I found this article on Nanabozho here.
It kinda sums up what I have been learning about the significance of Nanabozho.
Nanabozho.
"The demiurge of the cosmologic traditions of the Algonquian tribes, known among the various peoples by several unrelated names, based on some marked characteristic or dominant function of this personage.
Nanabozho is apparently the impersonation of life, the active quickening power of life, of life manifested and embodied in the myriad forms of sentient and physical nature. He is therefore reputed to possess not only the power to live, but also the correlative power of renewing his own life and of quickening and therefore of creating life in others.
He impersonates life in an unlimited series of diverse personalities which represent various phases and conditions of life, and the histories of the life and acts of these separate individualities fort an entire cycle of traditions and myths which, when compared one with another, are sometimes apparently contradictory and incongruous, relating, as these stories do, to the unrelated objects and subjects in nature.
The conception named Nanabozho exercises the diverse functions of many persons, and he likewise suffers their pains and needs. He is this life struggling with the ninny forms of want, misfortune, and death flint come to the bodies and beings of nature."
Nanabozho was so much like God yet so much like man. He was Holy yet unholy. He created, yet he created and destroyed. He was the object of praise, yet an object of ridicule. Many stories were told about Nanabozho, in many differant ways. Though the stories differ in description, they all gave me the same sense of God with us,.....yet stuck in humanity. I guess the description "embodiment of life" is a good one.
I get the personal sense that Nanabozho is an important part of the progressive revelation of God to the people of Turtle Island.
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