Wendigo Redux

Monsters change

The wendigo is an Algonkian creature, a man who in desperation became a cautionary tale against greed and consumption. The story varies in the telling; Anishnaabe stories are often variable with different endings or detail. Some stories are unique to particular communities; others are common throughout Anishnaabe and Algonkian peoples. I am aware of several stories that, with variations, are held in common with the Cree and Haudenosaunee peoples as well. These stories serve to teach us how to live a good life: that central Anishnaabe teaching of mino bimaadiziwin, and the variability allows for the meeting of different needs by emphasizing different things.

According to Anishnaabe storyteller and historian Basil Johnson, the monster Although not universal, there is a teaching that if you say the creature’s name you will call it’s attention, and so having established who I mean, I will also refer to it as the creature or monster to avoid saying it too often. used to be a man who lived with his family beside a lake, and life was good. He and his family had enough to eat, and enough to live on, and they were satisfied. Things changed, as they do, and life became harder. There were fewer animals, and fish were harder to catch. The man and his family began to starve. The man prayed, nothing changed. He eventually sought help from a sorcerer, who gave him a potion that he was to drink in the morning.

It worked—unfortunately. The first time he took the potion he went to a village and after he made war cries, the people turned into beavers. The man killed and ate them, the entire village. He didn’t bring any home to his family and didn’t stop to think about what he was eating, about these beavers who had been people. He got bigger, and hungrier. In some tellings, this it’s insatiable hunger will drive him chew off his own lips and eat them if there is nothing else to eat.

The monster was eventually killed, and his victims restored to life. But he lives on as spirit to enslave anyone who became too preoccupied with sleep, or work, or anything that interfered with living in balance, transforming them into a monster. The insatiable hunger is the antithesis of the good life: of mino bimaadiziwin

Capitalism and its conjoined twin, colonialism, have often been equated with this Algonkian creature by Anishnaabe writers. The insatiable hunger, the transformation of people into consumables, and the complete lack of balance that no amount of mindfulness will restore: all these traits are characteristic of colonialism and the monster.

Earlier this week I published an essay about the wendigo and how reading two books, Wrist by Nathan Adler and Red Clouds by Jen Storm, a short story in the graphic anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold, changed my understanding of the wendigo. Everything I’ve read and heard about this creature has placed it in the realm of metaphor, like most other monsters I suppose. Even the demon possessions in the Bible are swept into this by most Christians, seen as something from back before we understood mental illness. As if our current circumstance suggests real understanding. Reading these two books forced me to go back and make some changes to this part of the book.

Chapter two, tentatively titled Colonization: Here there be monsters, begins with a description of the wendigo and uses it as a metaphor, it’s a story from which we can learn things but that’s all it is. Or that’s what I thought. Even Basil Johnson, whose version I use, seems to feel this way because that is how the story is presented but I don’t want to put that fully on him. It’s presented in a book and I’ll get more into why what goes into the book and what’s in my head aren’t always consistent. But after reading these books, one a work of fiction and the other based on the true story of a windigo hunter who was arrested in 1907, I had to go back and make changes. Real people believed themselves to be windigos. Real people believed they needed to cure or kill windigos. It was like finding out that the TV show Supernatural is actually a documentary.

You can read that essay here, my purpose in this essay is to think about why I make some changes and not others. Why I made this particular change in the way that I did.

These are the changes:

Capitalism and its conjoined twin, colonialism, have often been equated with the wendigo. The insatiable hunger, the transformation of people into consumables, and the complete lack of balance that no amount of mindfulness will restore are all traits that are characteristic of a way of living that emerged in Europe which has its own traditions of hungry monsters: vampires and werewolves whose hunger drives them to transform and consume their victims. Monsters that we did not have the medicines to cure or knowledge to kill. But perhaps we recognized them, and perhaps they too learned to live here and made their own agreements with the monsters they found roaming this place.

