Question: What did the O'Chiese First Nation trade in "Fur trade"?

The maritime fur trade was a ship-based fur trade system that focused on acquiring furs of sea otters and other animals from the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and natives of Alaska.  The furs were mostly sold in China in exchange for tea, silks, porcelain, and other Chinese goods, which were then sold in Europe and the United States.  The maritime fur trade was pioneered by Russians, working east from Kamchatka along the Aleutian Islands to the southern coast of Alaska.  British and Americans entered during the 1780s, focusing on what is now the coast of British Columbia.  The trade boomed around the beginning of the 19th century.  A long period of decline began in the 1810s.  As the sea otter population was depleted, the maritime fur trade diversified and transformed, tapping new markets and commodities, while continuing to focus on the Northwest Coast and China.  It lasted until the middle to late 19th century.  Russians controlled most of the coast of what is now Alaska during the entire era.  The coast south of Alaska endured fierce competition between, and among, British and American trading vessels.  The British were the first to operate in the southern sector, but were unable to compete against the Americans, who dominated from the 1790s to the 1830s.  The British Hudson's Bay Company entered the coast trade in the 1820s with the intention of driving the Americans away.  This was accomplished by about 1840.  In its late period, the maritime fur trade was largely conducted by the British Hudson's Bay Company and the Russian-American Company. <SEP>  Though the ancestors of O'Chiese First Nation made the area about Baptiste River their winter camp site where they hunted moose and deer, and trapped small game for the Fur trade, they also migrated as far south as the Milk River in Montana in the summer. The O'Chiese First Nation is an Anishinabe First Nation in Alberta, Canada.  The First Nation's homeland is the 14131.9 ha O'Chiese 203A Indian reserve, located approximately 52 km northwest of Rocky Mountain House.  Also reserved is the O'Chiese Cemetery 203A.  As of November 2013, the First Nation had the population of 1,250 registered people, of which the on-reserve population was 831 people.  The primary language spoken on the reserve is Anishinaabe language. <SEP> 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 that allied together against common enemies.  The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were the branches of the Cree people that 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 the Assiniboine's Canadian descendants of today, the Nakoda, plus Iroquois and Métis involved in the fur trade.  The Confederacy 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 the flow of furs to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and North West Company (NWC) trading posts.  Its peoples later also played a major part in the bison (buffalo) hunt, and the pemmican trade.  The decline of the fur trade and the collapse of the bison herds sapped the power of the Confederacy after the 1860s, and it could no longer act as a barrier to U.S. and Canadian expansion. <SEP>  Since the establishment of a world fur market in the early modern period, furs of boreal, polar and cold temperate mammalian animals have been the most valued.  Historically the trade stimulated the exploration and colonization of Siberia, northern North America, and the South Shetland and South Sandwich Islands. The fur trade is a worldwide industry dealing in the acquisition and sale of animal fur.