Weskarini

The Weskarini, also called Wàwàckeciriniwak, the people of the deer, and known to the French as La Petite Nation, were an Algonquian people of the lower Ottawa valley. Their hunting grounds lay north of the Ottawa River, around the Lièvre, Rouge and Petite-Nation rivers, and they traded with the Wyandot.

Samuel de Champlain met them on the Ottawa in 1613, and French missionaries later recorded a Christian community under chief Charles Pachirini near Trois-Rivières. In the Beaver Wars, Iroquois raids scattered the Algonquian bands of the Ottawa valley, and Weskarini fighting strength was largely destroyed in 1654.

Survivors had already begun drifting east, and by the later seventeenth century the Weskarini ceased to appear as a separate political people. Their descendants merged into other Algonquin communities of the St Lawrence and Ottawa valleys.