Anishinaabe

Anishinaabe refers to the original people — the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations. The word is often translated as 'the good beings' or 'the beings made of nothing' (lowered from the spirit world).

The plural form is Anishinaabeg. The word is animate in the Ojibwe grammatical system, meaning it takes animate verb forms and is treated as a living being in sentence construction.

The term encompasses a shared cultural and linguistic identity across many distinct nations and communities spanning from the Atlantic coast to the prairies.