Wendigo

The wendigo belongs to the traditions of Algonquian-speaking peoples including the Ojibwe, Cree, Innu, and Saulteaux, a malevolent spirit bound to deep winter. Descriptions vary by region, but a common image is an emaciated giant: ribs pressing through its skin, lips chewed ragged by its own teeth, and a heart of ice that never thaws. The more it eats, the larger and hungrier it grows, so that it is forever starving. In Algonquian telling the wendigo is greed itself: the more it possesses, the deeper its want.

Traditional narrative places the deepest horror in the possibility that a person can become a wendigo. In a snowbound camp with the food gone, someone who crosses the taboo against eating human flesh, or whose dreams are entered by the wendigo spirit, slowly loses humanity and begins to see kin as prey. The stories thus carry serious social weight, guarding the gravest taboo of subsistence life and condemning hoarding and selfishness. Historically, Cree and Ojibwe communities did execute people judged to have turned wendigo; the Oji-Cree leader Jack Fiddler was arrested in 1907 over such a killing and died in custody, while his brother Joseph was tried and convicted; and the psychiatric label "wendigo psychosis," used in twentieth-century literature, remains disputed.

For the peoples concerned the wendigo remains part of living belief, treated with gravity; many elders avoid speaking of it in summer or in careless settings. The Ojibwe scholar Basil Johnston turned the wendigo into a critique of resource extraction and consumerism, while the antlered beast of horror fiction, film, and games is a twentieth-century outsider invention far removed from the tradition.