Yat Tindé

The Yat Tindé are the Plains Apache, also called the Kiowa Apache, a small Southern Athabaskan people of the Great Plains whose names for themselves include Ná'ishą and γát dìndé, the cedar people. Their oral tradition says they split from the Tsuut'ina, another Athabaskan group of the Canadian prairies, and they had taken to plains life by the sixteenth century, moving south until the Lakota allowed them land south of the Black Hills.

In the early eighteenth century they lived near the upper Missouri in a permanent alliance with the Kiowa, whose language was entirely unlike their own, so the two peoples conversed in Plains Indian Sign Language.

Their population was estimated at only about four hundred in 1780. Around 1800 they followed the Kiowa south onto the Southern Plains, hunting bison along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains.