Nanabozho

Also Known As: also Nanabozo, Nanabush, Nanaboozhoo, Wenabozho and Nenabozho across Anishinaabe dialects; Manabozho, Manabush and Michabo among neighbouring Algonquian peoples; Mishaabooz, “Great Rabbit”
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He can take any shape he chooses, most often a man or a hare, and he made the dry land a second time after the water covered everything.
Role in Mythos: Sent by Gitche Manitou to teach the animals and then the people how to live, he is at once the Anishinaabe culture hero and the fool whose blunders carry the lesson.
Relation to Humans: He is on the side of people in a way most tricksters are not, naming the plants and animals for them, teaching them to fish, and giving them the spiritual precepts of the Midewiwin. He also lies to them, steals from them and gets caught, and the stories in which he is humiliated are told with as much affection as the ones in which he saves the world.

The snake found him on the shore in the afternoon heat, coiled around what looked like an ordinary stump, and squeezed. Bark held. It squeezed again, harder, hard enough to crack a man’s ribs, and the stump made no sound at all, because the stump was Nanabozho and he had come a long way to be patient. When the snake slid off, a bear came and worked the same silent wood over with claws and teeth until the sap ran. He did not cry out then either. He was waiting for the sleepers to sleep, and he had a brother to answer for.

That scene holds most of him. Nanabozho is the central figure of Anishinaabe sacred story, told among the Ojibwe, the Odawa and the Potawatomi of the Great Lakes and in cognate forms across the wider Algonquian world. He answers to Nanabush, Nanaboozhoo, Wenabozho and Nenabozho depending on which shore of Lake Superior you are standing on, and to Manabozho or Manabush further south. He is also called Mishaabooz, the Great Rabbit. He is not a god. He was sent by Gitche Manitou, the Great Mystery, to walk among the animals and then among people and show them how to live properly, a job he performs mostly by doing it wrong first and loudly.

His beginning is the kind of story that opens with a warning nobody heeds. His father was a spirit, named in most tellings as the West Wind and in others as the Sun. His mother was human and died bringing him into the world, so he was raised by his grandmother Nokomis, who taught him the names of things and could not keep him out of anything. Half manidoo and half human: the division is not a footnote. It is the engine under every story he walks into, and it explains how a being capable of remaking the world can also be defeated by a baby.

He has no fixed body. Most often he is a lean, unremarkable-looking man, and almost as often a hare, occasionally a giant one, which is the shape the rock painters favoured on the Shield, drawn in ochre with its legs folded under it. He becomes a stump, a leaf, a raven, a coyote, a wolf. The shapes are not disguises so much as arguments, and the story usually hinges on whether the argument was a good one.

The greatest of the tales begins with hunting. He went out with two wolves; one turned away west, and the other stayed, and he took that one as his own. The lakes in those days were held by spirits, and the two of them made war on the spirits and cleared one lake entirely. Then the hunting went badly. Every deer they started fled to the water and vanished. One winter day the wolf ran a deer out onto the ice, and at the moment he closed on it the ice opened and the spirits below took them both. Nanabozho walked the shoreline weeping until a voice came up out of the water and told him, without kindness, that he would not see his brother again. So he went to the place where the spirits came to lie in the sun, and he became a stump, and he let a snake crush him and a bear tear at him without making a sound, and when they had settled down to sleep he took his own shape and killed their chiefs with arrows.

The rest happened fast. The surviving spirits came after him as a wall of water. He ran uphill and the hills went under. He climbed the tallest pine he could find and prayed it to grow, and it grew, and the flood kept rising; he prayed again and it grew less; a third time and it barely stirred, and the water reached his chin. Around him animals were swimming with nowhere left to go. He called the beaver, the otter and the muskrat and told them plainly that somebody had to go down and bring back earth or they were all finished. The beaver drowned on the way. The otter saw the bottom and lost consciousness before he could bite it. The muskrat went down, took a mouthful, and floated back up senseless, and when Nanabozho opened the small wet mouth there was a little soil in it. He rubbed it between his palms until it was dust, dried it in the sun, and blew it out over the water, and the land came back.

