Cree

The Cree are one of the largest Indigenous peoples of North America, a family of related First Nations whose homelands stretch from Eeyou Istchee on the eastern shore of James Bay in Quebec across northern Ontario and the Prairies to Alberta, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. More than 350,000 people in Canada counted themselves Cree or closely related in the 2016 census, and smaller communities live in Montana in the United States.

The English name comes through French Cris, a shortening of Christinaux, itself taken from an Ojibwe word for peoples living north and west of Lake Superior. The Cree have no single modern name for themselves. Plains Cree say nêhiyawak, Woods Cree Nīhithawak, Moose Cree ililîwak and the East Cree of Quebec Iiyiyuuch or Iinuuch, words meaning "people" or "human beings". The main divisions are the Plains, Woodland, Rocky, Swampy, Moose and East Cree, and the Innu, Naskapi and Atikamekw are closely related. The Oji-Cree and the Métis share Cree ancestry with Ojibwe and European families respectively.

Cree society was built from small units. A lodge of eight to a dozen people, often two related couples and their children, shared a wigwam or tipi, and several lodges formed a band that hunted and travelled together. Families could move between bands, but exile was a heavy punishment. There was no formal authority above the band: allied bands met in council and decided on war and peace by consensus, with each clan represented. In wartime a band chose a temporary war leader, distinct from the peace chief who acted more as a diplomat.

Cree history from the seventeenth century is bound up with the fur trade. Waskaganish, at the mouth of the Rupert River on James Bay, began in 1668 as Charles Fort, the post that preceded the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company, and in 1682 a company party met Cree at the mouth of the Nelson and Hayes rivers in today's Manitoba. Armed with guns obtained from the company, Cree traders moved west onto the Plains as middlemen. There the Plains Cree took up bison hunting and joined the Assiniboine, Saulteaux and Métis in the Iron Confederacy, a major power in the trade from the 1730s to the 1870s.

Most Cree lands are covered by the Numbered Treaties signed with Canada. When the North-West Rebellion broke out in 1885, Big Bear led his band in the period before the fighting, after which Wandering Spirit took command. In the early twentieth century, between 1905 and the 1930s, the Canadian government displaced Cree and Ojibwe people from a wide region north of Winnipeg. In Quebec, the East Cree and the Inuit of Nunavik signed the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975, one of the first modern treaties, and in 2012 an accord with Quebec created the Eeyou Istchee James Bay Regional Government, governed jointly with the other residents of the James Bay region.

Cree is Canada's most widely spoken Indigenous language, the first language of about 96,000 people and the main home language of about 65,000. Its dialects form a chain in which neighbours understand each other easily but distant speakers struggle, and it has official status in the Northwest Territories. Canada has 135 registered Cree bands with some 220,000 members; the Lac La Ronge Indian Band in Saskatchewan is the largest. The Grand Council of the Crees represents about 18,000 East Cree in Eeyou Istchee. South of the border, the Chippewa Cree of Montana live on the Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation alongside Ojibwe people.

Our maps from 1492 to 1700 draw an approximate Cree territory around James Bay and Hudson Bay, with Eeyou Istchee labelled in the east. Neighbours include the Ojibwe and the wider Anishinaabe peoples to the south, the Inuit to the north and, later, the Hudson's Bay Company lands of Rupert's Land.