Hinonoeitiit

The Hinonoeitiit group takes in the Arapaho proper, the Southern People and the Haaninin, known to the French as the Gros Ventre, all Algonquian peoples. Their ancestors grew maize in the Red River Valley, in what is now Manitoba and Minnesota. Pushed west by the Ojibwe, who had French guns, they were on the northern plains before 1700.

In the early 1700s they acquired horses and became nomadic bison hunters and fine horsemen. Around 1811 the Arapaho allied with the Cheyenne, which widened their hunting grounds, and by 1826 they and their allies had driven the Kiowa and Comanche south.