Nokomis, 'Grandmother,' is the primordial earth-grandmother of Menominee myth, the aged woman who dwelt upon the earth before the culture-hero and who reared the infant Manabus after his mother died at his birth. She is at once a kinswoman of the hero and an embodiment of the nurturing earth, keeper of the lodge to which Manabus returns between his wanderings and the source of much of the practical and ritual knowledge he carries to humankind. In the tales she counsels, warns, and occasionally suffers from her grandson's recklessness, and her lodge is the fixed point around which the episodic hero-cycle turns.