This paper explores two narrative case studies, one biography and one traditional indigenous story, as they inform the dynamics of community, politics, and nationhood for Anishinaabe indigenous people in northern Minnesota. The narratives both supply power and legitimacy to Anishinaabe national identity but inform divergent political projects of decolonial and postcolonial nationalism, respectively, complicating both settler and indigenous efforts to determine indigenous nationhood in a fixed and static way. This finding is employed to critique the dominant nation-state centric concepts of nationhood and to present alternative modes of comprehending nationhood in the context of indigenous politics.