5
WINDIGO
Monster of the North
Many are the monsters that haunt the woods of North America, but none is more terrible than the Windigo— the very incarnation of terror. A fixture of native American folklore since aboriginal days, the Windigo (also transliterated Wendigo, Witiko, Wiitko, Wetikoo, etc., all stemming from roots meaning the one who lives alone, hermit) lurks in the forested backlands throughout central Canada. When this lonesome creature gets hungry for human flesh, which is often, it crashes through the forests, uprooting trees, stampeding game, and setting off whirlwinds. Within its hideous, malformed body, there beats not a flesh-and-blood heart but a pitiless block of ice. The Windigo is as cruel, murderous, and unstoppable as any monster conceived by the mind of man. Because the Windigo rules over such a swath of territory it is worth a chapter all to itself.
MEETING THE WINDIGO
One of the first anthropological accounts of the Windigo comes from the pen of the Pennsylvania anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell. An expert in North American Indian culture, Hallowell was a pioneer in the collection of folklore in the Lake Winnipeg area in Manitoba Province in central Canada, a cold and forbidding place in the winter. Interviewing countless Indian informants in the 1930s and ‘40s, he recorded thousands of bloodcurdling tales. Much of his ethnographic work was later collected in a classic anthology, Culture and Experience (1974). His work deals with the psychology and personality traits of the Algonquian-speaking Indians.
In one of the earliest first-hand accounts of the power of the Windigo belief, dating from the early 1930s, Hallowell notes the association of the monster and local environmental disorders, especially ice storms, gales, and tornadoes, as well as the mass hysteria sparked among the Indians. Describing one such event, personally witnessed, among the Poplar River Saulteaux in the early 1930s, he writes:
One midwinter night at Poplar River, when a terrific gale was blowing, word got around that a wínd
go would likely pass that way. All the Indians on the north side of the river left their homes at once and congregated in a house across the river. In order to protect themselves they engaged one of the leading shamans to conjure all through the night in order to divert the wíndgo from his reputed path. The Indians firmly believed that the cannibal passed without harming them and part of the evidence they adduced was the fury of the wind, which was interpreted as a sign of his presence. ... To these Indians such monsters are quite as real, quite as much a part of the environment as the giant animals already mentioned, or, as in our culture, God, angels, and the Devil. (1974: 257)
In terms of sheer geographical range as a belief, the Windigo reigns as monster monarch of North America. It haunts a vast territory from the high Canadian Rockies to the Arctic Circle in the north and the Great Lake states and the Dakotas in the south. It lumbers across the continent as far east as the Atlantic provinces of Canada, including French-speaking Quebec, ruling an area almost as large as the United States.
While the Ojibwa and Saulteaux Manitoba are perhaps the best-known peoples ascribing to the existence of the Windigo, many sub-arctic tribes also acknowledge it. These include the Micmac, the Algonquians, the Montagnais-Naskapi, the Swampy and Woodland Cree, and, in the south, the Blackfoot. Speaking mutually intelligible dialects, these otherwise diverse Indian peoples are sometimes lumped as the “northern Algonkian-speaking group” or simply the “Northern Algonkians” (Bishop 1975: 237). By contrast, the Algonquians’ nearest neighbors, the Eskimo to the north and the Athabaskans to the west (the totem-pole building tribes of the Pacific Northwest like the Haida and Kwakiutl) seem to be free of the idea, although they are, as we shall see, troubled by other sorts of equally horrible bogeymen, demons, and monsters. Going by other names, these are not so dissimilar to the Windigo.
After the first observations by Hallowell and some others, American anthropologists flocked to the region to investigate the Windigo phenomenon. A number of very good descriptive and interpretive works naturally followed. Probably the most comprehensive of these is a meticulous monograph published by the American Ethnological Society, written by Morton Teicher, entitled Windigo Psychosis (1960). Teicher’s work ignited some excitement in academic circles, and good follow-up studies appeared shortly afterward in many obscure scholarly journals. These include papers by Raymond Fogelson (1965), Thomas Hay (1971), Charles Bishop (1975), Richard Preston (1980), and Robert Brightman (1988); however, after this scholarly flurry, interest seems to have died out among professionals.
