The Wendigo

The wendigo is a creature that may be familiar to some readers, as it has experienced a recent surge of popularity in pop culture- however, it has roots dating far further back originating in the myths of the Algonquian tribes of Canada. The wendigo is a creature of great cruelty, a spirit of the winter, the cold, and gnawing hunger. Those possessed by the spirit of a wendigo become monstrous and partake in the selfishness to fill the void within them either through endless greed or gluttonous cannibalism.

One becomes a wendigo by preforming an action deemed taboo and bringing down a curse- most frequently, this is partaking in cannibalism borne from starvation. Hunger has always been a key feature of the wendigo, the creature known for killing and eating others to sate the emptiness- but the wendigo is never full. This characteristic of forever unfulfilled desires and destructive greed is essential to the wendigo; the horrors of this monster transcend legend and have a place in the greed that came with colonialism and the further ravages of Manifest Destiny.

With the rise in popularity of the wendigo myth comes a fair amount of misunderstanding, largely stripping the creature of it's original context both culturally and aesthetically. A description of the wendigo offered by an Ojibwe scholar describes a much different creature than the antlered beast of the internet:

" The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. 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 "

The deer-headed animalistic monster is a modern, non-native invention, whereas the original was a distinctly human beast- and one that could exist- if not in the form of a nightmarish creature, but in the greed of man.

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Monsterum's Video

The Misrepresentation of the Wendigo