Tsuu'tina

The Tsuu'tina, long known to Europeans as the Sarcee from the Blackfoot name Saahsi, are the only Athabaskan-speaking people of the northern plains. Their Na-Dene tongue is related to those of the northern Dene, Navajo and Apache. Their name means the many people or the beaver people, and oral history remembers them as a branch of the Dane-zaa of the Peace and Athabasca country who moved south onto the plains in the early eighteenth century.

They kept the boreal-edge way of life, hunting moose and caribou in winter and gathering on the prairie for summer bison drives, living in tipis and divided into five independent bands.

In the 1810s the explorer David Thompson found them in the Beaver Hills near Edmonton alongside the Cree. Warfare with the Cree later pushed them south, where they joined the Blackfoot Confederacy and adopted much of their allies' plains culture.