Perhaps inspired by the enthusiasm of these field anthropologists, a number of Canadian creative writers, folklorists, and poets, both Indian and white, have subsequently compiled anthologies of Windigo lore and fiction (e.g., Colombo 1982; Marano 1982; Norman 1982). Much of this nonprofessional writing is anecdotal, without scholarly commentary or theoretical underpinnings, and all the more useful for the lack of bias or jargon.
IMAGERY AND REPRESENTATION
What does this North American specter actually look like? What shape, what physiognomy? Native lore is very diverse and endlessly imaginative on this score. Descriptions in the literature are fascinating and often horrific. Indian informants first emphasize its colossal size. So monstrously big is the Windigo, they say, that the mind cannot fathom or comprehend it: “your heart stops in its presence and you forget where your heart is” (Norman 1982: 4). But it gets worse. Already terrifying, the monster is said by informants to be full of rage, its nasty disposition making it all the more frightful. It is also said to be possessed of superhuman muscular strength, which it uses to strike down people (Parker 1960: 604).
So much for proportions and disposition. What about morphology? There are of course many regional variations in descriptions, limited only by imagination, but the best descriptions are noted by Teicher (1960: 2–3) and by folklorists Seymour Parker (1960), John Colombo (1982), and Howard Norman (1982). All rely directly on native sources, including firsthand interviews. In addition there are numerous sketches and paintings done by native artists giving their versions of the Windigo.
The Windigo is a particularly weird and abhorrent creature. We have already spoken of his (most are male) dimensions. Other grotesque deformations abound. Within his gigantic head is a cavernous mouth made more awful by the lack of lips. This odd feature requires its own explanation. Most Indian informants say that the monster is so hungry for flesh that he has eaten off his own lips! From this gruesome maw there protrude rows of jagged teeth through which the monster issues his fiery breath, making a sinister hissing that rivals windstorms in volume and is audible for miles around. It is in fact the whistling whirlwind of his foul breath that sends the Indians scurrying to safety, for the racket means a Windigo is on the prowl.
Anatomically, the creature is said to be human-like, at least in having two arms and legs, but is deformed and misshapen. His huge eyes are grotesque and repellant: they are yellow and protuberant like those of an owl, but they are bigger and roll in blood. The monster’s hands are massive and paw-like, ending in terrible claws twelve inches or more in length. His feet are a yard long and have only one toe, capped by a long dagger-like nail. The creature uses these blade-like appendages to slash and tear his victims.
The Windigo eating beavers, by native artist Norval Morrisseau. Courtesy Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta.
The monster is also deafeningly noisy. The Indians say that when the Windigo opens his cavernous maw to let out one of his signature roars, the sound is tremendous, ear-splitting, “more reverberating than thunder” (Teicher 1960: 3). When he indulges in one of his cannibalistic rampages, the monster issues long-drawn-out growls and whistles that cause people to panic and flee in mortal terror. The earth shakes, the wind howls, and the animals flee. The Windigo literally tears up the earth with his mighty bellows.
Twin images of the Windigo, by Ojibwa artist Carl Ray. The upper figure shows the monster leaping in mid-flight, the lower clothed in ice. Courtesy Estate of Carl Ray and James R. Stevens.
In proportion to his size and fury, the physical strength of the Windigo is described as prodigious. His destructive powers are superhuman and irresistible. The Ojibwa say the strength of his body is “omnipotent and fierce” (Parker 1960: 605). He can disembowel a man or a big animal with one swipe of his paw—a frequent enough occurrence, as the Indians will testify. He can devour tall men, grizzly bears, and horses in one gulp. Striding through the forest, full of windy fury and bloodlust, he lashes about with his mighty arms, ripping up tree trunks, snapping branches, and tearing up the surface of the earth, leaving a path of destruction as wide as that of a tornado. He will sometimes rip up a particularly big tree and use it as a club or a walking-stick.
The Windigo is virtually indestructible. Rain or snow cannot slow him; water cannot stop him. He can glide over the surface of lakes and rivers without sinking, and like a porpoise or a seal he can swim underneath the surface for hours without coming up for air. His speed and strength in water are so great that when swimming he raises titanic waves on either side, swamping and overturning canoes miles away.
