Siksika

The Siksika, whose name means black foot, are the northernmost of the Niitsitapi, the Original People of the Blackfoot Confederacy. One tradition traces the name to moccasin soles blackened by the ash of prairie fires.

Their ancestors were woodland people of the country around the upper Great Lakes who drifted west onto the plains after about 1200, living as foot nomads who drove bison over jumps until horses reached them around 1730. As mounted hunters and raiders they shared the summer Okan ceremony with the Kainai and Piikani.

Their principal enemies were the Cree and Assiniboine of the Iron Confederacy, and horse-and-gun rivalries made the Siksika a warring power of the eighteenth-century plains. The smallpox epidemic of 1837 devastated every Blackfoot nation, the Siksika among them, opening a long period of pressure from traders and incoming settlers.