In Algonquian folklore, the wendigo or windigo is a mythical cannibal monster or evil spirit native to the northern forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of both the United States and Canada.^[1]
The wendigo may appear as a monster with some characteristics of a
human, or as a spirit who has possessed a human being and made them
become monstrous. It is historically associated with cannibalism, murder, insatiable greed, and the cultural taboos against such behaviours.^[2]



The legend lends its name to the controversial modern medical term Wendigo psychosis, described by psychiatrists as a culture-bound syndrome with symptoms such as an intense craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal.^[3] In some Indigenous communities, environmental destruction and insatiable greed are also seen as a manifestation of Wendigo Psychosis.^[4]

Folk beliefs

Description

The wendigo is part of the traditional belief system of a number of Algonquin-speaking peoples, including the Ojibwe, the Saulteaux, the Cree, the Naskapi, and the Innu people.^[9] Although descriptions can vary somewhat, common to all these cultures is the view that the wendigo is a malevolent, cannibalistic, supernatural being.^[10] They were strongly associated with the winter, the north, and coldness, as well as with famine and starvation.^[11]






Basil Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, gives a description of a wendigo:

The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin
pulled tightly 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.^[12]

In Ojibwe, Eastern Cree, Westmain Swampy Cree, Naskapi, and Innu
lore, wendigos are often described as giants, many times larger than
human beings (a characteristic absent from the myth in the other
Algonquian cultures).^[13]
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.^[14] Therefore, wendigos are portrayed as simultaneously gluttonous and emaciated from starvation.





The Wendigo is seen as the embodiment of gluttony, greed, and excess:
never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they are
constantly searching for new victims.^[4]

Human Wendigos (Cannibals)

In
some traditions, humans who became overpowered by greed could turn into
wendigos; the myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation
and moderation. Also humans could turn into wendigos by being in contact
with them for too long.^[15]

Taboo reinforcement ceremony

Among the Assiniboine, the Cree and the Ojibwe, a satirical ceremonial dance is sometimes performed during times of famine to reinforce the seriousness of the wendigo taboo. 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.^[when?][16]

Wendigo psychosis

In
historical accounts of Wendigo psychosis, it has been reported that
humans became possessed by the Wendigo spirit, after being in a
situation of needing food and having no other choice besides
cannibalism. 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.^[17]

One of the more famous cases of Wendigo psychosis reported involved a Plains Cree trapper from Alberta, named Swift Runner.^[18][19]
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.^[20]
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 with Wendigo
psychosis.^[20] He eventually confessed and was executed by authorities at Fort Saskatchewan.^[21]






Another well-known case involving Wendigo psychosis was that of Jack Fiddler, an Oji-Cree chief and medicine man
known for his powers at defeating wendigos. In some cases this entailed
killing people with Wendigo psychosis. As a result, in 1907, Fiddler
and his brother Joseph were arrested by the Canadian authorities for
homicide. 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.^[22]






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.^[23][24]
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.^[25]






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.^[3]

As a concept or metaphor

In
addition to denoting a cannibalistic monster from their traditional
folklore, Native Americans also understand the wendigo conceptually. As a
concept, the wendigo can apply to any person, idea, or movement
infected by a corrosive drive toward self-aggrandizing greed and
excessive consumption, traits that sow disharmony and destruction if
left unchecked. Ojibwe
scholar Brady DeSanti asserts that the wendigo “can be understood as a
marker indicating . . . a person . . . imbalanced both internally and
toward the larger community of human and spiritual beings around them."^[26]
Out of equilibrium and estranged by their communities, individuals
afflicted by the wendigo spirit unravel and destroy the environmental
balance around them. Chippewa author Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House (novel),
winner of the National Book Award, depicts a situation where an
individual person becomes a wendigo. The novel describes its primary
antagonist, a rapist whose violent crimes desecrates a sacred site, as a
wendigo who must be killed because he threatens the reservation’s
safety.





In addition to characterizing individual people who exhibit
destructive tendencies, the wendigo can also describe movements and
events with similarly negative effects. According to professor Chris
Schedler, the figure of the wendigo represents “consuming forms of
exclusion and assimilation” through which groups dominate other groups."^[27]
This application allows Native Americans to describe colonialism and
its agents as wendigos, since the process of colonialism ejected natives
from their land and threw the natural world out of balance. DeSanti
points to the 1999 horror film Ravenous
as an illustration of this argument equating “the cannibal monster” to
“American colonialism and manifest destiny”. This movie features a
character who articulates that expansion brings displacement and
destruction as side effects, explaining that “manifest destiny” and
“western expansion” will bring “thousands of gold-hungry Americans . . .
over the mountains in search of new lives . . . This country is seeking
to be whole . . . Stretching out its arms . . . and consuming all it
can. And we merely follow”.^[28] For a more detailed exploration linking wendigo attributes to colonialism, see Jack D. Forbes’s 1978 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, which was an influential text in the American Indian Movement.





As a concept, wendigo can apply to other situations than just Native
American-European relations. It can serve as a metaphor explaining any
pattern of domination by which groups subjugate and dominate or
violently destroy and displace. Joe Lockhard, English professor at
Arizona State University, argues that wendigos are agents of “social
cannibalism” who know “no provincial or national borders; all human
cultures have been visited by shape shifting wendigos. Their visitations
speak to the inseparability of human experience . . . National identity
is irrelevant to this borderless horror”.^[29]
Lockhard’s ideas explain that wendigos are an expression of a dark
aspect of human nature: the drive toward greed, consumption, and
disregard for other life in the pursuit of self-aggrandization.

In popular culture

Although distinct from how it appears in the traditional lore, one of
the first appearances of a character inspired by, or named after, a
Wendigo in literature is Algernon Blackwood's 1910 short story The Wendigo.^[30][31][32] Blackwood's work has influenced many of the subsequent portrayals in mainstream horror fiction,^[33][34] such as August Derleth's "The Thing that Walked in the Wind" and "Ithaqua" (1933 and 1941),^[32] which in turn inspired the character in Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary,^[33]
where it is a personification of evil, an ugly grinning creature with
yellow-grey eyes, ears replaced by ram's horns, white vapour coming from
its nostrils and a pointed, decaying yellow tongue.^[34]






The Wendigo appears in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Herb Trimpe,
the monster is the result of a curse that afflicts those who commit
acts of cannibalism in parts of Canada. The Wendigo first appeared in
The Incredible Hulk #162 (April 1973) fighting the Incredible Hulk as
well as Wolverine in his first comic book appearance.^[35]






Creatures based upon wendigos appear in a number of films, including Dark Was the Night, Ravenous,^[36] and The Descent, a film featuring "crawlers" that are similar to Wendigos. The creatures have also appeared in television series, including Supernatural,^[37] Blood Ties,^[38] Charmed, ^[39] Grimm,^[40] Sleepy Hollow, Teen Wolf and Hannibal, in which a creature matching the Wendigo in appearance appears in several episodes.





Characters with the name appear in a number of computer and video games, including Until Dawn, The Legend of Dragoon,^[41] The Secret World^[42] and Warcraft universes,^[43] as well as role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons.^[44]