High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Iron Confederacy (or "Confederation", also called in Cree: Nehiyaw-Pwat or in English Cree-Assiniboine) was a political and military alliance of Plains Indians of what is now Western Canada and the northern United States. This confederacy included various individual bands which were allied together against common enemies. The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were those branches of the Cree people which moved onto the Great Plains around 1740 (the southern half of this movement eventually became the "Plains Cree" and the northern half the "Woods Cree"), the Saulteaux (Plains Ojibwa), the Assiniboine, and their Canadian descendants, the Nakoda, plus individual Iroquois and Metis involved in the fur trade. The Confederacy first rose to predominance on the northern Plains during the height of the North American fur trade when they operated as middlemen controlling the flow of European goods to other native nations, and that of furs...