<P> The Great Lakes Commission, authorized by the region's American states and Province of Ontario, and the additional Canadian Province of Quebec, comprises a bi-national authority with specified powers to protect and preserve the water and environmental resources of the Great Lakes and surrounding waterways and aquifers . The Commission's authorities are confirmed by the Canadian and American federal governments, and by its constituent states and provinces . The states and provinces are represented in the Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers . </P> <P> The Great Lakes region takes its name from the corresponding geological formation of the Great Lakes Basin, a narrow watershed encompassing The Great Lakes, bounded by watersheds to the region's north (Hudson Bay), west (Mississippi), east and south (Ohio). To the east, the rivers of St. Lawrence, Richelieu, Hudson, Mohawk and Susquehanna form an arc of watersheds east to The Atlantic . </P> <P> The Great Lakes region, as distinct from the Great Lakes Basin, defines a unit of sub-national political entities defined by the U.S. states and the Canadian Province of Ontario encompassing the Great Lakes watershed, and the states and Province bordering one or more of the Great Lakes . </P> <P> Prior to European settlement, Iroquoian people lived around Lakes Erie and Ontario, Algonquian peoples around most of the rest, and a variety of other indigenous nation - peoples including the Lakotan, Ojibwa, Illinois, Pottawatmie, Huron, Shawnee, Erie, Fox, Miami, Crow and Ho - Chunk (Winnebago). With the first permanent European settlements in the early seventeenth century, all these nation - peoples developed an extensive fur trade with French, Dutch, and English merchants in the St. Lawrence, Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, and Hudson's Bay, respectively . </P>

Who controlled the land north of the great lakes at this time