As far as diet goes, the Windigo, as is customary for monsters, displays some disgusting proclivities. For everyday food, he likes mushrooms, rotten wood, moss, lichen, and other forest effluvia. Like an animal, he eats everything raw. He literally eats the forest from the ground up. These vegetable things, however, are just hors d’oeuvres. By far his favorite dish is meat, especially tasty human flesh. He can never get enough.
What about internal organs? The signature feature of the Windigo is his heart, which is made of ice. Impervious to all human weaponry, a Windigo can be dispatched by a human only by melting its frozen heart (Norman 1982: 73), although some Indians say cutting off the head may do the trick, if you can manage this feat! Some Indians extend this frosty metaphor to the entire body of the monster. For example, sometimes the Ojibwa depict the Windigo as a skeleton-like demon made entirely of ice. Other Indians say all the internal organs are made of frost.
The Windigo can be either male or female, although, as we have seen, most are represented as basically male and have traits the Indians associate with masculinity, such as anger, physical aggression, and large size. However, more important than its indeterminate gender is its isolation from human society, its separateness, alienness, remoteness. Males and females do not five together as couples. If two Windigos of opposite sex should happen to meet, the Indians believe, a violent battle will erupt and survivor eats the loser. Alternatively, the defeated Windigo is thrown into the fire and the body is reduced to ashes, all except for the icy heart, which is taken out of the fire and pounded to bits which are then thrown back into the fire to be melted (Teicher 1960: 2).
Clearly, like most monsters, Windigos are asocial beings, misanthropic, solitary, referred to as “hermit Windigos.” For the Cree and Ojibwa the monster is “the outsider,” “He-Who-Lives-Alone,” or simply Upayokawitigo, “the Hermit” (Norman 1982: 5).
How old is the Windigo? Indians say that the spirit of the monster is a timeless eminence that has “always” been among them like the skies and the waters. It origins, they say, lie in the distant, unknown, and legendary past. The Cree, for example, say that the Windigo arose when the first ancestral humans emerged from the primal slime in mythical times and were given shape by the gods and instructed to take over the land from wild beasts. Many Indians associate the monster with “the olden days,” meaning the time not only before Western acculturation, but also before Indian culture itself took shape, that is, prehistoric times. The creature was present at the beginning of the earth and, like the gods and spirits, is eternal.
Aside from a taste for murder, cannibalism, and general mayhem, Windigos are held responsible for virtually all misfortunes and disasters that can befall humans. For example, if a hunter freezes to death in the forest, or a family starves, or a young person goes on a vision quest and disappears, the invariable explanation is an attack by a Windigo (Teicher 1960: 3). If a person sinks into a depression or becomes senile or demented, the Indians will say that a Windigo caused this to happen. The same blanket causality is ascribed to natural disasters like cold spells, lack of game, famines, and indeed all nature’s inimical forces—Indians surmise that a Windigo did it. As we have seen, the Windigo is also held responsible for natural calamities like wind storms, frosts, and tornadoes.
“GOING WINDIGO”
To understand the Windigo in the Indian imagination, one must recognize that these horrific creatures are not separable from people. In fact, men (and women) can easily “turn Windigo,” as the natives say, and become cannibals themselves—miniature replicas of the giant ogre. Indeed, according to Hallowell (1974: 257–59), the term means three things, all conceptually interchangeable.
Windigo means first, the mythical monster itself. Second, it means an ordinary human being who has become possessed by the spirit of the monster and who, without changing shape in any discernible manner except supposedly to grow bigger, coarser, and hideously ugly, becomes prone to cannibal urges, going so far as to kill and eat his fellows. And third, in a more abstract sense, the word means the cannibal urge itself, as an acted-out crime or a fantasy.
When a human goes Windigo, certain observable changes happen. First, the affected person’s size increases and he or she becomes coarsened and wild-looking, with a maniacal staring look. Then, the victim’s heart freezes over and becomes ice, as they say; next he or she becomes possessed with demonic physical powers and animal cunning. And of course the victim is struck by irresistible cannibal urges, upon which he or she must act or die.
“Going Windigo” therefore creates a menace to all those around, including the victim’s own family, so he or she must be wrestled to the ground and held down by ten strong men until pacified. The person must be bound up tightly and held over an open fire so that the smoke drives away the evil spirit. If this treatment fails, the human-turned-Windigo must be killed at once to prevent him or her from harming others, and especially, from actually committing an act of cannibalism, which is the most disgusting thing in the world to the Indians. As we shall see, numerous killings of human Windigos have actually been reported since the phenomenon was first documented over three hundred years ago (some of these killings are authenticated in tribal or police records, others probably are apocryphal).
