Nakoda Erotic

The Nakoda call themselves by a word that is closer to a claim than a label: it means something like the allies, the friends, and it is the same word that comes out as Dakota and Lakota further south, bent by the sound shift that marks their dialect off from their relatives'. Nobody else used it. The Ojibwe called them asinii-bwaan, stone Sioux, after the way they cooked, dropping fire-heated stones into a hide-lined pit or a buffalo paunch until the water boiled. English took that name in two directions at once and kept both: Assiniboine on the plains, Stoney in the Alberta foothills. The autonym only came back into official use within living memory. Its return also fixed a long-running error, since handbooks spent most of the twentieth century assigning the spelling Nakota to the Yankton and Yanktonai, who have never called themselves that.

They broke from the Yanktonai before 1640 and pushed north and west into the aspen parkland and the northern plains, across what is now Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, Montana and North Dakota. That placed them well for the fur trade, and for a century and a half they worked it as middlemen, allied with the Plains Cree in the arrangement traders called the Iron Confederacy, moving pemmican and pelts toward the Hudson's Bay posts. Smallpox broke it twice, in the 1780s and again in 1837, and the second epidemic hit the Assiniboine harder than almost anyone else on the plains. Then the bison were gone. In 1873 American wolf hunters attacked a Nakoda camp in the Cypress Hills over horses the Nakoda had not taken, and the killings were the immediate reason Canada raised the North West Mounted Police. Treaties Four, Six and Seven followed in the north; in Montana, reservations at Fort Peck and Fort Belknap, both shared with other nations. The Stoney bands, Bearspaw, Chiniki and Goodstoney, settled at Morley under the Rockies and became mountain hunters as much as plains ones, working elk and bighorn country that plains people rarely entered. Methodist missionaries reached them early and the Stoney remain visibly Christian, which has not displaced the sweat lodge, the pipe, the Sun Dance, or the winter stories about Inktomi, the spider who is never as clever as he thinks. The two languages are in very different shape: Stoney is among the healthier Siouan languages, taught and spoken daily, while Assiniboine is down to a small number of fluent elders and the immersion programs racing them.