Ojibwe tradition describes a world alive with manidoog, spirit beings whose power runs through animals, waters, winds and the land itself, under the ultimate mystery the Ojibwe call Gichi-Manidoo, the Great Spirit. Basil Johnston, the Anishinaabe scholar who devoted his career to recording this heritage, presents the manidoog not as a fixed pantheon but as persons in relation: Nanabozho, the trickster and culture hero who remade the world on a turtle's back after the great flood; the Thunderbirds whose storms cleanse the earth; and the underwater beings, above all Mishipeshu, whose consent governed safe passage on the lakes. The wendigo, a winter cannibal spirit of hunger, stands as the tradition's sharpest moral warning against greed.
Relationship with the manidoog is personal before it is institutional. Tobacco is offered before travel, harvest and prayer, and children were sent on dream fasts to receive a guardian vision that would orient a whole life. Frances Densmore, recording Ojibwe communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin early in the twentieth century, documented these practices woven through everyday work, food and medicine.
The Midewiwin, or Grand Medicine Society, is the tradition's formal institution: an initiatory lodge whose members advance through ranked degrees of healing knowledge, chronicled in pictographic birchbark scrolls that serve as mnemonic records of songs, migration and cosmology. Walter Hoffman's 1891 study preserved a detailed outside view of its ceremonies; the lodge itself, suppressed in the boarding school era, continues today, and its inner teachings remain the business of initiates.