The Midewiwin, usually translated as the Grand Medicine Society, is the institution most often written about from outside, and it is a society with degrees, with instruction, with fees and with conditions of entry rather than a general folk practice. Its teachings concern healing, conduct and the path a person takes, and they were recorded on birchbark scrolls incised with mnemonic figures, which functioned as an aid to a trained memory rather than as a script anyone could read cold. A number of those scrolls survive in museum collections, and their custody, like that of many objects taken during the same period, is a matter the communities have raised.
Basil Johnston, an Anishinaabe writer from Wasauksing First Nation, published accounts of this material in English from inside the tradition, which is why the atlas cites him here rather than an outside ethnography of the same ground. The wider tradition includes the seven grandfather teachings, the clan system, and a body of narrative about Nanabozho. What belongs to initiates is named as belonging to initiates and is not reproduced. Anishinaabemowin, the language itself, is central to all of it, and immersion schools on both sides of the border have been built specifically because the teachings are held to be inseparable from the language they were given in.