they were a core member of the Iron Confederacy (Nēhiyaw-Pwat) with the Cree, Stoney, Saulteaux and later the Métis. This alliance dominated the northern plains and fought the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Shoshone, the Crow and the Sioux.

Henry Kelsey of the Hudson's Bay Company described the Assiniboine in the 1690s, and later traders such as the La Vérendrye family and Anthony Henday confirmed how far their lands reached. The Assiniboine became essential middlemen for the Hudson's Bay and North West companies in Rupert's Land, and later for American fur companies on the Missouri, trading beaver pelts and bison robes for guns, kettles, blankets and beads. Contact also brought smallpox and other diseases. Their numbers fell from about 10,000 in the late eighteenth century to about 2,600 by 1890.

Bands moved with the bison herds in the warmer months and lived in tipis. Women processed meat and hides, made clothing and tools and treated illness with plants; men hunted, traded and fought on horseback, and girls too learned to ride and hunt. The nation was historically divided into as many as 40 bands, each with a chief, a council, a war chief, a medicine man, a camp crier and camp police. The Sun Dance and vision quests were central to religious life, and the trickster-creator Iktome appears in their earth-diver creation story.

The Assiniboine signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851. On 1 June 1873 American wolf hunters killed at least 20 Assiniboine in the Cypress Hills Massacre, an event that helped lead to the creation of the North-West Mounted Police. With the destruction of the bison herds, the Iron Confederacy broke apart, and the Assiniboine moved onto reserves and reservations.

Many Assiniboine share reserves and reservations with Cree, Saulteaux, Lakota, Dakota and Gros Ventre neighbours. In Montana they live on the Fort Peck Reservation, with Sioux bands, and on the Fort Belknap Reservation, with the Gros Ventre. In Saskatchewan their nations include Carry the Kettle, White Bear, Ocean Man and Pheasant Rump. The language is endangered, with about 150 speakers in the early 2000s. In 2012 the Montana reservations received 63 genetically pure bison from Yellowstone, a celebrated step in returning the animal to the plains.

Our maps for 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Assiniboine territory, labelled "Assiniboin", on the northern plains. On the 1650 map it borders the Cree and the Ojibwe to the north and east, the Crow and Gros Ventre to the south-west, and the Teton (Lakota) and Yanktonai to the south.