The word kinnikinnick is Algonquian and means roughly a mixture. What goes into it varies by people and by region: bearberry leaf, red willow or dogwood inner bark, sumac leaf, and tobacco where tobacco is available, in proportions that are local knowledge rather than a recipe.
That matters for reading historical accounts. European observers described Indigenous people smoking tobacco, and much of the time the mixture was mostly not tobacco, either because the plant was traded and expensive or because the mixture was the point. Assuming the pipe contained what a European pipe contained produces a distorted picture of both the botany and the practice.
Tobacco itself was cultivated well beyond its natural range, sometimes by peoples who grew nothing else, which is a strong indication of how it was valued. Nicotiana rustica reached the Great Lakes and the Northeast as a crop.
The ceremonial and commercial strands have not stayed separate. Commercial tobacco is used as an offering today in many communities, and tribal public health programmes across North America now work with a distinction between traditional tobacco and commercial tobacco, campaigning hard against the second while defending the first. That framing is theirs, and it is the accurate way to state what is a single plant and two entirely different things.