 Manitu and the Master-Entities of the Territory 
The Algonquian notion of Manitu has confused anthropologists since its first mention within the discipline. Throughout these debates, manitu has been understood as a class of entities, a diffuse power present everywhere in nature or even as a more general notion than the sacred, in short in essentially magico-religious terms. On the contrary, manitu appears to us as an encompassing concept that animates and establishes the coherence of Algonquian cosmologies that we propose to conceive as an ultimate meta-rule. We put forward that the notion of manitu warrants analysis jointly with that of master-entity. These two notions are at the foundation of Algonquian juridicity as they express the idea of a power that is the cause of itself and that regulates the relations of human beings with other beings in the cosmos.