The Great Hare Nanabozho

At a Glance

• Central figures: Nanabozho, the Great Hare, trickster and culture hero of the Anishinaabe peoples; his grandmother Nokomis, who raised him; and the great manido (spirit-powers) of the underwater world.
• Setting: Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) tradition, the Great Lakes region of North America - the forests, rivers, and inland seas of what is now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Ontario.
• The turn: Nanabozho’s wolf companion is drowned by the underwater manido, and Nanabozho wages war against them to retrieve the body and avenge the killing.
• The outcome: The underwater manido flood the entire world in retaliation; Nanabozho survives by climbing a great pine and directs the animals to dive for mud, from which the earth is remade on a turtle’s back.
• The legacy: The re-creation of the earth as Turtle Island, the name by which many Anishinaabe and other Indigenous peoples still refer to North America.

Nanabozho was born in trouble. His mother died giving birth to him, and his grandmother Nokomis took him and raised him at the edge of a lake. He grew fast - not the way children grow, but the way fire grows when it catches dry wood. He could change his shape. He could talk to animals. He was clever and reckless and hungry, always hungry, and he had a temper that ran ahead of his thinking.

Nokomis told him what she could. She told him about the manido, the spirit-powers that lived beneath the water and moved through the world. She told him to be careful. Nanabozho listened the way he always listened - with one ear, while the other ear was already planning something.

The Wolf

Nanabozho left Nokomis and traveled. He walked through the forests south of the great lake and found a wolf, and the two of them became companions. They hunted together. They traveled together across the snow. The wolf was steady where Nanabozho was erratic, quiet where Nanabozho was loud. They were good for each other.

The manido who lived beneath the lakes watched this. They did not like Nanabozho. He was too powerful, too unpredictable, and he did not respect them. They decided to strike at him through the wolf.

One winter the wolf crossed a frozen lake. The ice was thick enough to hold a moose, but the underwater manido broke it from below. The wolf went through. The water closed over him, and the manido dragged him down to their lodges at the bottom.

Nanabozho came to the lakeshore and called. No answer. He walked the edges of the ice and saw the hole where the surface had been shattered from underneath. He knew what had happened. He sat down on the bank and wept, and then he stood up and his grief turned to fury.

The Ambush at the Shore

Nanabozho watched the lake. He knew the underwater manido sometimes came to the surface to sun themselves on warm rocks. He waited through the rest of winter and into spring. When the days grew long and warm, he found the rocks where the manido came to bask - great serpents, some of them, and horned creatures with copper scales. He changed his shape. He became a stump, blackened and old, sitting among the other stumps at the waterline.

The manido came up. They spread themselves across the warm stone. One of them looked at the stump.

That stump was not there before.

Another one shrugged and closed its eyes. The sun was good.

Nanabozho struck. He took his true form and drove his war club into the chief of the underwater manido, wounding him badly. The creatures thrashed and fled back into the water, dragging their chief with them. The lake churned and went dark.

The Flood

The manido were enraged. From their lodges beneath the water they called the flood. The lakes rose. The rivers reversed. Water came up through the ground and poured from every direction, covering the forests, the hills, the places where Nanabozho had traveled with the wolf.

Nanabozho ran. The water followed. He climbed the highest hill he could find, and the water followed him up. He climbed a great white pine at the top of the hill, going branch by branch as the water rose around the trunk. He climbed until there were no more branches, and still the water came. He spoke to the tree.

Grow. Stretch yourself.

The pine grew. It pushed new wood up from its crown, and Nanabozho climbed the new growth while the water lapped at his feet. The pine grew four times, each time just enough. The water stopped rising when it reached Nanabozho’s chin.

He clung to the top of the pine in a world that had become entirely water. No land anywhere. A few animals floated nearby - a muskrat, a beaver, a loon, an otter - holding onto driftwood and floating logs.

The Dive

Nanabozho called to the animals. He needed earth. Even a small piece, a handful of mud from the bottom, would be enough. He could make new land from it.

The loon dove first. It was gone a long time. It came back gasping, half-drowned, with nothing.

The otter dove. It was gone longer. It surfaced belly-up, exhausted, with nothing in its paws.

The beaver dove. Strongest swimmer of all of them. It was gone so long Nanabozho thought it had drowned. It came back barely alive, and its paws were empty.

The muskrat looked at the water. It was the smallest. It was not the strongest swimmer. It dove.

It was gone a very long time. Nanabozho watched the surface. Nothing. Then the muskrat floated up, limp, eyes closed. Nanabozho pulled it from the water. He opened its small paw, and inside, packed under the claws, was a little ball of mud from the bottom.

Turtle Island

Nanabozho took the mud and looked around for a place to put it. A turtle surfaced near the pine tree and offered its back. Nanabozho set the mud on the turtle’s shell.

The mud spread. It grew the way Nanabozho himself had grown - fast, beyond what its size should have allowed. It covered the turtle’s shell and kept going, reaching outward across the water, thickening into soil, pushing up into hills. Grass came. Trees came. The water drew back to fill the lakes and rivers, and the land was firm again.

Nanabozho climbed down from the pine. He walked on the new earth. The muskrat recovered. The other animals found their places. The world was not exactly what it had been before - the old shapes of the land were gone - but it was land, and it held.

Nokomis was waiting for him. She had survived the flood in her own way - Nokomis always survived. She looked at the new earth and at her grandson, standing there soaked and furious and alive.

The wolf did not come back. That was the cost. Nanabozho had remade the world, and the world was good, and the wolf was still at the bottom of the old lake that no longer existed in the shape it once had. The Anishinaabe walk on Turtle Island, on the mud the muskrat carried in its paw, on the back of the turtle who offered what it had. The Great Hare made it. But he made it out of grief, and the grief is still in it.