Wendigo or Windigo Witiku or wihtiikiw is Cree for a person who goes insane and turns cannibal. It may also reflect the myth of what will happen to you if you dare to transgress proper nutritional behaviour and eat human flesh. Then you will turn into the legendary cannibal night monster, the windigo. The word is related to the Cree verb wihtikowiw ‘he eats greedily.’ But which came first? The verb or the cannibal noun? Those more versed in Cree must answer that one. Many northern Algonkian-speaking peoples believed in it. The wendigo can possess any male, especially during a fever or an attack of madness. Often it invades the human heart as a lump of ice. A wendigo on the loose in a dark forest may be glimpsed vomiting ice. The victim’s face may turn black with frostbite. He may be able to fly through winter nights in search of new prey, his own species. Any man who goes on a solo hunt and never returns may have fallen victim to a wendigo. Eating human flesh, even in an emergency, may be a sign that a starving hunter as “turned wendigo.” Such a wretch will be shunned by all members of his group, and probably driven from the camp. For once the wendigo has tasted human flesh, he will yearn to feed again. Associated with the horrors enumerated in the last paragraph are further mythic embellishments such as giantism, wherein the hunter who has turned wendigo man-feeds so greedily that, in a paroxysm of anthropophagous hypertrophy, he swells up into a Titanic, slavering monster.
If possession by wendigo is confirmed, a shaman must be summoned to exorcize the horror, a tricky procedure, for it entails trying to melt the lump of ice that has frozen the victim’s human heart. It is recorded that boiling fat has been poured down a human throat. A raving victim has been plunged into boiling water. One of Canada’s astute ethnologists, Dr. Diamond Jenness, in The Ojibwa Indians of Parry Island, published by the National Museum of Canada (#78, Ottawa, 1935) offered this insight into the psychological origins of the wendigo myth: “The most dreaded of all supernatural beings that are evil or hostile to man is the Windigo, a personification of the starvation and craving for flesh that so often befell the Ojibwa in the last months of the winter.” A brooding body of water ringed by desolate shores in Algonquin Park bears the name Windigo Lake. A lone canoeist, paddling in the damp air of a moon-stained night, may even think the lake picturesque. Why, on a cloudy twilight, from the middle of Windigo Lake, one can scarcely see anything on shore that is shuffling hungrily toward the water’s edge to feed.
Lest we forget: European lore too abounds with cannibal stories. Consider the people-munching realm of European nursery rhymes like “Hansel and Gretel” or “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Remember the giant’s jingle? Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum. Throughout European history reports of cannibalism are rife. Check out this old colored engraving. Why, there are so many chopped-up corpses it resembles a convention of Canadian Liberals trying to elect a leader!
Cannibalism in Muscovy and Lithuania 1571 At the top the German in a black-letter text called Fraktur reads: Ein erschröckenliche doch warhaftige grausame Hungers Nott und pestilenzische Plag so im Landt Reissen und Littaw furgangan (sic) im 1571 Jahr. Translation: A frightful but nevertheless truthful, cruel emergency of hunger and pestilential trouble which happened in such a way in the country of Reissen (Russia?) and Lithuania in the year 1571.
Those who know American history will recall that tragic 19th-century tale of the westering Donner Party winter-trapped in the Pacific mountains and reduced to cannibalism. I have always thought of opening a restaurant called — The Donner Party Deli sole proprietor Bill Casselman Our Promise: Good Home Cookin' Our Specialty: Mom’s Leg of Dad
May I sign you up for the opening-night banquet? Happy Halloween!
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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