Wendigo
[1] In some representations, the wendigo is described as a giant humanoid with a heart of ice, whose approach is signaled by a foul stench or sudden unseasonable chill.
[10] 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.
What lips it had were tattered and bloody ... Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.
This was the end of this Giant Windigo.In some traditions, humans overpowered by greed could turn into wendigos; the myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation.
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.
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.
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.
Windigo psychosis may well be the most perfect example of the construction of an Aboriginal mental disorder by the scholarly professions, and its persistence dramatically underscores how constructions of the Aboriginal by these professions have, like Frankenstein's monster, taken on a life of their own.The 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) classifies "Windigo" as a culture-specific disorder, describing it as "Rare, historic accounts of cannibalistic obsession...
Some controversial new studies question the syndrome's legitimacy, claiming cases were actually a product of hostile accusations invented to justify the victim's ostracism or execution.
"[34] Some metal, vitamin, and oligoelements deficiencies are linked to psychosis-like conditions, Wendigo could be a folk elaboration of some near-starvation mental disorders.
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.
Chippewa author Louise Erdrich's novel The Round House, 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 desecrate 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.
DeSanti points to the 1999 horror film Ravenous as an illustration of this argument equating "the cannibal monster" to "American colonialism and manifest destiny".
"[38] 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-aggrandizement.
Romantic scholar and documentarian Emily Zarka, also a professor at Arizona State University, observes that two commonalities among the indigenous cultures of Algonquian language family speakers are that they are situated in climes where harsh winters are frequent and may be accompanied by starvation.
[39][40] Joe Nazare wrote that Blackwood's "subtly-demonizing rhetoric transforms the Wendigo from a native myth into a descriptive template for the Indian savage.
"[41] Blackwood's work has influenced many of the subsequent portrayals in mainstream horror fiction,[41][42] such as August Derleth's "The Thing that Walked on the Wind" and "Ithaqua" (1933 and 1941),[40] which in turn inspired the character in Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary,[41] where it is a personification of evil, an ugly grinning creature with yellow-grey eyes, ears replaced by ram's horns, white vapor coming from its nostrils, and a pointed, decaying yellow tongue.
[41] In an early short story by Thomas Pynchon, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (first published in 1959), the plot centers around a character developing Wendigo syndrome and going on a killing spree.
Created by the writer Steve Englehart and artist Herb Trimpe, the monster is the result of a curse that afflicts those who commit acts of cannibalism.
[48][49] In the 2021 film The Inhuman (L'Inhumain) the arrival of a wendigo symbolizes inner turmoil after a character turns his back on his Indigenous heritage in the pursuit of material success.
