326 
and funeral rites, purchased the Blackfoot medicine-bundles with 
their rituals, and copied their institution of an annual sun-dance ini- 
tiated by a woman’s vow to purchase a sun-dance medicine-bundle. 
They shared, too, all the misfortunes of the Blackfoot, ami when the 
latter were confined to reserves, received a small and rather infertile 
tract of land a few miles south of Caljrary. There they have steadily 
declined, partly through apathy, partly through the ravages of tuber- 
culosis, which has cari’ied off a large proportion of the children dur- 
ing the last half century. In B)24 their reserve returned a popula- 
tion of only 11)0, a total that included a number of Cree and Black- 
foot who had married into the tribe or joined their fortunes with it. 
GROS VENTRE AND SIOUX 
The (h’os \’entre or Big Belly’ Indians who roamed over the 
southern part of Saskatchewan about 1750 were an offshoot of the 
Arapaho, one of the many tribes that hunted the buffalo on the 
prairies of the Fnited States. They were organized on much the 
same lines as tlie Blackfoot, having graded military societies and 
other institutions that differed only in secondary details from the cor- 
responding institutions of their neighbours. After harassing some 
of the fur-trading j^osts on the Saskatchewan towards the close of 
the eighteenth century, they retreated to the south under pressure 
from the Assiniboine and Cree,- and ceased to exert any further 
influence on the development of the Canadian prairies. 
On some small reserves in Alanitoba and Saskatchewan to-day 
there live a few Dakota Sioux, survivors and descendants of tlie 
bands that, under their leader, Sitting Bull, rebelled against the 
United States government in 187(3, annihilated the force of General 
Custer that was sent against them, and found asylum in Canada. 
Previous to that date they crossed the International Boundary line 
comparatively seldom, although they bitterly opposed the imnarls of 
the Ojibwa, Assiniboine, and Blackfoot into the prairies farther 
south. Strictly s])eaking, therefore, they are not a Canadian tribe, 
and we may pass them by without further mention. 
1 A niistak(‘n rontUTiag of Iheir tribal sign, which exprossed th*! name given to tliem l)y their 
Arapaho kinsmen, llilnena, ‘‘Ueggars.” Tlieir langiiago was Alguiikian, not Siouan, as erroneously 
■<ho\vn on the fohteil map at the end of this volume. 
2 David Thotnpsoti’s Narrative, p. 235. 
3 Sioux is an abbriwiat ion of an Ojibwa word ineanir!g "rattle-snake’* or, metaphorically, “enemy.’’ 