So close is the connection between monster and human, so routine the metamorphosis, that most Indian legends depict the Windigo’s origin as deriving not from an act by gods or spirits, or from nature, but from an Indian who was once transformed by magic or by gnawing hunger. In addition to being transformed by bewitchment or hunger, someone can “go Windigo” by committing some heinous infraction against group values, something considered the moral equivalent of cannibalism. In the Indian lexicon, such heinous acts would include the unprovoked killing of a fellow Indian, the breaking of a serious religious taboo, or the act of incest. If the transgression is bad enough, for example, if a person commits a premeditated murder within the tribe, or if one has a “cannibalistic thought,” however momentary or fleeting, one may suffer the dreaded transformation (Carpenter 1980: 102).
The Cree Indians, for example, say that most Windigos were once just ordinary people who went bad. Many Indians believe that all Windigos, including the giant monster-spirit itself, are in fact doomed human souls having left their human bodies. That is, they say that the human and monster forms are metaphoric counterparts: physically and morally interchangeable, part and parcel of the same evil that permeates the world (see Norman 1982: 5).
Folklorist Robert Preston quotes one old Indian who repeated a myth describing the Windigo as being human in origin: “At one time in his life he was a human being born of human beings and perhaps quite normal for some years of his life” (1980: 122). A Cree elder told Howard Norman that “Windigos were all once persons. But once they begin to go Windigo, it gets worse and worse” (Norman 1982: 5). In one of those imaginative twists we have seen before, man is once again ancestral to monster, at least metaphorically speaking. Which is man, which is monster? There is a thin line between them. Indeed, there are many ways a human can go Windigo without even committing a transgression or having a single bad impulse. For example, without any conscious intent, an innocent person may be visited by the Windigo spirit in a dream or a vision. This involuntary experience is enough to transform one into a monster, for the Indians say that simply to dream of the Windigo is to become one upon wakening.
This may also happen during the vision quest that many adult males undertake. Like other Algonquian speakers, the young males among the Ojibwa and Cree must obtain a spirit helper through a dream-vision that is brought on by fasting and other sacrifices. This helping spirit is needed for a youth to pass into the status the Indians consider true manhood. If during his manhood quest the Indian youth is accosted by a Windigo in a vision, and if he does not reject the Windigo spirit forcefully enough, he then becomes a Windigo himself. He is then doomed to become a cannibal and suffer a terrible fate.
Man-into-monster metamorphoses, however, are most likely brought on by famine and starvation in the cold winter months when hunting is bad. If a person suffers severe hunger for a long enough period (meaning long enough to dull the moral sense and blur the mental capacities), then he or she may turn into a Windigo. This happens most often in the winter when food is scarce, leading to a native association of Windigo, food deprivation, and cold. This association probably explains the ice metaphor: the Windigo embodies the lethal cold and gnawing hunger that lead to cannibalism.
Going Windigo can happen in less ominous circumstances. A person who inadvertently eats a product of another human being—for example, mistakenly consuming someone’s hair clippings or excretions in normal food— will then develop a taste for human flesh and will probably go Windigo. Teicher recounts the story of an entire family turning into Windigos and preying on each other because of hunger-induced hallucinations of this sort (1960: 23). Again, this happens most often in winter. Preston cites one story that highlights the routine aspect of man-into-monster transformations. It is worth repeating.
He [the unlucky hunter] goes out every day, trying to feed his starving family and himself. Their plight becomes desperate. A time comes when one of the party begins to look longingly though slyly at another. This person is tempted to kill, so as to eat. It becomes an obsession with him or her. At last—chance offering, it happens. The person kills and soon he (or she) is eating. He has passed from being a human to beastliness. The rest of the family realizes that they have a Wetikoo to cope with. All they have heard about such monsters comes into their minds. A great dread overwhelms them, the marrow in their-bones seems to melt and they have no power to move or fight. (1980: 123)
A person may also turn into a Windigo through hostile enemy means. For example, this may happen to a man who is the object of sorcery by a member of an enemy tribe. Although going Windigo most often occurs to male hunters and their families after an unsuccessful hunt in winter, both sexes can be affected. Teicher Is study of seventy well-documented cases from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s notes that forty involved men turning into Windigos; twenty-nine involved women, and in one case no sex was given (1960: 108).
