Wendigo

A Wendigo^{[note 1]} is a half-beast creature appearing in the legends of the Algonquian peoples along the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of both the United States and Canada. The creature or spirit could either possess characteristics of a human or a monster that had physically transformed from a person. It is particularly associated with cannibalism. The Algonquian believed those who indulged in eating human flesh were at particular risk;^[4] the legend appears to have reinforced the taboo against the practice of cannibalism. It is often described in Algonquian mythology as a balance of nature. The legend lends its name to the disputed modern medical term Wendigo psychosis. This is supposed to be a Culture-bound syndrome that features symptoms such as an intense craving for human flesh and a fear the sufferer is a cannibal. This condition was alleged to have occurred among Algonquian native cultures,^[5] but remains disputed.

The Wendigo legend has inspired a number of derived characters commonly found in modern horror fiction.

Mythology

Description

The Wendigo is part of the traditional belief systems of various Buffalo people in the northern United States and Canada, most notably the Ojibwe and Saulteaux, the Cree, the Naskapi, and the Innu people.^[6] Although descriptions varied somewhat, common to all these cultures was the conception Wendigos as malevolent, cannibalistic, supernatural beings (manitous) of great spiritual power.^[7] They were strongly associated with the winter, the north, and coldness, as well as with famine and starvation.^[8]

Basil Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, gives one description of how wendigos were viewed:^[9]

The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody [....] Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.

At the same time, Wendigos were embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess: never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims. In some traditions, humans who became overpowered by greed could turn into Wendigos; the Wendigo myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation.^[10]

Among the Ojibwe, Eastern Cree, Westmain Swampy Cree, Naskapi, and Innu, Wendigos were said to be giants, many times larger than human beings (a characteristic absent from the Wendigo myth in the other Algonquian cultures).^[11] Whenever a Wendigo ate another person, it would grow in proportion to the meal it had just eaten, so that it could never be full.^[12] Therefore, Wendigos were portrayed as simultaneously gluttonous and emaciated from starvation.

Human Wendigos

All cultures in which the Wendigo myth appeared shared the belief that human beings could turn into Wendigos if they ever resorted to cannibalism,^[4] or, alternatively, become possessed by the demonic spirit of a Wendigo, often in a dream. Once transformed, a person would become violent and obsessed with eating human flesh. The most frequent cause of transformation into a Wendigo was if a person had resorted to cannibalism, consuming the body of another human in order to keep from starving to death during a time of extreme hardship, for example in hard winters, or famine.^[13]

Among northern Algonquian cultures, cannibalism, even to save one's own life, was viewed as a serious taboo; the proper response to famine was suicide or resignation to death.^[14] On one level, the Wendigo myth thus worked as a deterrent and a warning against resorting to cannibalism; those who did would become wendigo monsters themselves.

Taboo Reinforcement Ceremony

Among the Assiniboine, the Cree and the Ojibwe, a satirical ceremonial dance originally was performed during times of famine to reinforce the seriousness of the Wendigo taboo. The dance was to have originated with a dream of a young Assiniboine man. It was to be performed, whenever there was a camp for the enjoyment of the people. The ceremonial dance was known as a Wihtikokansimoowin to the Cree, who later attained the tradition, performed it as part of the activities of the last day of their Sun Dance ceremonies. It involves wearing a mask and dancing about the drum backward.^[15] The last known wendigo ceremony conducted in the United States was at Lake Windigo of Star Island of Cass Lake, located within the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota.^[16]

Wendigo psychosis

"Wendigo psychosis" (also spelled many other ways, including "Windigo psychosis" and "Witiko psychosis") refers to a condition in which sufferers developed an insatiable desire to eat human flesh even when other food sources were readily available,^[17] often as a result of prior famine cannibalism.^[18] Wendigo psychosis traditionally has been identified by Western psychologists as a culture-bound syndrome, although there is a debate over the existence of the phenomenon as a genuine disorder. The theory was popular primarily among psychologists in the early 1900s, and may have resulted from a misinterpretation of northern Algonquian myths and culture.^[19]

In accounts of Wendigo psychosis, it was reported that members of the aboriginal communities in which it existed believed that cases literally involved individuals turning into Wendigos. Such individuals generally recognized these symptoms as meaning that they were turning into Wendigos, and often requested to be executed before they could harm others.^[20] Reportedly, the most common response when someone began suffering from Wendigo psychosis was the practice of curing attempts by traditional native healers or Western doctors. In the unusual cases where these attempts failed, reports indicate that the Wendigo began either to threaten those around them or to act violently or anti-socially, generally they were then executed.^[21] Cases of Wendigo psychosis, though evidently real, were relatively rare, and it was even rarer for them to culminate in the execution of the sufferer.^[21]

In 1661, the Jesuit Relations reported:

What caused us greater concern was the intelligence that met us upon entering the Lake, namely, that the men deputed by our Conductor for the purpose of summoning the Nations to the North Sea, and assigning them a rendezvous, where they were to await our coming, had met their death the previous Winter in a very strange manner. Those poor men (according to the report given us) were seized with an ailment unknown to us, but not very unusual among the people we were seeking. They are afflicted with neither lunacy, hypochondria, nor frenzy; but have a combination of all these species of disease, which affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger. This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounce upon women, children, and even upon men, like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously, without being able to appease or glut their appetite -- ever seeking fresh prey, and the more greedily the more they eat. This ailment attacked our deputies; and, as death is the sole remedy among those simple people for checking such acts of murder, they were slain in order to stay the course of their madness.

