Anishinaabe

Gichi-Manidoo, the great mystery, stands at the source, and beneath that the world is understood as populated by manidoog, powers with their own agency, attached to directions, waters, weather, animals and places. The relationship a person has with them is individual and is established rather than assumed, most notably through fasting and through what is received in that fasting.

The world is not governed from a throne. There is no divine king, no council of gods with portfolios, and no succession between generations of deities. What organises the tradition instead is relationship and reciprocity: with the manidoog, with the clan, with the beings whose lives sustain human life, and with the land itself.

Nanabozho occupies a position that has no clean equivalent in the pantheons of the Old World. He is at once the being through whom much of the present world came to be arranged and a figure whose appetites and misjudgements make him funny, and the tradition holds both without embarrassment.

The Midewiwin, the medicine lodge, is a graded institution with its own teachings and its own record, entered by invitation and instruction over years.

Anishinaabe religion is living, held by nations across the Great Lakes, and is listed by this atlas as restricted. The atlas states that the lodge exists, what kind of institution it is, and that its material is not public.

Anishinaabe knowledge is transmitted in person, in relationship, and in stages. Some of it is carried on birchbark scrolls, incised with figures that serve as a mnemonic structure for teachings and for the record of the migration westward from the eastern sea, and the scrolls are readable by those trained to read them and are not a script anyone else can pick up.

The outside record begins with the French, whose missionaries and traders produced the earliest sustained descriptions in the seventeenth century, and it is very large by the nineteenth. Some of it was compiled by men married into Anishinaabe families and working with fluent informants, which makes it better than most colonial ethnography and does not make it disinterested. Scrolls were collected, and lodge material was published, in a period when the ceremonies themselves were under legal and administrative pressure across both Canada and the United States.

The consequence is the same asymmetry that recurs across this part of the atlas: material held under conditions inside the tradition is freely available outside it, and its availability proves nothing about consent.

Anishinaabe scholars, language revitalisation programmes and nation-level research protocols now determine what is documented and by whom, and repatriation of scrolls and other material is an active process.

The atlas describes the structure of the spirit world and reproduces none of the lodge's material.