Walpole Island and the surrounding region is called Bkejwanong or "where the waters divide." It has been home to aboriginal people for over six thousand years.

Bkejwanong is the traditional territory of the Walpole Island First Nation. The people are descended from members of the Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi Nations who lived in the area at different times in the past. Sharing a similar lifestyle and culture they speak related Algonkian languages. The three nations are joined politically in the Council of the Three Fires. Their traditional economy is based upon hunting, fishing, trapping, planting corn as early as 700 AD, harvesting, and gathering all forms of bounty from the land.

During the mid-16th century, the Walpole Island area had been occupied and then abandoned by the Neutral Indians who had displaced the previous occupants. The Neutrals then found themselves under pressure from the Iroquois. It appears that the Walpole Island region was repopulated gradually by Ojibwa and Ottawa groups after 1650.

By the early 1700s, the Ojibwa and Ottawa were both well established south of their former homelands in southern Ontario and in Lower Michigan. Some scholars have determined that an estimated 300 Ojibwa were in a village at the north end of Lake St. Clair which would have been on or near what is the Walpole Island Reserve.

After 1700, some Ottawa bands moved south from Mackinac to Fort Detroit, where they lived among the Potawatomi and Ojibwa who had already settled there. They sided with the French in the colonial wars, but many switched their allegiance after the British won control of Canada in the Seven Years' War (1756 – 1763). (Just prior to the war in 1755 the British Imperial Indian Department was created and its policy was to recognize native peoples as military allies.) Some of the native peoples, who had supported the French and moved to the Maumee River region of Ohio and to the southern shores of Lake Michigan, fought against the British in a series of uprisings known as Pontiac's rebellion. These native peoples were eventually defeated and peace was restored between them and the British.

After defeating the French in 1763, the British Government issued a Royal Proclamation which established an "Indian Territory" stretching in an arc across the centre of the continent. The Proclamation ruled that "no private person" could obtain land directly from the Indian Nations. If Indian Nations wished to "dispose" of land, the Crown could be the only purchaser and only through a treaty arranged at a public meeting or assembly. Also, the Crown promised to protect the territory and rights of Aboriginal people from "frauds and abuses" by white settlers. The Crown reaffirmed these promises with the Walpole Island First Nation in the treaties of Niagara (1764), Detroit (1765), Lake Ontario (1766) Simcoe (1794), and St. Anne Island (1796).