Nanabozho stands between the manidoog and people, and does the work of an intermediary in both directions. In the narratives he is sent to walk the world and name what is in it, and the naming is not labelling but recognition: he learns what each plant and animal is for, what it can do and what it will and will not give, and the knowledge that results is the knowledge people have. He brings fire. He brings the medicines. Much of what the Anishinaabe know about how to live is knowledge he acquired, usually by asking, sometimes by theft, and frequently by getting it wrong first.
He is also a fool, and the tradition is entirely comfortable with both facts at once. He overreaches, is greedy, is vain, is caught out by his own cleverness, and suffers indignities described in detail and with obvious enjoyment. The stories in which he fails are not a lesser class of story. They carry the instruction, and a figure who was only dignified could not carry it, because the point is frequently that the listener would have done the same thing.
He is commonly figured as a hare, and the hare runs through the related figures in neighbouring Algonquian traditions, though those are distinct beings in distinct traditions rather than the same one under other names.
A flood narrative sits at the centre of the cycle. The world is covered, Nanabozho is on a raft with animals, and one animal dives for earth from the bottom and surfaces dying with a little of it, from which the world is remade.