Anishinaabe or Anishnawbe: Origin of an Ethnonym from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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Ojibwa people call themselves Anishinabe, usually translated into English as “the people.” There are a variety of spellings including Anishnawbe, Anishnab, Anishnabe and Anishinaabe. The Ojibwe root stems of this mighty name are fascinating, especially as they relate this ethnonym to worldwide creation myths. There are three common spellings of Ojibwe: older Ojibway; preferred modern Ojibwa and Ojibwe.

An ethnonym is the proper name a people or ethnic group call themselves. Inuit is an ethnonym; Eskimo is not. The compound word was borrowed into English linguistic and anthropological jargon from Russian. But a Russian linguist coined the word using two Greek roots: ethnonym = ethnos ‘people’ + onoma ‘name.’ Some ancient Greek dialects like Aeolian used the form onyma, which form was borrowed into Late Latin, thus accounting for the -onym spellings listed in the next sentence. Compare words like ethnic and a list of compound English words whose second element is -onym: acronym, synonym, pseudonym, patronym, homonym and toponym (place name). A fuller reflex of that Greek word for name lurks in the botanical term for a familiar garden shrub, Euonymus, ‘[plant] of good name.’

I offer two derivations of the word Anishinabe.

First Possible Derivation

anishaa + naabe = Anishinabe

Anishaa means ‘for nothing, without purpose.’

Naabe means ‘male.’ Naabe is also a masculinizing prefix added to nouns, verbs and particles in Ojibwe.

Anishi-naabe then carries the semantic weight of ‘men made from nothing.’ This does NOT mean the people are worthless; rather the compound word points back to several Ojibwa creation myths and stories that jibe well with similar origin stories found all over the world throughout human history. It suggests that at some point in Anishinaabe history there was a myth about Gitchi-Manitou, the Great Spirit, making men from nothing, from the very dust of the ground. In the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, we find a similar creation myth buried inside the very name of the first man, Adam. Adam was made from nothing, that is, from dust. That’s what his name means.

One striking feature of the Adam and Eve creation myth in Genesis is the pottery metaphor: a god formed humans from clay or dust. This is a worldwide element in creation stories. Compare the Hebrew and Christian version in Genesis 2:6, 7 as translated in the King James version of 1611: “There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground. . .” So, even today, in brickyards of the Middle East, does the brick-maker sprinkle water on the clay before he kneads it into shape. The Bible’s name for the first man reflects this too. Adam means ‘human being, person.’ With only a slightly different Hebrew voicing, adom means ‘red.’ Both may be related to Hebrew adamah ‘clay’ or ‘red earth of Israel.’ In Old Testament Hebrew it is usually ha adam and the definite article ha makes some biblical scholars suspect that the name, like some others in Hebrew, was very early borrowed from neighbouring Assyrians. If so, it might stem from Assyrian adamu ‘to make or produce.’ Thus Adam would mean ‘the made one, the created one.’

In English the term human being borrowed from Latin shares this myth, meaning the ancient Romans believed this story too, reflecting the made-of-dust and/or the pottery myth in creation stories. The prime meaning of Latin humanus is ‘clayey’ or made of humus ‘earth, soil, clay.’ The Roman word for human being or man, homo, as in our species Homo sapiens, also stems from the same root. In Old Latin it was hemo ‘the earthen one’ or ‘the person of clay.’ The idea must have occurred early in human history, when primitive humans first dug up an interred body to discover bones and dust. Dust thou art; to dust shalt thou return.

Now let’s look at one version of the Ojibwe creation myth. The Great Spirit, Gitchie Manitou, took four parts of Mother Earth (earth, wind, fire, and water) and blew into them using a sacred cowrie shell. From the union of these four elements and God’s breath, man was created. But look closely at those elements. There is everything needed to make clay pots: earth and water to make the pottery clay, wind and fire to bake the pots, God’s breath to blow on the fire and keep it burning while the terra cotta pots were fired (terra cotta Italian, literally ‘earth baked.’) Here again is a creation myth whose disguised metaphor is ‘God made men just as we fire pottery.’

Second Possible Derivation of Anishinaabe

Is the Ojibwe stem meaning ‘friend’ in the word Anishinaabe?

In Ojibwe ‘my male friend’ is niijii-kiwenh.

Some aboriginal etymologists see the root niijii- ‘my fellow…’ in Anishinaabe, so that an earlier form involved niijii + naabe hence ‘my fellow men’ hence ‘my people,’ hence ‘the people.’

There are Ojibwe forms like the vocative niijii ‘my friend!’ and niijiinini ‘my fellow man’ containing the familiar Ojibwe and general Algonkian inini ‘a man’ plural ininiwag ‘men.’ This stem root for men appears in the name of a northern people, the Innu, and in the arctic language Inuktitut also as the name of an Eskimo people, the Inuit or ‘the men, the people.’ Yes, I know that Eskimo is not a good word, but it is used here to make things clear for non-Canadians and for no other reason. And I have earlier written about its origin in several of my books.

In the word inini, the basic root is *niin meaning ‘I, me, one person, one man.’ Plural forms meaning ‘we’ or ‘many people’ include the Ojibwe niina-wind.

Nitchie, Dude!

Niijii, the Ojibwe vocative ‘Hey, my friend!” gave a once common northern greeting among aboriginals and whites, “Nitchie!”

Nitchie, with many variants like neche, nee-chee, neejee, and nidge, is a stem word in many Algonkian languages for ‘friend, person, native.’ It was used among Algonkian-speaking aboriginal peoples to greet one another. But as early as the 1840s fur traders and other Whites had turned the cheerful Nitchie! into yet another derogatory synonym for ‘Indian,’ thus permanently reducing its use among Whites who did not want to offend first peoples.

An interesting new Canadian word, which is a blend of English and Ojibwa, was pointed out by Ojibwa writer, theatre director, film-maker and dramatist Drew Hayden Taylor in a column in the Toronto Star. This pun on Anishnabe is used by certain native people to describe the growing aboriginal middle-class in major Canadian cities. If they seem too white to other native people, they are termed ‘Anish-snobs.’

A good collection of Mr. Taylor’s satire appears in Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations of a Blue-eyed Ojibway which has appeared in several editions. Check out his works at this web site:

http://www.athabascau.ca/writers/dhtaylor.html

Caution: One Phoney-Baloney Folk Etymology!

Since it is widely spread on the internet, I will quote one spurious derivation. According to some, the ethnonym Anishinaabe derives from ani ‘whence’ + nishina ‘lowered’ + abe ‘male.’

So Gitchie Manitou just sort of lowered some males to earth!

“Wow, dude! Like a, like, total cosmic elevator system, would that be, like,...it?”

I don’t think so; nor do Ojibwe linguists who have studied the word. This is folk etymology from a person who has not the slightest notion about phonemic transformation, that is, what happens to sounds over time in any language as they are altered by propinquitous letters, as they blend and evolve on the living tongue. The changes that may befall a human uttered sound are manifold but finite and studiable, whether one speak Hawaiian or Hittite; and the vowel gradations necessary in Ojibwe to countenance the ‘man-lowered’ etymology are--not to put too fine a point upon the matter--impossible.

A white racist insult, too common in Canada's north, is "nish," a put-down abbreviation of anishinaabe.

So ends my examination of one aboriginal ethnonym of North America and my choice of its cogent etymologies.