The cold and forbidding forests of Canada and Northern Michigan are home to a plethora of natural wonders. Surely, the frozen landscape is beautiful enough. But when the winter wind howls and the trees crack–surely something evil creeps in the frightful dark. In Indigenous cultures, the beast goes by the name “wendigo.” This post will analyze the lore around this monstrous creature and see how the strength of folklore influences culture and history to this day.

The Origins of the Wendigo

The most pressing connotation of the wendigo is that of the abominable snowman—lurking in snowy forests in secluded regions around the world. However, as mentioned, the wendigo (or windigo) actually materialized out of the First Nations tribes in Canada, or Algonquin folklore.

Some sources tells us that the windigo “legend existed in Algonquian oral history for many centuries,” and previous to the arrival of Europeans on the continent. In 1722, a “French traveler Bacqueville de la Potherie” recorded the first appearance of the word, but it appeared as “Onaouientagos.” Explorers did not understand the portentous nature of the beast at the time. Nonetheless, through oral storytelling and sightings we now are more familiar with an abominable snowman-type beast.

Physical Description

Researchers have described the monster in a variety of ways. However, there is consistency to these descriptions.

Oftentimes, stories portrayed the beast as having “glowing eyes, long yellowed fangs, terrible claws and (a) long tongue.” This description provides a terrifying picture of the monster. As reported, the beast is a violent creature with “yellowish skin” and one that is “matted with hair or (has) decaying skin,” which gives me the impression of a large, rabid dog.

As described by Legends of America, the wendigo is a “monster with some human characteristics” and it has been “historically associated with cannibalism, murder, insatiable greed, and cultural taboos against such behaviors,” which paints a menacing portrait.

The Wendigo: A Symbolic Meaning

Explaining Madness

On the surface, the wendigo’s existence is that of a horrible monster, often huge and ravenous, menacing the frozen forests of the North. But connotatively, we have something far more nuanced. The wendigo is a representation of natural phenomena and the danger of nature. It is the wind, the trees, the hills…the snow.

When not representative of nature, the wendigo embodies the aforementioned characteristics of greed, cannibalism, and murder: “… the word also functions symbolically to connote gluttony and the ‘image of excess’” writes Marlene Goldman in “Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction.” When new arrivals emerged from Europe, a straightforward way to explain their xenophobic, homicidal mania was to liken it to a beast of legend: why else would the invaders be so ruthless and bloodthirsty?

In addition to that, the legend of the wendigo explains a community member’s unexplained madness and violence. An uncle murdered your aunt and cut her to bits? If he had never even seemed remotely violent, wouldn’t that confound your relatives and the community at large? Why not suggest that the supernatural is plausible in a society that worshipped both spirits in a variety of forms?

Furthermore, as posited by Katarzyna Jusiak in “The Embodiment of the Taboo: The Images of Wendigo in Literature and Their Rendition in Modern Media.,” the wendigo is a multifaceted creature whose appearance, and meaning, is dependent on the presenter, whether that be the Canadian image, which adheres to a “traditional image known from oral culture,” or the image of the wendigo as a predator, “preying on grief of those who lost someone loved instead of the necessity of devouring human meat in the wilderness…” (Jusiak 31).

Remember: the cultures of days gone, whether those of antiquity or even farther back, needed to explain the world to their children through an oral medium. These could be Indigenous cultures or settlers establishing a state. Thus, creating a boogeyman helped people understand the bad-faith actors in other societies and their own. These people who were feverishly destroying cultures and propagating a new narrative of civilized life could only be literal monsters.

Explaining Imperialism

Aptly, in an article title “Boogie Men” on Mohawk Nation News, writer kahntineta writes that the Windigo is “sick because it’s cut off from its roots” and that “its hunger knows no bounds … When it sees something, it wants to own it.”

The author refers to this thirst as “Windigo Psychosis” or “Owistah disease.” While researchers hotly debate this idea, the terminology is in reference to despicable characteristics in humanity. For instance, the insatiable lust for destruction that resulted in the genocide of Indigenous cultures. And the violence that occurred to people when imperialism came to the shores of North America.

With that said, it is clear that the wendigo is not just a literal snow beast that lives in the snowy parts of the world. Rather, it is a metaphor for the actions committed by a person or society that commits violence and atrocities. In other words, those who murder, or rape, or cannibalize another’s life or community has the Wendigo disease–literally or figuratively. So, societies afflicted with this psychosis allow genocide and the mass destruction of cultural heritage.

“They (settlers) were unchained from the morality of human feeling,” kahntineta states.

Conclusion

It is my belief that symbolism is heavy in the hands of the believer, whether they know it or not. What I mean by this is that believers in supernatural ghosts, goblins, and werewolves—possess a particularly important interpretation of the world. This interpretation symbolizes reality and places it into a contextual framework.

At first, one might say that this is a dangerous outlook. Belief in the unverifiable attaches itself to conspiracy or downright lunacy. However, respect for folklore and oral tradition can create a sort of unintentional explanation of reality. That is to say, the Bigfoot can represent the rejection of a peremptory government, and the Paulding Light represents our society’s reverence for the dead. Sure, we can believe that these phenomena are real, but that does not create any new understanding for society. It just creates mystery, but that is not the point of folklore. We can either believe in a ten-foot-tall monster that roams the Canadian outback, or we can understand that these uncertainties echo the horrors of history.

The wendigo embodies the worst, most fragmented aspects of our culture. Yet, it also forces us to reflect on those aspects to aspire to greater heights of humanity and morality.