Gitche Manitou

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In Lake Huron there is an island so large it has its own lakes, and the people who have always lived there call it Mnidoo-mnis. The English maps render it Manitoulin, smoothing the Odawa word into something a settler tongue could hold, and most travelers who cross to it never learn that the name means island of the Great Spirit — that the word manitou is sitting there on the highway sign, on the ferry schedule, hiding in plain view. It hides in Manitoba too, from manidoo-wapow, the strait where the waves on a narrows of Lake Manitoba make a sound the old people heard as a spirit’s drum. The word is scattered across the northern map of the continent because the thing it names was understood to be scattered across the world itself: a power present everywhere, in places and animals and weather and the dead. Gitche Manitou is the greatest concentration of that power — the Great Manitou — and the distance between what the Anishinaabe mean by it and what a nineteenth-century poem made of it is the whole of this entry’s subject.

Satellite view of Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron. NASA WorldWind, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The word and the nations

The name belongs first to a language. In Anishinaabemowin, the tongue of the Anishinaabe, the term is Gichi-manidoo: gichi- a preverb meaning great or big, and manidoo a spirit, a sacred being, a power that is more than ordinary. Joined, they make the Great Spirit-power — and the spellings that reach the English record (Gitche Manitou, Kitchi-Manitou, Gitchi Manito) are all attempts by outside ears to catch a sound that the language itself writes cleanly. The Anishinaabe are not one nation but three closely bound peoples — the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi, the Three Fires — and the word travels with them and beyond them, for they belong to the great Algonquian family of languages that once ran from the Atlantic coast across the Great Lakes and up into the subarctic. Its cognates spread the same idea across that whole reach: the Cree say Kihci-manitow, the Lenape said Kitschimanitto, the Miami Kihci Manetoowa. This is a concept of a language family, not of a single tribe, and that breadth matters — it is exactly what later made the word so easy to abstract.

How it reaches the written record is the first thing to mark, because everyone who wrote it down for centuries was an outsider. The Anishinaabe kept their sacred knowledge in memory and in the incised birchbark scrolls of their medicine society, not in books open to strangers; the manitou-world was carried in speech, in story, in ceremony. The earliest European notations of the Algonquian word are startled and approximate — the English colonist Thomas Harriot recorded a form of it on Roanoke Island as early as 1585, glossing it, in the only theology he had, as “gods and goddesses.” From there the term passes through the hands of French and English missionaries, who seized on it as the nearest native word for the Christian God and bent it to that use, and then through the nineteenth-century ethnographers and oral-history collectors who made the Great Lakes peoples a subject of study. The deepest distortions and the most durable popular images both enter through that outsider channel, and a reader has to hold the channel in view while reading what came down it.

A world full of manitous

To understand the Great Manitou one has to begin a long way below it, with the ordinary, uncountable manitous of the world. Manitou — in Ojibwe manidoo, plural manidoog — is best understood not as a god but as a kind of charge: the spiritual and fundamental life-force that, in the Algonquian understanding, manifests everywhere — in organisms, in the land, in events. A bear has its manitou; so does a stand of birch, a thunderhead, a stretch of rapids, a dream, a person newly dead. The four winds are manitous; the power of the upper sky — the Thunderbird, whose ancient foe is the power that lives beneath the water — is a manitou of the highest rank. This is a world that is full — saturated with presence, alive in every direction — and the manitous are not arranged in a tidy celestial hierarchy like the gods of a Mediterranean pantheon. They are more like organs of one body, or facets of one pervasive sacredness, interacting and overlapping. The crucial point, easy to miss and easy to flatten, is that this is a vision of the world as charged, not a roster of named deities.

Because the world is charged in this way, a person’s life is lived among the manitous, not merely under one of them. In the Anishinaabe understanding a young person traditionally seeks a relationship with a particular manitou through fasting and dream — a guardian power encountered in a solitary vision, who may give a name, a song, a protection. The healers of the medicine society were understood to draw on manitou to see what was coming, to turn weather, to mend sickness. These are matters described here at the distance the tradition itself keeps and the sources allow, never as a procedure: the point is only that manitou is not an abstraction debated by theologians but the medium in which an Anishinaabe life was conducted, a daily commerce with powers that were near and real. The spirit-grandfathers of the old stories, the aadizookaanag, are addressed as living kin rather than as characters. To stand inside this frame is to live in a country where the sacred is not somewhere else.

