Siksika

The Siksika group includes the Siksika, whose name means black foot, the Piikani and the Akinaa, the Blackfoot peoples of the northwestern Great Plains. Their dialects of Siksika, an Algonquian language, belong to the nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Their ancestors were woodland people of the upper Great Lakes who drifted west onto the plains after about 1200 and hunted bison on foot, driving the herds over jumps. They had horses by the early 1700s and became mounted raiders who gathered each summer for the Okan, or Sun Dance. Their chief enemies were the Cree and Assiniboine. Smallpox devastated every Blackfoot nation in 1837.