Iron Confederacy

The Iron Confederacy (or "Confederation", also called in Cree: Nehiyaw-Pwat or in English Cree-Assiniboine) was a political and military alliance of Plains Indians of what is now Western Canada and the northern United States. This confederacy included various individual bands that allied together against common enemies. The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were the branches of the Cree people that moved onto the Great Plains around 1740 (the southern half of this movement eventually became the "Plains Cree" and the northern half the "Woods Cree"), the Saulteaux (Plains Ojibwa), the Assiniboine, and the Assiniboine's Canadian descendants of today, the Nakoda, plus Iroquois and Métis involved in the fur trade. The Confederacy rose to predominance on the northern Plains during the height of the North American fur trade when they operated as middlemen controlling the flow of European goods to other native nations, and the flow of furs to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and North West Company (NWC) trading posts. Its peoples later also played a major part in the bison (buffalo) hunt, and the pemmican trade. The decline of the fur trade and the collapse of the bison herds sapped the power of the Confederacy after the 1860s, and it could no longer act as a barrier to U.S. and Canadian expansion.