Nipissing

The Nipissing, in their own language Nbisiing, are an Anishinaabe people of mixed Ojibwe and Algonquin descent whose homeland lies around Lake Nipissing in northeastern Ontario. Their lake sat astride the travel and trade routes linking the Ottawa valley with the upper Great Lakes, and in the French colonial period they prospered as keepers of those fur-trade routes.

The Beaver Wars disrupted this position: through much of the seventeenth century part of the nation lived far to the northwest around Lake Nipigon, where the missionary Claude-Jean Allouez visited them in 1667, before they returned to Lake Nipissing in 1671, while other families settled at the French missions of Trois-Rivières and Oka.

By the early years of the nineteenth century independent Canadian and Métis trappers were working their lake country, eroding the trade on which the Nipissing had depended.