For the Anishinaabe people the wendigo was not just a warning and a caution, it was also real. People believed that they had become infected or possessed by a wendigo, this was a torment for them and for their communities. The stories of those who became wendigos relate their pain and despair as they realized what they had become and in this too it has lessons for us in the world that we live in. We can work against the harms of capitalism and colonialism, but we cannot fully extricate ourselves from them. And as we become increasingly aware of the harms being done, and our connection to those harms, we can fall into despair and hopelessness. I think it is ok to sit with those feelings for a little while, but not too long.

Then later in the conclusion I add the phrase “and other hungers” in this paragraph:

It is hard not to see that the invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast and the floodwaters are rising. Wendigos and other hungers stalk our lands in three-piece suits, and stand behind podiums, while each side argues over the merits of electing their particular monster.

This change was important because after reading Wrist and Red Clouds it struck me that the wendigo is a uniquely Anishinaabe or Algonquin monster. And we did not infect the Europeans, our hungers did not transform them into colonial monsters. They had their own hungers who stalked their continent and who, as portrayed by Neil Gaiman in American Gods, came over with the people. Maybe came over as people. I read American Gods and watched the series, so I’m not sure why this didn’t occur to me sooner. We made our own mistakes certainly, at times we chose avarice over community and many of us align with power for a lot of complicated reasons. But we did not create this and connecting the wendigo with colonialism suggests that we did.

There’s other places in the book where I took out similar things. At one point I talk about charter groups, the first people to move into an area who set the norms, and I talk about the Europeans as a charter group. My thinking was that they were the first group of settlers and that they set the norms for other settlers, which is true, but it sounded like they were the first people and that is wrong. It felt like too much to explain just to make a point that I’d already made elsewhere so I took it out.

What I did not get into was the experiences of those who believed in windigos, both those who believed themselves to be transformed or those who killed them because I didn’t want it to become a National Geographic kind of voyeurism into a Primitive Culture that Really Believes Those Things. And maybe that’s why Basil Johnson didn’t write about it that way, not everything is for everyone and some knowledge needs to be oral. Oral knowledge is transferred through relationship and doled out according to that relationship. Once something is in print I lose control over it. I don’t know how you are interpreting this, what you are bringing to it, or what you are taking away from it. You can find me on Twitter or leave a comment and we can talk about it, but the bird has flown. So I left it largely as metaphor, altered somewhat but still a story from which we can learn things rather than something that is possibly, alarmingly, real.

Anything written is a snapshot, a picture of a life in motion. There’s things that I want to change that I haven’t because at some point the thing has to be done. The bird has to fly. I need to move on to other topics and not get stuck in this moment. It was gratifying to read Tyson Yunkaporta talking about this in the introduction to his book Sand Talk. He calls his book a translation of a fragment of a shadow, frozen in time. Not truth or absolute authority. It’s not “like this.” It’s “this is now I see it right now.” Which is entirely subjective. He talks about Indigenous knowledge being valued only when it is fossilized, and print is a way of fossilizing knowledge. So I make some changes and leave others and hope that people understand that there are things in here that are part of my own process of learning out loud and I may yet cringe to see some of it in a year or two. I toyed with taking the wendigo imagery out altogether because of the problems I mentioned earlier. But my editor loves the image, and it isn’t wrong. It’s just an incomplete way of thinking about it.

The final thing is why I decided to keep using the name. There is a convention or teaching that we not name it, like Beetlejuice if you say the name too many times you risk calling it’s attention. I’m not sure, metaphor or otherwise, that there is any risk left in that. However you define real the monsters are here and so that was both an editorial and personal choice. The books I mention use the name regularly throughout the manuscripts. There’s businesses and even a reserve bearing the name although I’m not sure I want to eat at Windigo Catering. That ship has really and truly sailed.

So thankyou for bearing with me, and I am sorry that it took so long to get another essay out to you. I am aiming to send out weekly reflections quotes and reflections if not coherent essays. Please leave comments about what more you would like to see, what questions you have about the manuscript that I can address in future essays, and your own reflections. After all, we’re heading into final edits in a few weeks and your thoughts may provoke some necessary changes ;)

Miigwech!

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Baamaapii.