If you get a chance, look up the

Neutral Hills, Alberta

The Cree and Blackfoot were not friends. In fact, they made war on each other. Our notion of warfare amongst indigenous peoples is somewhat skewed by our present-day understandings of warfare. If we look at the Sioux and the Crow, what we can see is that one had to be careful how much actual killing went on. Death counts were much lower partly because it led to families within tribes getting into a Hatfields/McCoy mind set and the difficulties never went away. It is exemplified the Blackfoot/Cree dislike of each other. The Neutral Hills was decided to be neutral because both groups (Plains Cree in this case) agreed to have the Hills as a mutual hunting area and warfare was disallowed there by both groups.

People tend to think--through no fault of their own--that an Indian is an Indian. Not so. This excellent site (google)

Browse List of Tribes

will give the reader a basic understanding that there are LOTS of First Nations groups, some decided by linguistic variations and others by history or geographic location. The practise of keeping slaves--for the slaves--waS better than the alternative. Often, slaves were accepted into the tribes and were allowed to marry and have children. Interesting to note that when the Sioux first saw 'buffalo soldiers' they called them the dark/brown white men.