Anishinaabemowin sorts every noun into animate or inanimate, and what falls on the animate side is the shortest route into the tradition. Manidoo is animate. So are the sun, thunder, tobacco, and particular stones, kettles and shells that have shown themselves capable of acting. The grammar is not a quaint survival laid over a world of objects; it is a working claim that the world contains far more persons than people, and that some of them can be addressed.
Manidoo covers a great deal. It is used of powers of the first rank, of the beings encountered in a fasting vision, of the thunderers who arrive in spring and leave in autumn, and of the beings under the water who are their counterparts. Gichi-Manidoo, the great manidoo, stands at the head of the usual modern account.
Around that sits a set of institutions. Every person belongs to a dodem, a clan reckoned through the father and named for a being, which fixes who they may marry, what obligations they carry and what role they hold. Names are given in ceremony, by someone who has sought one on the recipient's behalf, and a name is a description of something seen rather than a label chosen. The aadizookaanan, the sacred narratives, are told only when there is snow on the ground, and they are spoken of as beings in their own right rather than as tales about beings, which is why the season restriction is a matter of respect and not of custom.