This article is about the Native American nation. For the university, see Quinnipiac University.

The Quinnipiac—rarely spelled Quinnipiack—is the English name for the Eansketambawg (meaning “original people”; c.f., Ojibwe: Anishinaabeg and Blackfoot: Niitsítapi) a Native American nation of the Algonquian family who inhabited the Wampanoki (i.e., “Dawnland”; c.f., Ojibwe: Waabanaki, Abenaki: Wabanakiyik) region, including present-day Connecticut.

The Quinnipiac (occasionally misspelled Quinnipiack) people—also known as Quiripi and Renapi—are speakers of the r-dialect of the Algonquian language family. (The Algonquian Language Phyla was the largest in North America and covered about one-third of the continent above Mexico.) The Quinnipiac/Quiripi/Renapi people are considered to be the first of the indigenous peoples to be placed on a reservation (by the English in 1638), under the first of several treaties which resulted in additional reservations at Branford, Madison, Derby, and Farmington. J.H. Trumbull was the first to recognize that the New Haven band of the Quiripi was only one band or sub-sachemship and not the entire tribal nation. Blair Rudes found that the Eastern Algonquian r-dialect group's “territory extended “… up to the Hudson in the west, including a portion of land in present-day New York state…. Furthermore… the same people occupied a portion of … western Long Island ….” Since 1997, more extensive research, based on linguistics and early historical records, has extended the boundaries of the 1500-1600 AD Quiripi/Renapi/Quinnipiac confederacies to include all of what is now Connecticut, eastern New York, northern New Jersey, and half of Long Island (prior to the immigration of the Pequot/Mohegan peoples into eastern CT).