Another Canadian folklorist who was piqued by the Windigo, Howard Norman, interviewed hundreds of Cree Indians in the early 1980s. He reports that all the one hundred and fifty older Cree people he interviewed agreed that a human could go Windigo under the slightest provocation. When that happens, a person’s sense-perceptions of other humans are greatly altered by the inevitable cannibalistic urges; the affected person may then perceive another person, even a friend or relative, as food, as a “fat ptarmigan” for instance. Norman gives one concrete example that came to his attention: “Isaac Greys, a Cree elder,” he writes, told how a man going Windigo “‘began asking his own brother how it was in a nearby beaver lodge’ ... in the lodge! Because he saw his brother as a fat beaver and he wanted to eat him!” (1982: 37; italics in original).
WINDIGO PSYCHOSIS
The notion that people can turn into Windigos has given rise to the psychiatric concept of a culture-bound disorder known as “Windigo psychosis,” whose symptoms are anorexia, vomiting, insomnia, and melancholic withdrawal into oneself. The Indians feel that the sufferer can be cured during the initial stages; but the more advanced stages, which are characterized by perceptual distortions causing the victim to see other persons as edible animals and by outbursts of violent antisocial behavior, are considered beyond native therapy. When the violent stage is reached, the afflicted person has to be killed by the community in self defense. The corpse is usually chopped to pieces and burned to melt the icy heart and forestall resurrection (Fogelson 1974: 4).
Another observer, Richard Preston (1980: 120), however, adds that although all Windigos are vicious killers, not all are necessarily cannibals. Some Windigos murder their victims without eating them. “Witigo,” he writes, is not necessarily a cannibal; he may be only “a murderer of his fellows, urged on by dreams, melancholy, and brooding.” Virtually all other observers except Norman (1982: 3), who cites the above passage without commentary, however, agree that Windigo and cannibalism are virtually synonymous. For Teicher (1960: 2–4) and Robert Brightman (1988: 337), the Windigo is “an anthropophagous monster” by definition. Empirical confirmation of the cannibal connection comes from Teicher’s systematic study. He was able to reconstruct from written records and from Indian memories an exact profile of seventy authenticated cases of Windigo madness. Forty-four of these cases involved actual cases of cannibalism, and in the remaining twenty-six cases cannibalism was a fended-off threat; that is, the victim actually attempted to kill and eat another human being. Frequently, close relatives are attacked and cannibalized:
Of the forty-four cases where cannibalism occurred, members of the immediate family were eaten in thirty-six cases. In one case, “a friend” was eaten and in seven cases, no information was given as to the identity of the person eaten, although it was evident that cannibalism had actually occurred. (1960: 109)
In the twenty-six cases in which cannibalism did not occur, the Windigo psychotic was actually killed before he could act out his cravings, proving the force of the Windigo belief in the culture of the community.
A WINDIGO STORY
One brief Indian tale will demonstrate the hold of Windigo on the native consciousness. Condensed somewhat, “The Windigo at Berens River” (Colombo 1982: 195–97), goes as follows. Once upon a time, in the late nineteenth century, a small camp of Indians were living near a post by the Berens River. One winter day a hunter from this isolated camp, driven by hunger, went out trapping with his wife and children. A few days after their departure, the remaining people in the camp heard the trapper screaming and howling most piteously in the forest. They knew from their own premonitions that the man must have been possessed by the Windigo and had become a cannibal ogre himself. Some courageous people went to the man’s trap line to investigate, and there they discovered the half-devoured corpses of the trapper’s wife and three children. Everyone in the camp was immediately overcome by panic, running frantically hither and thither in terror. For they knew it would only be a short time before the homicidal man-beast would be at their throats. Something must be done before the monster was upon them.
The panicked Indians hurriedly convened a council and unanimously elected the most powerful brave in camp, a youth named Rotten Log, to defend them. A true culture hero, Rotten Log said, “I am the person without fear of man or beast,” and he readied himself for the epic struggle to come. One other brave man agreed to help.