Within that charged world, Gitche Manitou is the Great Manitou — the greatest, the creating and sustaining power, the source from which the rest of the manitou-world takes its life. It is sometimes rendered the Creator, sometimes the Master of Life, sometimes the Giver of Life, and the Anishinaabe also speak of it as a kind of Great Mystery, a sacredness too large and too diffuse to be drawn as a face. That diffuseness is the heart of the concept and the part the popular version cannot keep. Gitche Manitou is far less anthropomorphic, far less a single willing personality, than the word spirit in English suggests; it is closer to the whole field of sacred power gathered to its highest pitch than to a ruler seated above creation. The lesser manitous are not its servants in the way angels serve a throne. They are the world’s own powers, and the Great Manitou is the depth those powers come from.

This is the power addressed in the great ceremonial institution of the Anishinaabe, the Midewiwin — the Grand Medicine Society, Mide for short — whose members carry the healing knowledge and the origin teachings of the people. The society’s authority is traced to a culture-hero, Nanabozho, sent to bring the people the medicine ways and to restore balance in a world contested by competing manitous; its teachings are recorded in wiigwaasabak, the birchbark scrolls, whose figures are incised with a bone awl as memory-prompts for ceremonies and songs. What is done inside the Midewiwin lodge, in detail, is not a matter for outside narration — the society has always guarded its inner knowledge, and it remains the property of its members and the living nations, described here only as the institution it is and no further. The same reticence is owed to the sacred pipe and the offerings through which Gitche Manitou is addressed: that they exist, that the smoke and the breath carry words upward toward the Great Manitou, can be said; the how of it is not for an encyclopedia to instruct. The line is worth keeping visible, because much of the harm done to these traditions came precisely from outsiders who would not keep it.

Not the Great Spirit of the books

“The Great Spirit” is the phrase nearly every English speaker reaches for, and it is the phrase that does the most quiet damage. As a translation of Gichi-manidoo it is not exactly wrong — missionaries chose it deliberately, and the Anishinaabe themselves now often use Great Spirit in English. The trouble is what the English carries with it and what it strips away. It carries the silhouette of the Christian God: a single, personal, sovereign deity, masculine, enthroned above the world and apart from it. It strips away the diffuseness, the manitou-saturated field, the sense that the sacred is in the bear and the rapids and the wind rather than ruling them from outside. The translation, in other words, quietly converts a pervading power into a high god — and that conversion was, for the missionaries who made it, the entire point. The historical record shows the bending happening in the vocabulary itself: where the church wanted a word for the Holy Spirit it reached for Gichi-ojichaag, the Great Soul, reserving the older Gichi-manidoo and letting it drift toward the Christian Father. The pan-Indian “Great Spirit” that resulted is a composite, assembled by outsiders, that smooths dozens of distinct traditions into one monotheist-shaped figure.

The flattening runs wider than any single nation, and this is where a careful reader has to refuse an easy merger. The popular “Great Spirit” gathers under one English phrase concepts that belong to entirely separate language families and entirely separate theologies. The Lakota Wakan Tanka — the Great Mystery, the wakan that pervades all being — is a Siouan concept, not an Algonquian one; it is related to Gitche Manitou only in the loose sense that both are great diffuse sacred powers mistranslated by the same colonial phrase, and to treat them as one being is to erase two distinct peoples at a stroke. Gitche Manitou is the Algonquian manitou-power; Wakan Tanka is the Lakota mystery; the resemblance between them lives in the failure of the English word, not in the traditions. To say “the Great Spirit” as if it named one deity worshiped from the Atlantic to the Plains is to repeat the nineteenth century’s central error about Native North America — and to mistake the reach of an English abstraction for the unity of the peoples it was imposed on.

