Fort Severn First Nation
human settlement in Ontario, Canada
Fort Severn First Nation (Swampy Cree: ᐗᔕᐦᐅ ᐃᓂᓂᐗᐠ, romanized: Waśaho Ininiwak) is a Western Swampy Cree First Nation band government located on the Severn River near Hudson Bay. It is the northernmost community in Ontario, Canada. In 2001, the population was 401, consisting of 90 families in an area of 40 square kilometres. The legal name of the reserve is Fort Severn 89, with the main settlement of Fort Severn (Swampy Cree: ᐗᔕᐦᐅᐠ, romanized: Waśahohk; Severn Ojibwa: ᐙᔕᐦᐅᐤ, romanized: wâšahow).
The town is linked by a winter/ice road called the Wapusk Trail during the winter to Peawanuck, Ontario, in the east, and Shamattawa and Gillam, Manitoba, to the west.
Fort Severn is policed by the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service, an Indigenous-based service.
History
This area was inhabited for thousands of years by varying cultures of indigenous peoples. At the time of European contact, the historic Swampy Cree, an Algonquian-speaking people, lived in the area.
In 1689 the Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Severn at this site, originally naming it Fort James; it was one of the earliest English fur trading posts in the New World. After years of international competition between the English and French, with their wars playing out in North America, the French attacked the outpost and pillaged it in 1782 when they were allies of the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolutionary War.
“Fort Severn First Nation” enters the record as human settlement in Ontario, Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fort, Severn and First can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3078079. VIAF identifies the subject as 152380607. The Library of Congress control number is no2015155303. Authority coordinates are 55.992, -87.635. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 1689 and 1782.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fort Severn First Nation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.