Assiniboines are American Indian and First Nation people belonging to tribes with reservations in Northeastern Montana, on the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Reservation, west of there on the Fort Belknap Reservation, and in Canada, where they are sometimes known as the Stoney, on small reserves ranging from eastern Saskatchewan to central Alberta in the Canadian Rockies. Collectively across these borders there are an estimated 10,000, registered Assiniboine people. This thesis uses authenticity, self-determination, and place as concepts to investigate Assiniboine history from both an inside and outside perspective, in order to clarify how Assiniboine identity is constructed and de-constructed continuously in cultural transformations. Further, this analysis relates to global indigenous people in a postcolonial context. I begin with an account of Assiniboine oral history, moving through Pre European Contact to the present
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