He is a liar, and the stories do not pretend otherwise. In one he passes an encampment, sees a child lying in the sun sucking its toe, decides he can certainly do that, and spends an increasingly furious afternoon twisting himself into knots on the ground while his foot stays stubbornly out of reach. The child wakes up and laughs at him. He does not retaliate against the child, which is something, but he turns the next boy who is rude to him into a cedar tree, which is less. In another, the one animal arrogant enough to raid his forbidden cave of tobacco is chased down and shrunk, leap by leap, from a great green thing that cleared the treetops into a grasshopper with brown juice on its mouth, condemned to be slightly harmful to crops forever. Punishment in these stories is rarely proportionate and always memorable.

What he gives is enormous. He named the plants and the animals. He taught people to fish. He is credited with the spiritual grounding of the Midewiwin and, in some accounts, with devising the characters in which Ojibwe was written. He recovered the land itself out of a rodent’s mouth. Against that, his limits are exactly the ones his mixed parentage predicts. He is vain, and vanity is what gets him beaten. He cannot resist an audience or a dare. His power over shape does not extend to power over consequence, and the spirits under the lakes were strong enough to kill someone he loved and then chase him up a tree. In the tellings that follow the grief through, his brother is not restored to him; after years of fighting the water manitous he wins only a concession, that the dead have a protector, which is not the same as having his brother back.

There is a complication in how these stories reached English readers, and it deserves saying. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft collected the Manabozho cycle and published it in 1839, and Longfellow built The Song of Hiawatha on that material in 1855. Longfellow’s own journal shows him deciding to swap the name, on the understanding that Hiawatha was simply another word for the same person. It was not. Hiawatha belongs to the Haudenosaunee and the founding of their League, several hundred miles and an entire language family away. Schoolcraft made the error, Longfellow set it in verse, and the poem’s popularity welded a borrowed name onto a figure who already had five of his own. Anishinaabe writers have spent a good deal of the last century unpicking that, and Nanabozho has come back into print under his own name in the work of Basil Johnston, Gerald Vizenor, Thomas King and Tomson Highway, who once described him as being as pivotal in the Native world as Christ is in the Christian one. He turns up in those pages as a seagull, a nighthawk and a bingo caller, which is about right for someone who has been a stump.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nanabozho?

Nanabozho is the trickster and culture hero of the Anishinaabe peoples, the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi of the Great Lakes region. He is half spirit and half human, sent by Gitche Manitou to teach the animals and then people how to live. He is also known as Nanabush, Nanaboozhoo, Wenabozho and Manabozho.

Is Nanabozho a god?

No. Nanabozho is a supernatural being with god-like powers, but the Ojibwe do not class him as a god. He is the son of a spirit father and a human mother, and his half-human side is what makes him vulnerable, vain and frequently ridiculous.

How did Nanabozho create the world?

Nanabozho did not create the world so much as remake it after a flood sent by the water spirits. Stranded at the top of a pine tree, he sent the beaver, otter and muskrat down to fetch earth from the bottom. Only the muskrat succeeded, and Nanabozho ground that mouthful of soil into dust, dried it, and blew it over the water until dry land appeared.

What animal is Nanabozho?

Nanabozho is a shapeshifter who most commonly appears as a man or as a hare, and in his hare form he is called Mishaabooz, the Great Rabbit. He also takes the form of a stump, a leaf, a raven, a coyote and a wolf. The rabbit form is the one preserved in old rock paintings of the Canadian Shield.

Is Nanabozho the same as Hiawatha?

No, and the confusion is a documented mistake. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft published the Manabozho stories in 1839, and Longfellow used them for The Song of Hiawatha in 1855 while renaming the hero, believing Hiawatha was another name for the same figure. Hiawatha is actually a Haudenosaunee figure associated with the founding of the Iroquois League.