But it was not a sustainable permanent settlement.

The buffalo herds that had supported Plains peoples’ economies for generations were collapsing rapidly across the 1870s and 1880s.

Commercial American buffalo hunters had already severely reduced the southern herd; the northern herd, which the Lakota and their neighbors depended on in Canada, was following the same trajectory.

The nimíipuu refugees who arrived in Canada were plateau people, not plains people.

They knew how to hunt buffalo, but the horse-based buffalo economy of the plains was not their primary subsistence tradition.