Piegan Blackfeet

The Piegan (Blackfeet: ᑯᖱᖿᖹ Piikáni) are an Algonquian-speaking people from the North American Great Plains.

After their homelands were divided by the nations of Canada and the United States of America making boundaries between them, the Piegan people were forced to sign treaties with one of those two countries, settle in reservations on one side or the other of the border, and be enrolled in one of two government-like bodies sanctioned by North American nation-states.

"[3] Traditionally, Plains peoples were divided into "bands": groups of families who migrated together for hunting and defence.

The bands of the Piegan, as given by Grinnell, are: Ahahpitape, Ahkaiyikokakiniks, Kiyis, Sikutsipmaiks, Sikopoksimaiks, Tsiniksistsoyiks, Kutaiimiks, Ipoksimaiks, Silkokitsimiks, Nitawyiks, Apikaiviks, Miahwahpitsiks, Nitakoskitsipupiks, Nitikskiks, Inuksiks, Miawkinaiyiks, Esksinaitupiks, Inuksikahkopwaiks, Kahmitaiks, Kutaisotsiman, Nitotsiksisstaniks, Motwainaiks, Mokumiks, and Motahtosiks.

[4] In 2014, researchers reported on their sequencing of the DNA of a 12,500+-year-old infant skeleton in west-central Montana,[5] found in close association with several Clovis culture artifacts.

[8] The Piegan people may be more recent arrivals in the area, as there is strong evidence that, beginning about 1730, their Algonquian-speaking ancestors migrated southwest from what today is Saskatchewan.

According to tribal oral histories, humans lived near the Rocky Mountain Front for thousands of years before European contact.

The fur trader James Gaddy and the Hudson's Bay Company explorer David Thompson, the first Whites recorded as seeing Bow River, camped with a group of Piegan during the 1787–1788 winter.

The population was at times dramatically lower when the Blackfeet people suffered declines due to infectious disease epidemics.

They had no natural immunity to Eurasian diseases, and the 1837 smallpox epidemic on the Plains killed 6,000 Blackfeet, as well as thousands more in other tribes.