Nipissing ('at the little water or
lake', referring to Lake Nipissing; Nipisirinien, 'little-water
people'). A tribe of the Algonkin. When they first became known to the
French, in 1613, they were residing in the vicinity of Lake Nipissing,
Ontario, which has been their home during most of the time to the present.
Having been attacked, about 1650, by the Iroquois, and many of them slain,
they fled for safety to Lake Nipigon (Mackenzie, Voy., x1i, note, 1802),
where Allouez visited them in 1667, but they were again on Lake Nipissing
in 1671. A part of the tribe afterward went to Three Rivers, and some
resided with the Catholic Iroquois at Oka, where they still have a
village. Some of these assisted the French in 1756. It is their dialect
which is represented in Cuoq's Lexique de la Langue Algonquine. They were
a comparatively unwarlike people, firm friends of the French, readily
accepting the Christian teachings of the missionaries. Although having a
fixed home, they were semi-nomadic, going south in autumn to the vicinity
of the Hurons to fish and prepare food for the winter, which they passed
among them. They cultivated the soil to a slight extent only, traded with
the Cree in the north, and were much given to jugglery and shamanistic
practices, on which account the Hurons and the whites called them
Sorcerers. Their chiefs were elective, and their totems, according to
Chauvignerie (N. Y. Doc. Col. Hist., x, 1053, 1855), were the heron,
beaver, birchbark, squirrel, and blood. No reliable statistics in
regard to their numbers have been recorded. The Indians now on a
reservation on Lake Nipissing are officially classed as Chippewa; they
numbered 162 in 1884 and 223 in 1906. A Nipissing division was
called Miskouaha.
Source: Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Frederick Webb Hodge, 1906
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