One of the more famous cases of Wendigo psychosis reported involved a Plains Cree trapper from Alberta, named Swift Runner.^[22][23] During the winter of 1878, Swift Runner and his family were starving, and his eldest son died. Twenty-five miles away from emergency food supplies at a Hudson's Bay Company post, Swift Runner butchered and ate his wife and five remaining children.^[24] Given that he resorted to cannibalism so near to food supplies, and that he killed and consumed the remains of all those present, it was revealed that Swift Runner's was not a case of pure cannibalism as a last resort to avoid starvation, but rather of a man suffering from Wendigo psychosis.^[24] He eventually confessed and was executed by authorities at Fort Saskatchewan.^[25]

Another well-known case involving Wendigo psychosis was that of Jack Fiddler, an Oji-Cree chief and shaman known for his powers at defeating Wendigos. In some cases this entailed euthanizing people suffering from Wendigo psychosis; as a result, in 1907, Fiddler and his brother Joseph were arrested by the Canadian authorities for murder. Jack committed suicide, but Joseph was tried and sentenced to life in prison. He ultimately was granted a pardon, but died three days later in jail before receiving the news of this pardon.^[26]

Fascination with Wendigo psychosis among Western ethnographers, psychologists, and anthropologists led to a hotly debated controversy in the 1980s over the historicity of this phenomenon. Some researchers argued that essentially, wendigo psychosis was a fabrication, the result of naïve anthropologists taking stories related to them at face value without observation.^[19][27] Others have pointed to a number of credible eyewitness accounts, both by Algonquians and others, as evidence that wendigo psychosis was a factual historical phenomenon.^[28]

The frequency of Wendigo psychosis cases decreased sharply in the 20th century as Boreal Algonquian people came into greater and greater contact with Western ideologies and more sedentary, less rural, lifestyles.^[5] While there is some substantive evidence to suggest that Wendigo psychosis might have existed, a number of questions concerning the condition remain unanswered, and there is continuing debate over its existence, nature, significance and prevalence.

In popular culture

• Creatures based upon the Wendigo appear in the films Wendigo, Ravenous,^[29] Dark Was the Night and The Last Winter, and in episodes of the television series Supernatural,^[30] Grimm, The X-Files,^[31] (although it is referred to as a manitou a more general word meaning "spirit"), Charmed ^[32] Blood Ties,^[33] Hannibal ^[34] (where it is a visual metaphor instead of an actual creature), Sleepy Hollow,^[35] Teen Wolf,^[36] and The Blacklist.^[37]
• Early references to Wendigos in literature include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 The Song of Hiawatha ("Slay all monsters and magicians,/All the Wendigoes, the giants...").^[38]
• Wendigos have been referred to in literature for many decades, most notably in Algernon Blackwood's 1910 story "The Wendigo", which introduced the legend to horror fiction,^[39] and in Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary.^[40]
• Characters bearing the name appear in a number of computer and video games, including Tearaway,^[41] Final Fantasy, The Legend of Dragoon, Until Dawn,^[42] The Secret World, the Shin Megami Tensei universe ^[43] Dementium II and the Warcraft universe,^[44] as well as role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons.^[45]
• In the Marvel Comics Universe, there is a fictional creature known as Wendigo.^[46]
• In the Supernatural episode "Wendigo" the titular monsters are the remnants of the Donner Party that was lost in California in 1846.
• Wendigos appear as the main antagonists in the 2015 video game Until Dawn.

See also

• Ithaqua, (the Wind-Walker) a fictional character in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.
• Jikininki, Japanese spirits of cursed individuals who in death must seek out and eat human corpses.
• Ogre, European monsters which traditionally ate babies.
• Rakshasa, a human-flesh eating creature according to Hinduism.
• Skin-walker, a person, who according to a Native American belief, has the supernatural ability to turn themselves into an animal.
• Wechuge, a similar creature that appears in the legends of the Athabaskan people of the Northwest Pacific Coast.
• Jack Fiddler, last known wendigo hunter.

Notes

References

Sources

• Dispelling Wetiko, Breaking the Curse of Evil by Paul LEVY, NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS (2013) ISBN 978-1-58394-548-3
• Brightman, Robert A. (1988). "The Windigo in the Material World". Ethnohistory 35 (4): 337–379. doi:10.2307/482140. JSTOR 482140. 
• Colombo, J.R. ed. Wendigo. Western Producer Prairie Books, Saskatoon: 1982.
• Goddard, Ives (1969). "Owls and Cannibals: Two Algonquian Etymologies". Paper presented at the Second Algonquian Conference, St. John's, Newfoundland. 
• Joh/Users, Basil (1990 [1976]). Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• Joh/Users, Basil (2001 [1995]). The Manitous. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
• Marano, Lou (1982). "Windigo Psychosis: The Anatomy of an Emic-Etic Confusion". Current Anthropology 23: 385–412. doi:10.1086/202868. 
• Parker, Seymour (1960). "The Wiitiko Psychosis in the Context of Ojibwa Personality and Culture". American Anthropologist 62 (4): 603–623. doi:10.1525/aa.1960.62.4.02a00050. 
• Schwarz, Herbert T. (1969). Windigo and Other Tales of the Ojibways, illustrated by Norval Morrisseau. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited.
• Teicher, Morton I. (1961). "Windigo Psychosis: A Study of Relationship between Belief and Behaviour among the Indians of Northeastern Canada." In Proceedings of the 1960 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. Verne P. Ray. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Windigo Mito e Leggenda by Claudio FOTI, PARALLELO45 ED (2013) ISBN 978-88-98440-29-0