Gichi-Manidoo

The name is a compound and an ordinary one: gichi, great, and manidoo, a power of the other-than-human kind. It is the name used at the opening of ceremonies, in prayer at the drum, in the naming of a child, and at the giving of tobacco, and for most Anishinaabe people today it is simply the name of the highest.

What is addressed under it is not described in the way a deity with a biography is described. Gichi-Manidoo has no stories of the kind Nanabozho has, no domain in the sense that a Greek god has one, no image and no cult centre. The relationship is conducted through offering rather than through narrative: tobacco is put down, words are said, and the transaction is with a presence rather than with a character. That absence of story is itself informative, and it is what makes the comparison with a European high god misleading in both directions.

Nor is the address exclusive. A person who prays to Gichi-Manidoo also deals with the manidoo met in a fast, with the thunderers, with the beings of a particular lake, and with the ancestors, and there is no sense in which the greater makes the lesser redundant. The system is not organised as a hierarchy with delegated authority.

Practice here has also been in long contact with Christianity, in some communities for three centuries, and many Anishinaabe people hold both. That is not syncretic confusion to be untangled by an outsider; it is the ordinary religious situation of the Great Lakes.

Two positions are held, both by serious people, and the atlas marks the question debated rather than picking one.

The first holds that a highest power was there before contact. Anishinaabe people say so; the concept sits comfortably in the wider Algonquian world; and early records report it. On this reading, missionaries found an existing idea and used the existing word, which is the ordinary way translation works.

The second holds that the translation did more than report. On this reading manidoo named a quality of power distributed unevenly across many beings rather than a being at the top, the superlative gichi- was an available construction rather than a title in use, and the pressure of needing an equivalent for God hardened a diffuse notion into a singular figure with monotheist contours. The strongest form of the argument points at what Gichi-Manidoo lacks: no narrative cycle, no ceremonial specific to him, no place, which is what one would expect of a category promoted to a person.

The difficulty is evidential and probably permanent. The earliest written Anishinaabe religious vocabulary was recorded by missionaries, in dictionaries and catechisms compiled in order to preach. The instrument that would have to be used to test the second position is the instrument the second position accuses. Nothing in the archive is neutral on the point, and no new source is likely to appear.

The atlas therefore reports both camps, names the ground each stands on, and leaves the question where it is.