The Assiniboine

J.R. Miller, a professor of history, is Canada Research Chair at the
University of Saskatchewan. He is the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the
Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada and co-editor of
the Canadian Historical Review.

The Assiniboine is a reissue of a mid-19th-century ethnographic survey
of the Assiniboine, a Siouan Indian nation located on the upper Missouri
River and in portions of Rupert’s Land in British territory. It was
compiled in 1853–54 by Edwin T. Denig, the officer in charge of the
American Fur Company’s Fort Union, at the junction of the Missouri and
Yellowstone Rivers. Denig prepared his detailed description of the
organization and lifeways of the Assiniboine in response to a
348-question inquiry that U.S. government official Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft sent to a wide variety of traders and Indian Agents. First
published in 1930 as part of the 46th Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology, it has been reissued with an introduction by David R. Miller,
an expert on the Assiniboine who is on the faculty of the Saskatchewan
Indian Federated College in Regina.

Based on Denig’s observations during 21 years in Assiniboine country,
not to mention his marriage to a daughter of an Assiniboine chief, the
survey provides a wealth of information about the Assiniboine and some
of their neighbors, such as the Crow, Mandan, and Blackfoot. Denig’s
coverage was quite literally encyclopedic: there is an enormous amount
of informative detail on social, economic, and political organization;
on history, religion, and heath-care practices; and on activities
ranging from hunting and warfare to dancing and amusements.

Although Denig was not free of the racial prejudice of his time and
place, he provided a reasonably dispassionate and sympathetic account of
the Assiniboine. The volume will be of use principally to researchers
looking for primary sources on the Assiniboine and her neighbors at the
juncture at which their relations with non-Native fur traders were about
to be supplanted by more-problematic interactions with homesteaders,
ranchers, missionaries, and government officials.