This group of natives in North America were indigenous to the Interior Plains, historically nomadic, and relied on bison hunting.
Plains Indians Plains Indians, Interior Plains Indians or Indigenous people of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies are the Native American tribes and First Nation band governments who have traditionally lived on the greater Interior Plains (i.e. the Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies) in North America. Their historic nomadic culture and development of equestrian culture and resistance to domination by the government and military forces of Canada and the United States have made the Plains Indian culture groups an archetype in literature and art for American Indians everywhere.
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.