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The Iron Confederacy (or "Confederation", also called in (クリー語: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 which were allied together against common enemies. The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were those branches of the Cree people which 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 their Canadian descendants, the Nakoda, plus Iroquois and Métis involved in the fur trade. The Confederacy first 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 that of furs to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and North West Company (NWC) trading posts, and its peoples were later also major part of the bison (buffalo) hunt, and the pemmican trade. After the 1860s, the decline of the fur trade and the collapse of the bison herds sapped the power of the Confederacy, and it was no longer a match militarily for the expanding American and Canadian societies. ==Origins== The Assiniboine are believed to have originated on the southern edge of the Laurentian Shield in present-day Minnesota. They became a separate people from their closest linguistic cousins, the Yanktonai Dakota, sometime prior to 1640 when they are first mentioned by Europeans in the Jesuit Relation. They were not a member of the "Seven Fires Council" of the Great Sioux Nation by this time and were referred to by other Sioux speakers as the ''Hohe'' or "rebels". By 1806 the historical evidence definitively locates them in the Assiniboine River valley in present-day Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Cree had been in contact with Europeans since around 1611 when Henry Hudson reached their ancestral homeland around Hudson and James Bays.〔"〕 The traditional view of historians, based on the accounts of white traders, is that once the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) began to establish itself in the Hudson Bay region, two branches of the Cree began moving west and south to act as middlemen traders. They denied other plains peoples access to the HBC, except for the Assiniboine, in exchange for peaceful relations.〔Millroy, 5〕 A more recent view, based on oral history and linguistic evidence, suggests that the Cree were already established west of Lake Winnipeg when the HBC arrived, and were likely present as far west as the Peace River Region of present-day Alberta. When the Hudson Bay Company opened its first bayside posts in 1668 and 1688, the Cree became their main customers and resellers. Prior to this the Cree had been at the northwestern edge of a trade system linked to the French, from which they received only the secondhand goods others were ready to discard. Once in possession of direct access to European tools and weapons, the Cree were able to expand rapidly West.〔 The earliest written record of the military and political relations of the nations west of Hudson's Bay comes from Henry Kelsey's journal circa 1690–1692. In it, he states that the Cree and the Assiniboine had good relations with the Blackfoot and were already allies against the "Eagle Birch Indians, Mountain Poets, and Nayanwattame Poets" (the identities of these groups is uncertain but they may have been other Siouan-speakers, or Gros Ventres).〔Millroy, 6–7〕 The history of the Stoney before the mid-eighteenth century are obscure. They speak a Siouan language they call ''nakoda'', which is little different from Assiniboine. The present-day Stoney Nation of Alberta believes that Kelsey's mention of the "Mountain Poets" may refer to their ancestors. However the consensus view is that they were not yet a separate people from the Assiniboine. There is clear evidence of them as a separate group from 1754–1755 when Anthony Henday wrote of camping with "Stone" families near present-day Red Deer, Alberta. The Stoney were already trading with the Cree fur traders at this point and were military allies.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Iron Confederacy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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