Gitche Manito, the mighty

If one phrase fixed the romantic Great Spirit in the popular mind, it was set there by a poem. In 1855 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most widely read poet in the English-speaking world, published The Song of Hiawatha, an epic of the Great Lakes peoples in a hypnotic, chanting meter. Its first canto, “The Peace-Pipe,” opens with the Great Manitou descending to the red stone quarry to call the nations together — “Gitche Manito, the mighty, / He the Master of Life, descending” — and that single mighty, masterful, manlike figure, standing erect on the crags and summoning the tribes, is the image of the Great Spirit that a century of readers carried away. It is a magnificent piece of verse and a thorough misunderstanding. The being it draws is anthropomorphic, sovereign, singular — the high god of the mistranslation, not the diffuse manitou-power of the Anishinaabe.

The poem’s foundations were as outsider-made as its picture. Longfellow drew his material chiefly from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent and ethnographer who, through his Ojibwe wife’s family, had gathered Great Lakes oral traditions and published them — gathered them, that is, through the filter of his own period and assumptions, in a record scholars now read with great caution. From this flawed source Longfellow built a still deeper confusion: he took the name Hiawatha, which belongs to a historical Iroquois statesman of the Haudenosaunee, and attached it to the Ojibwe culture-hero Nanabozho, fusing two unrelated figures from two unrelated peoples into one. He set the whole in a trochaic meter borrowed not from any Native source but from the Finnish Kalevala. The result, as the folklorist Stith Thompson observed, produces “a unity the original will not warrant” — a smooth, pseudo-Indian epic that is, at its core, a non-Indian work. It is reception, and it must be marked as reception: a romanticized, partly Christianized image manufactured at two removes from the living tradition, never to be mistaken for the thing itself.

Currier and Ives lithograph of Hiawatha’s Departure. Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1865., via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What the poem set loose was enormous. Hiawatha was recited in schoolrooms, parodied, set to music, painted by Albert Bierstadt and lithographed by Currier & Ives, and printed in editions beyond counting; it taught generations of non-Native readers nearly everything they thought they knew about the Anishinaabe. And it taught them, above all, the noble, vanishing, monotheist Indian — the “Great Spirit” as a single mighty Father, the woodland peoples as a beautiful sunset rather than living nations. That image flattered the conscience of a settler society in the middle of dispossessing the very peoples it sentimentalized, and it has proven nearly impossible to dislodge. Every plastic “Great Spirit” of advertising and self-help, every greeting-card Indian gazing at a sunset, descends in part from Longfellow’s mighty Gitche Manito.

The living word

None of this is past tense. The Anishinaabe are a present people — Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations across the Great Lakes and the northern plains, in the United States and Canada — and the word Gichi-manidoo is not a relic to be recovered but a living term in a language being actively taught and spoken. It is precisely the Anishinaabe’s own voice that now does the work of un-flattening. Language programs and community elders set gichi-manidoo back inside its real grammar, where manidoo is one of a host of manidoog and the Great Manitou is the depth of a charged world rather than a borrowed sky-father. The University of Minnesota’s Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, built with first-language speakers, records the word with the voices of the people who hold it — an inversion, small but real, of the centuries in which outsiders did the recording. Where a missionary glossary once bent the word toward a foreign God, the nations now hold the pen.

It helps to remember that the Midewiwin teachings survived a long assault — the missions, the boarding and residential schools that punished children for the language the word lives in, the long period when Native ceremony was discouraged or effectively outlawed and went underground to be kept. That the wiigwaasabak were hidden, that the songs were carried in memory through generations forbidden to sing them, that Gichi-manidoo is still spoken in its own grammar today — these are facts about endurance, not about a vanished faith. The word kept by the people differs from the word taken by the books in exactly the way a living thing differs from its portrait: it cannot be held still, it answers to no single face, and it is theirs to define. Longfellow’s mighty Gitche Manito will go on standing on his crags in the anthologies. The Great Manitou of the manitou-filled world goes on being addressed, in the language that named it, by the people who never stopped.

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