Those of us who work on the Northern Plains recognize the 1974 article by Susan Sharrock in Ethnohistory to be a breakthrough in understanding First Nations’ social formations in the region. Both legal usage of the two Anglo nation-states dominating the region and conventional histories assume that a half-dozen or so self-aware, bounded indigenous nations lived, and live, in the region: Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, Cree, Saulteaux, Sioux (Lakota, Dakota, Nakoda), and Métis. Treaties and the creation of reservations were premised on such a European conception of political form, with citizenship derived from parents’ citizenship and residence. Historical documents that seemed to confuse tribal affiliations of individuals and bands were assumed to reflect writers’ incomplete knowledge, to be expected of outsiders. Such apparently faulty documents made ethnohistory difficult.
Susan Sharrock shattered conventional history by asserting and documenting multicultural bands, specifically a generations-long band of Cree and Assiniboine that remained bilingual....