Later, in the forest, the two young braves built a fire and huddled nervously around the flames waiting. At last they saw the terrible creature striding boldly through the trees toward them. As the huge monster approached, whirlwinds started, the trees were torn up, and all the forest animals yelped and howled in terror. The two Indians were horrified to see that the demon had chewed off its own lips: its awesome teeth stood out like daggers. The face of thing was hideous to behold, and its teeth, arms, claws, and fingers were caked with blood and gore. Undeterred, the two heroes stood their ground.
Before they could react, the loathsome monster jumped over the fire and pounced on Rotten Log, trying to bite through his throat. However, the hero was prepared. He called on his helper-spirit and guardian, the great Misqua-day-sih, to save him, and the spirit responded: he instantly gave Rotten Log supernatural powers to equal those of the monster. After a titanic battle, Rotten Log and his helper emerged victorious and tied up the Windigo and put its enormous, grotesquely malformed body on a dog sled. When they returned to the camp with their hog-tied captive at last, the other people, jubilant over their salvation, made a gigantic bonfire to melt the giant’s ice heart. After being forced to vomit up the half-digested bodies of its previous victims, the Windigo was burned and finally died when his heart defrosted. The happy people then threw the massive burned corpse onto the flames in order to ensure the final destruction of its restless spirit. The terrible Windigo was finally dead.
ORIGIN AND TENACITY OF BELIEF
Perhaps because it seemed so close to Western models of monstrosity, with its eerie echoes of celluloid monsters like The Predator and the alien in Ridley Scott movies, the Windigo originally seemed to be of borrowed origin to many anthropologists, possibly a product of white contact. But this turned out not to be so. Accounts by Jesuit missionaries and others as far back as the early eighteenth century prove conclusively that the Indians had such beliefs before any serious acculturation took place. The Windigo belief is undoubtedly native, pre-contact, and unquestionably pre-Hollywood.
The earliest notice comes from a Jesuit’s report in the mid-1600s concerning the Montagnais-Naskapi tribe of northern Quebec. At that time the Indians were being converted by French Jesuit missionaries. In the winter of 1634–35, Father Paul Le Jeune, a French Jesuit, wrote that an Indian man in the Three Rivers area had gone insane and had tried to eat his brother, wife, and sister-in-law, who had considered killing him out of concern for their safety. This man was described as being half-mad with cannibalistic rage, promiscuously homicidal, and physically uncontrollable—all typical symptoms of Windigo possession (Bishop 1975: 239). While the Frenchman does not mention the word Windigo or any of its variants, it is clear that he is reporting on a case of classical Windigo psychosis.
Another serious outbreak occurred in 1661, which was likened by the same priest to a plague of “veritable werewolves” (Colombo 1982: 7). Father Le Jeune also mentions in the same report that other Indians had reported to him that a number of entire families had been eaten by “Devils” (his word), and that the Montagnais, fearing for their lives, avoided hunting in the neighborhood of Cape de Tourmente and Tadoussac because cannibalistic monsters had appeared in these places (241). Although the good father again does not report the Indian name used by his informants, it is clear this is a case of Windigo hysteria.
Reports abound in the eighteenth century, and the Algonquian word Windigo, or variants, appears in another Frenchman’s report by the 1720s (Colombo 1982: 8). In 1748, English explorer Henry Ellis (1721–1806), writing about native Ojibwa beliefs, reported that the Indians he knew were suffering from fear of a supernatural monster: “They likewise acknowledge another Being, whom they call Wiitikka, whom they represent as the Instrument of Mischief and Evil; and of whom they are very much afraid; but however we know of no Methods made use by them to appease him” (cited in Colombo 1982: 9). Colombo and others report historical cases through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (these stories continue with very much the same plots, narratives, and dramatis personae up to the 1970s). In careful analyses of such historical data, most recent anthropologists have therefore concluded the concept of the Windigo as completely aboriginal and not a product of white contact or of some kind of post-contact cultural or environmental change or social trauma (Bishop 1975; Brightman 1988).
