This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Anishinaabe Deities gathers Manidoo, the category itself, and two of the figures it contains, a structure close to the Ainu kamuy: a class of other-than-human persons rather than a closed pantheon.
Manidoo is the Anishinaabe word for a power or a person of the other-than-human kind, grammatically animate and covering beings of the first rank, from the one met in a fasting vision to the thunderers of the sky and the powers under the water; it is also the word missionaries took over to translate God. Gichi-Manidoo, the great manidoo, stands at the head of the usual modern account, addressed in prayer, at naming ceremonies and at the opening of gatherings, with tobacco offered alongside the name. Whether a supreme being of this shape is pre-contact or took its present outline under missionary translation is disputed, and the atlas records the argument rather than closing it.
Nanabozho is the central figure of Anishinaabe sacred narrative, both a manidoo and something like a relative, the one who names the animals and plants, who brings the medicines, and who is repeatedly ridiculous and repeatedly consequential in the same stories. Those stories are told only when there is snow on the ground, a restriction on the season of telling rather than on who may hear them.