River Cree Resort and Casino

The Plains Cree people have witnessed and felt profound changes in a relatively brief period of time, commencing with:
European contact in 1640;
The Cree migration westward to the Plains in the eighteenth century;
The establishment of alliances and a permanent home on the Plains though intermarriage with indigenous Plains aboriginal peoples;
The rise and fall of the buffalo trade in the first half of the nineteenth century;
The social and economic collapse of the Cree autonomy in the second half of the nineteenth century, as brought about by disease, disenfranchisement, the treaties, residential schools, and the transition to reserve life;
The loss of approximately 50of the Enoch Reserve land area. and, more importantly, the majority of Enochs agricultural economic land base within twenty years of the Reserve being created in 1889; and
The process of identifying and capitalizing on various forms of economic development, primary oil and gas leases, throughout the twentieth century.

Since the Privy Councils acceptance on February 12, 1889 of the original Stony Plain Indian Reserve survey of September, 1884, and the forced surrender of over one-half of those lands in the first years of the twentieth century, the Enoch Nation and its people have struggled to maintain their identity and independence as both Firth Nation people and as a cohesive social, economic and political entity.

Enoch Cree Nation members are direct descendants of two identifiable groups of Native people: the Cree who migrated ever westward in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century as part of the expansion of the Cree trading territory, and the indigenous aboriginal groups the Cree married into. These indigenous groups had, for thousand of years, occupied what is commonly known today as the Great Plains of southern Alberta. By the early 1800s, the included Soto, Beaver, Shoshone, Slavey, Mohawk, and Mountain Cree. The Mountain Cree were of mixed Cree, Nakoda, Chippewa/Ojibwa, Tsuu Tina and lesser Kutenai, Iroquois, and Blackfoot Cultures. Mandelbaum, 1979

The Cree people are a unique indigenous group for three reasons:

1. They were and remain today the largest tribe in what we know as present day Canada, both pre- and post-European contact;
2. Prior to the treaties, the Cree occupied the largest expanse of land as an indigenous peoples, extending from the Boreal forests of the eastern Canada to the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains; and
3. The Cree were the driving force in creating the largest confederation of Indians tribes in North America: the Cree Confederation.