Iron Confederacy

rdf:langString Iron Confederacy

rdf:langString Iron Confederacy

rdf:langString Iron Confederacy

rdf:langString unknown, before 1692

rdf:langString Assiniboine

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rdf:langString Stoney

rdf:langString Plains Cree

rdf:langString Michif

rdf:langString Western or Plains Ojibwa

rdf:langString Assiniboine

rdf:langString Métis

rdf:langString Saulteaux

rdf:langString

rdf:langString Stoney

rdf:langString Plains Cree

rdf:langString

rdf:langString The neighbors of the western Cree were Athapascans on the north and northwest, Blackfeet on the west, and Assiniboine on the south. With the Assiniboine they were closely associated from the time of the separation of that tribe from the parent Sioux prior to the opening of the country by exploration in the early years of the seventeenth century; nevertheless, there were rather frequent drunken brawls, with consequent murders, between the two tribes in the boisterous era of the fur-trade. They joined forces in pushing the Blackfeet, Bloods, and Piegan southwestward out of the plains bordering Saskatchewan river, and up to the termination of inter-tribal warfare remained constant enemies of these other Algonquians. The Cree inheritance of the historic Sioux hostility toward the Chippewa was not lessened by the friendly reception they accorded the renegade Assiniboine, for whom the Sioux entertained bitter hatred mixed with professed contempt. The Woods Cree had little, if any, part in this warfare with the Blackfeet and the Sioux; their operations were limited to dispossessing the Athapascans of their territory between the Saskatchewan and Athabasca lake. Peace river, according to Henry, received its name from the circumstance that the Cree and the Beavers settled their hostilities at Peace point.

rdf:langString —The North American Indian, Volume 18

rdf:langString The Iron Confederacy or Iron Confederation (also known as Cree-Assiniboine in English or Nehiyaw-Pwat in Cree) was a political and military alliance of Plains Indians of what is now Western Canada and the northern United States. This confederacy included various individual bands that formed political, hunting and military alliances in defense against common enemies. The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were the branches of the Cree that moved onto the Great Plains around 1740 (the southern half of this movement eventually became the "Plains Cree" and the northern half the "Woods Cree"), the Saulteaux (Plains Ojibwa), the Nakoda or Stoney people also called Pwat or Assiniboine, and the Métis and Haudenosaunee (who had come west with the fur trade). The Confederacy rose to predominance on the northern Plains during the height of the North American fur trade when they operated as middlemen controlling the flow of European goods, particularly guns and ammunition, to other Indigenous nations (the "Indian Trade"), and the flow of furs to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and North West Company (NWC) trading posts. Its peoples later also played a major part in the bison (buffalo) hunt, and the pemmican trade. The decline of the fur trade and the collapse of the bison herds sapped the power of the Confederacy after the 1860s, and it could no longer act as a barrier to U.S. and Canadian expansion.

rdf:langString Assiniboine

rdf:langString Métis

rdf:langString Saulteaux

rdf:langString Stoney

rdf:langString Plains Cree

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