Whatever its origin, belief in the terrible Windigo still lingers today among the Indians, many of whom still believe. And it still exerts enough power over them to have significant behavioral consequences. For example, there were numerous outbreaks of mass Windigo hysteria right up until the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, a revelatory incident occurred in 1950, as reported by Canadian journalist Beth Paterson in a local newspaper. In the early part of that year, over a thousand Saulteaux people living at Island Lake, 326 miles northeast of Winnipeg, were completely disrupted—“thrown into a state of total panic and trepidation” in the journalist’s words—for an entire summer by the rumor that a Windigo was on the prowl in the vicinity. The Indians huddled together for protection and avoided going into the forests, which hobbled local economic activities for weeks (cited in Teicher 1960: 4).
Writing just a few years earlier about the Montagnais-Naskapi in Quebec, a local geographer reported that “numerous terrifying spirits still range the forests. . . . Windigo, the giant cannibal . . . who fives on human flesh ... no one among them would dare to doubt the existence of the cannibal giant Windigo.” About 100 miles northwest of Sioux Lookout in Northwestern Ontario is a small lake called Packwash Lake. Teicher reports that the contemporary Ojibwa believe that a Windigo resides there and claims at least one life each year. “Their fear is so intense that the area is studiously avoided” (Teicher 1960: 4). Colombo (1982), Marano (1982), and Norman (1982) report on sightings and panics up to the 1980s. Even today many older Indians pay homage to the Windigo, hurrying indoors when the wind howls and whispering ominously about apparitions and shadows in the forests.
So intense is the fear among the local Indians that some whites living with them have come to appreciate and even echo the Indian beliefs—even some sophisticated people. Indeed, the Windigo, as melodrama and metaphor for terror, has worked its way into much mainstream Canadian fiction to a surprising degree. In a paper entitled “Canadian Monsters” (1977), author and critic Margaret Atwood considers this issue, writing that much of the outdoorsy fiction written in Canada features supernatural monsters that represent the huge untamed northern wilderness and the psychological “Other,” both of which are greater and less than human nature. She adds that there is a very strong tradition of what she calls “semi-human heroes” fighting monsters in modern Canadian fiction, and that much of this literature follows the inspiration of Indian folklore, in particular using and interpolating Windigo traditions (Atwood 1977: 109). Fascinating anthologies by Norman (1982) and Colombo (1982) provide numerous examples of modern stories and anecdotes on the subject. Even some American poets have paid their respect to the Windigo, sometimes in a humorous vein, as in the ditty by Ogden Nash cited above. Having introduced the bellowing beast, the poem continues with macabre glee:
The Wendigo!
The Wendigo!
I saw it just a friend ago!
Last night it lurked in Canada;
Tonight, on your veranda!
As you are lolling hammockwise
It contemplates you stomachwise.
You loll,
It contemplates,
It lollops.
The rest is merely gulps and gollops.
* * *
What is most important to keep in mind about this aboriginal Indian myth is how closely it conforms to European models, despite the dubiousness of transatlantic diffusion. The Windigo is gigantic, ancient, mute, unstoppable, ancestral to man, ferocious, supra-human in the sense of being simultaneously godlike and demonic, a repository of all our worst fears, an incarnation of pure malevolence as conceived by the human mind, as well as reflecting a certain degree of superstitious awe and veneration. Most saliently, this Canadian beast is a voracious, insatiable cannibal, as are monsters everywhere. Windigo drips with blood and gore.
In appearance Windigo closely resembles Grendel and the other Western demons we have met, for it, too, it a giant creature, bizarrely hybrid in anatomy, half human and half beast, uniting the worst features of both and having the feral cunning that so terrifies the human mind which relies upon superior intelligence as protection from a savage nature. Also like Grendel, the Windigo lives on the margins of society, is at home in water, and has a vague, nightmarish mobility, suddenly emerging from dark mists. Its behavior is similar to Grendel’s, and whatever obvious differences may exist between the two may be ascribed to local conditions, such as the Windigo’s association with freezing cold, winter darkness, and famine. The Windigo calls forth local heroes who resemble Beowulf in their superhuman powers, and the monster likewise gives moral meaning to man’s struggles with nature and with his own appetites.
Although the Windigo is perhaps the best known of the American monsters, it is only one among many terrible creatures and weird beings that haunt the native imagination. We now turn to other American apparitions, starting with the Windigo’s junior cousin, the Wechuge, a formidable creature in its own right.