Before 1870s (enrolled Blackfeet Tribe of Montana) with her award-winning beadworkIn 2014, researchers reported on their sequencing of the DNA of a 12,500+-year-old infant skeleton in west-central Montana, found in close association with several
Clovis culture artifacts. It showed strong affinities with all existing Native American populations. There is preliminary evidence of human habitation in
north central Montana that may date as far back as 5000 years. There was evidence that the people had made substantial use of
buffalo jumps from as early as AD 300. The Piegan people may be more recent arrivals in the area, as there is strong evidence that, beginning about 1730, their Algonquian-speaking ancestors migrated southwest from what today is
Saskatchewan. Before that, they may have lived further east, as many Algonquian-speaking peoples have historically lived along the Atlantic Coast, and others around the
Great Lakes. Linguistic studies of the Blackfoot language in comparison to others in the
Algonquian-language family indicate that the Blackfoot had long lived in an area west of the
Great Lakes. Like others in this language family, the Blackfoot language is
agglutinative. The people practiced some agriculture and were partly nomadic. They moved westward after they adopted use of horses and guns, which gave them a larger range for bison hunting. They became part of the
Plains Indians cultures in the early 19th century. According to tribal oral histories, humans lived near the
Rocky Mountain Front for thousands of years before European contact. The Blackfoot creation story is set near
Glacier National Park in an area now known as the
Badger-Two Medicine. The introduction of the horse is placed at about 1730, when raids by the
Shoshone prompted the Piegan to obtain horses from the
Kutenai and other
Interior Salish peoples, as well as the
Nez Perce. Early accounts of contact with European-descended people date to the late eighteenth century. The fur trader James Gaddy and the
Hudson's Bay Company explorer
David Thompson, the first Whites recorded as seeing
Bow River, camped with a group of Piegan during the 1787–1788 winter. In 1858 the Piegan in the United States were estimated to number 3,700. Three years later, Hayden estimated the population at 2,520. The population was at times dramatically lower when the Blackfeet people suffered declines due to
infectious disease epidemics. They had no natural immunity to Eurasian diseases, and the 1837
smallpox epidemic on the Plains killed 6,000 Blackfeet, as well as thousands more in other tribes. The Blackfeet also suffered from
starvation because of disruption of food supplies and war. When the last buffalo hunt failed in 1882, that year became known as the starvation year. In 1900, there were an estimated 20,000 Blackfoot. In 1906 there were 2,072 under the Blackfeet Agency in Montana, and 493 under the Piegan band in Alberta, Canada. In the early 21st century, there are more than 35,000. In the US 2010 census, 105,304 people identified as Piegan Blackfeet, 27,279 of them full-blooded, the remainder self-identified as being of more than one race or, in some cases, with ancestry from more than one tribe, but they primarily identified as Blackfeet. These were recorded as acting in many of the social roles of men. This includes a willingness to sing alone, usually considered "immodest", and using a men's singing style. ==After 1870s==