Blackfoot Tribe
The Blackfoot Nation really consists of four distinct Blackfoot nations who share a historical and cultural background, but have separate leadership: the Siksika (which means Blackfoot), the Akainawa (also called Kainai or Bloods), the Pikanii (variously spelled Piikani, Pikani, Pikuni, Piegan, or Peigan), and the Blackfeet Nation.
The first three nations are in Alberta, Canada, and the fourth is in Montana. "Blackfeet," though the official name of this tribe, is actually a misnomer given to them by white authorities; the word is not plural in the Blackfoot language, and some Blackfoot people in Montana resist this name.
The Blackfoot were nomadic plains hunters, traditional enemies of the Shoshone and Nez Perce.
They were a powerful buffalo-hunting society of the northern plains. At first the arrival of the Europeans pleased them, since European horses became quickly invaluable to the Blackfoot tribes. But smallpox epidemics ravaged the Blackfoot population in the mid-1800's.
In 1870 American army forces, looking for Mountain Chief's band of hostile Blackfoot Indians, fell instead upon Heavy Runner's peaceable Piegan band and killed 200 of them, many of them women and children. Mountain Chief and his people escaped across the new border into Canada.
Worse still, by 1900, the white settlers had wiped out the buffalo herds. Hundreds of Blackfoot Indians starved to death, and the forced transition to sedentary life left a once-mighty nation dependent on government rations.
Nevertheless, the Blackfoot have not lost their culture, and the Blackfoot Indian language is one of the few indigenous languages in Canada and the United States which has a fair chance for survival.
Blackfoot, or Siksika, is an Algonquian language spoken by 8000 people in southern Alberta and northern Montana.
The population of the Blackfoot Indians today totals 14,000.
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