Closely related linguistically and culturally to the eastern and middle Dakotas, the Assiniboines are a Siouan-speaking people who initially inhabited the woodlands and parkland prairie regions southeast, south, and southwest of Lake Winnipeg. Assiniboine is an Algonquian word meaning "those who cook with stones." It is the prevailing interpretation today that the Assiniboines, who were distinct by a.d. 1550, may have come from the Sandy Lake and Duck Bay archaeological cultures found along the forest's edge in the period a.d. 1250 to 1500. (However, the Jesuit Relation of 1640 reported an earlier fission among the Dakotas that resulted in the Assiniboines' social formation.) This division occurred through adversarial pressures from the neighboring Algonquian groups to the north and west, probably the protohistoric Cheyenne and Atsina-Arapaho groups. The Assiniboines were allies of the western Crees and later the western Ojibwas, and enemies of other Algonquian groups, including the Blackfoot Confederacy, and of the Siouan-speaking Dakota/Lakota Sioux and Hidatsas.
In 1958 Europeans first encountered the trade canoes of Assiniboines on the north shore of Lake Superior and in the vicinity of Lake Nipigon. By the late seventeenth century most Assiniboines were concentrated within the southern Lake Winnipeg region, between the Assiniboine River and the valley of the Red River. The remaining Assiniboines relocated their trade routes away from the western Great Lakes to the competing English and French trading posts on Hudson Bay and eventually to the interior. In this same period they made regular trade expeditions to Missouri River tribes' villages, the major market of the northern plains. Subgroups among the Assiniboines fulfilled the specialized role of middlemen, while others seasonally exploited the rich environment of this region. A minority of individuals became trading captains and organized seasonal expeditions to transport furs to Hudson Bay, imitating the practice of the Crees and Ojibwas. Trade interactions united the allies militarily, and eventually religiously, politically, and socially as well.
In the regions southeast of Lake Winnipeg, the Assiniboines continued to rely upon a seasonal round of wild-rice harvesting; to the southwest they procured buffalo by trapping them in pounds. They eventually expanded their procurement cycle to the regions beyond the Souris River basin to the upper Missouri River, and from the Qu'Appelle Valley to the Cypress Hills. Assiniboines suffered massive population reductions from smallpox epidemics in 1737, 1780-81, and 1837-38, each of which required major reconstitutions of their society.
In 1826 a U.S. Indian agent was assigned to the Assiniboines on the upper Missouri River. Three years later, the American Fur Company built Fort Union at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. The fort dominated the southern trade relations of the Assiniboines until the late 1850s. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 designated Assiniboine lands south of the soon-to-be-surveyed border between the United States and British North America, and the 1855 Isaac Stevens Treaty with the Blackfeet declared the entire northern tier north of the Missouri in present-day Montana to be a hunting ground for Blackfeet and "other Indians." In 1866 Assiniboines living in the vicinity of the recently abandoned Fort Union agreed to come under the protection of Fort Buford, in modern-day North Dakota. In 1869 the Milk River Agency was established near present-day Chinook, Montana; it was later moved to a trading post called Fort Peck, purchased by the trading company of Durfee and Peck in 1874. However, hostilities increased among the various Indians within the jurisdiction of the agency, and a new agency called Fort Belknap was established for the Atsina Gros Ventres and the upper Assiniboines in 1873, and the agency at Fort Peck was moved to Poplar River in 1877, where the lower Assiniboines shared the agency with Yanktonais and Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakotas.
The Cypress Hills massacre in 1873, in which Assiniboines led by Little Soldier were attacked and killed by wolfers and whiskey traders, brought the new Dominion of Canada into the region of the Canadian west known as Whoop-Up country. A constabulary known as the North-West Mounted Police was established as a direct result of this violence, and the Canadian government established posts at Fort McLeod and at Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills. This effort to protect both Indians and non-Indians was also an effort to enforce the international border. As the buffalo herds began to disappear, the Cypress Hills, Wood Mountain, and the Moose Mountains increasingly became refuges to starving Indians, the Assiniboines among them.
The Numbered Treaties, signed in Canada in the 1870s, resulted in reserves being surveyed for the bands of treaty signers. Treaty 4 was signed by bands in present-day southern Saskatchewan; Treaty 6 at Forts Carleton and Pitt in central Saskatchewan; and Treaty 7 at Fort McLeon in southern Alberta. Assiniboines eventually took reserves in Saskatchewan and Alberta. By the 1890s and early 1900s a number of reserves had been reevaluated, and in several cases Assiniboine reserves or portions of lands were seized as part of the Canadian policy of "developing" the prairies by filling them with new settlers.
The U.S. reservation boundaries of Fort Belknap and Fort Peck were fixed by 1889. Throughout the 1890s much of the land on these reservations was leased to large cattle operators. Lands were first allotted at Fort Peck in 1909, and at Fort Belknap in 1921, fostering protected ownership of individual lands. The allotting of lands ended with the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934; Fort Belknap accepted the new law and organized a tribal government under it, whereas Fort Peck did not.
The first decades of the twentieth century were difficult ones for both U.S. and Canadian Assiniboines. Subsistence farming was both encouraged and discouraged as government policies fluctuated. Children were often sent away to either government or church-operated residential schools that purposely discouraged adherence to Indian culture. Limited governance, in the form of either chiefs and councils or business committees, was gradually allowed, but Indian agents or superintendents dominated most aspects of tribal life. Men served in the armed forces of both nations in the two world wars and returned to pursue greater freedoms and responsibilities for themselves and their relatives.
In Canada, the Assiniboine reserves in Saskatchewan are Carry the Kettle, Pheasant Rump, and Ocean Man, with Assiniboines represented as a minority on the Mosquito, Red Pheasant, Grizzley Bear's Head, Kawacatoose, Cowessess, Little Black Bear, and White Bear reserves. The Alexis, Paul, Wesley, Big Horn, and Eden Valley reserves are in Alberta (where Assiniboines are known as Stoneys); descendants of the Sharps Head band were scattered onto several other non-Stoney reserves in Alberta. In Montana, Assiniboines reside on the Fort Belknap and Fort Peck reservations, shared respectively with the Atsina Gros Ventres and with descendants from all three divisions of the Sioux.
Contemporary Assiniboine accomplishments include increased economic development, success in pursuing land and other claims, and innovative political and service structures. Though language loss is at a critical stage, many cultural traditions remain strong, with participation by all generations. For example, there is a vibrant network of participants in the Medicine Lodge religion (called the Rain Dance in Canada). Assiniboines are also active participants in the northern plains powwow circuit.
See also
Indian-White Relations in Canada, 1763 to the Present.
Arthur Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Hunters, Trappers, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974); Dale R. Russell, Eighteenth-Century Western Cree and Their Neighbors Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury Series Paper no. 143 (Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1991).
David Reed Miller
Saskatchewan Indian Federated College
University of Regina
