Matiyinini

The Matiyinini were the upstream division of the Plains Cree; their full Cree name Natimiyininiwak means the people living upriver. They spoke a western Cree dialect and occupied the upper North Saskatchewan country, around the Battle River and the Beaver River and Beaver Lake, between the plains and the boreal forest.

Cree bands moved onto the northern plains around 1740, drawn by bison and the fur trade. The upstream Cree joined the Iron Confederacy, the Cree and Assiniboine alliance that controlled the flow of guns and goods between Hudson's Bay Company posts and the western nations. They hunted bison on foot and later on horseback and made pemmican for trading posts.

Through the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries they raided and were raided by the Blackfoot Confederacy across disputed bison grounds. The smallpox epidemic of 1781 struck their camps.