The wendigo is a malevolent creature or spirit appearing in the folklore of the subarctic Algonquin peoples of northeastern North America and the Great Lakes region. At one time it was particularly common among the Ojibwe and Cree societies. The word may be derived from a supposed proto-Algonquian term for owl.
As traditionally described, the wendigo could apparently shift between human and nonhuman forms, and came into being through possession by another wendigo, through an act of cannibalism, or in some cases, through excessive greed. The particulars of its appearance varied from society to society. It was generally described as being frighteningly gaunt and emaciated as a result of its insatiable hunger—a hunger that increased with every human being consumed. Besides craving human flesh, it also has a taste for moss and mushrooms. It might have huge, jagged teeth, misshapen hands and fingernails, glowing eyes, and yellowish skin. The creature was thought to inhabit cold, remote areas of wilderness, and it was often described as having a heart, or even a body, of ice. It was extraordinarily strong and could travel as fast as the wind.
European American explorers, traders, and missionaries recorded frequent references to the wendigo when traveling among Native American and First Nation peoples. Early nineteenth-century fur trader George Nelson noted the belief in the creature among the Cree and Ojibwe, and recounted a story that he had been told of how a wendigo had once been captured and killed. He went on to suggest that wendigos could “delegate their Power to the Indians,” thus creating cannibalistic cravings that could be all too tempting during periods of privation (Nelson 1988, 86–88). British army officer Sir William Francis Butler recorded an 1870 encounter near Rat Portage (now Kenora) in what is today northwestern Ontario with a Native American described as a “Windigo” due to his alleged cannibalism (Butler 1872, 175–176). In this anecdote, there was no mention of a supernatural element.
It is thought that fear of the wendigo may have acted as a reinforcement of the taboo against cannibalism, but the concept served other functions as well. Elders told wendigo stories to control children or teach them lessons about correct behavior. In other contexts, stories of wendigos involved sexual matters, often violent ones. Although usually male, wendigos could be female, or the stories about them might describe how women had thwarted them. On occasion the creature could be a water spirit.
“Wendigo killings” were apparently an accepted component of Ojibwe and Cree life, and a number of such crimes were recorded in Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In one early case, a Cree named Abishabis (Small Eyes) was killed by three fellow Cree in 1843 while being confined for murder in a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. As reported by a company trader, the three stated that they had acted “to secure themselves against being haunted by a wendigo” (Harring 2003, 78). More than half a century later, in 1896, an Ojibwe named Machekequonabe was found guilty of manslaughter by a Canadian court for killing a man in northwestern Ontario that he believed to have been a wendigo. Several more cases followed over the following fifteen years.
Some commentators have linked the wendigo to the appearance of Europeans and European Americans in North America. In this interpretation, stories about the cannibalistic creature grew out of the extermination of game animals and the increasing danger of starvation that followed their disappearance. In a more general sense, the stories could reflect the cultural upheaval and destruction (including the spread of alcoholism) that the strangers brought with them.
A few psychologists have suggested the existence of a “wendigo psychosis”—a mental condition in which the victim believes that he or she has become a wendigo and suffers from an irresistible desire to consume human flesh. One frequently cited case involved a Cree named Ka-ki-si-kutchin (Swift Runner) who was arrested in May 1879 in what is now Alberta for murdering the members of his family and cannibalizing their bodies—this despite the fact that an emergency supply of food was available at a nearby trading post. After a trial, the defendant was hanged. In other instances, those so possessed are said to have begged to be killed before they could turn on their friends or kin. However, the wendigo psychosis is a disputed concept. Critics have pointed out that many reports of the condition are at best secondhand and argue that it may be a form of severe depression, one brought on by hunger and isolation and expressed through the particular spiritual beliefs of the societies in question.
One of the first significant literary treatments of the myth is “The Windigo,” a 1901 poem in Franglais dialect by Irish-born Canadian poet William Henry Drummond. But most contemporary readers know of the creature through the 1910 short story “The Wendigo” by British writer Algernon Blackwood. Blackwood was interested in the folklore and language of the Algonquin peoples and had camped in the Rat Portage area where he set his story, describing the ordeal of a French Canadian guide leading a small party of moose hunters. Blackwood envisioned the creature as an embodiment of the northern wilderness, however, and his version of the creature differs in some respects from the traditional wendigo.
The concept of the wendigo colors Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake (2003) and its sequels. Atwood’s fellow writers among the First Nations have adopted the wendigo as a symbol of the destruction of their traditional cultures by European Americans. The creature has also become a staple of contemporary horror literature, appearing in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) and a number of novels for younger readers. In film there have been several adaptations of Blackwood’s story, and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999) and Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) deal with the subject as well.
Grove Koger
See also Rougarou; Skinwalker; Tlahuelpuchi; Zombie Legends
Further Reading
Atwood, Margaret. 1995. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Blackwood, Algernon. 1910. “The Wendigo.” In The Lost Valley and Other Stories. London: Eveleigh Nash.
Brightman, Robert A. 1988. “The Windigo in the Material World.” Ethnohistory 35 (4): 337–379.
Butler, William Francis. 1872. The Great Lone Land: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle.
Colombo, John Robert, ed. 1982. Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books.
Harring, Sidney. 2003. “The Wendigo Killings: The Legal Penetration of Canadian Law into the Spirit World of the Ojibwa and Cree Indians.” In Violent Crime in North America, edited by Louis A. Knafla. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Nelson, George. 1988. The Orders of the Dreamed: George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Teicher, Morton I. 1960. “Windigo Psychosis: A Study of a Relationship between Belief and Behavior among the Indians of Northeastern Canada.” Proceedings of the 1960 Annual Spring Meeting. Seattle: American Ethnological Society.