Life in exile in Canada was not the sanctuary the nimíipuu had hoped for.

The Lakota hosts were generous within their capacity, but they were themselves refugees in a precarious situation.

Sitting Bull’s people had their own resource pressures, their own uncertain relationship with the Canadian authorities, and their own eventual trajectory back toward the United States and surrender.

For the nimíipuu refugees, the first Canadian winter was hard.

The buffalo herds that the Lakota depended on were thinning rapidly — overhunting and habitat disruption were already in the process of eliminating the Plains buffalo, and by the late 1870s the herds were a shadow of what they had once been.

The nimíipuu, who were plateau people rather than plains hunters by tradition, faced the challenge of subsisting in an environment that was already under pressure.