Haaninin

The Haaninin, who call themselves the White Clay People, are better known as the Gros Ventre or Atsina, and speak an Arapahoan Algonquian language. Three thousand years ago their ancestors were maize-growing villagers by the Great Lakes, and they long formed one people with the Arapaho in the Red River Valley.

Pressured by Ojibwe with French guns, they moved toward the Missouri, and near Devil's Lake split into the Arapaho and the Haaninin, who continued west. They took to horses and became bison hunters, first meeting Europeans around 1754 on the Saskatchewan.

Smallpox reduced them, and around 1793, pressed by Cree and Assiniboine raiders, they burned two Hudson's Bay posts supplying their enemies. By the end of the century they had joined the Blackfoot Confederacy, and in 1832 Prince Maximilian met them on the Missouri.