WENDIGO

The Wendigo! The Wendigo! Its eyes are ice and indigo! reads one poem about this ferocious creature. The verses go on to capture the horrid visage and acts of the Algonquin legend. But mostly it's impressive they found so many ways to rhyme wendigo.

Borrowed from Cree, Ojibwa and Algonquin languages, what we refer to as the wendigo is typically characterized as a bipedal human-like being with an evil spirt, said to possess people, drive them to insatiable hunger, and sometimes as far as murder or cannibalism. Kind of like Slenderman if he was on some weird Instagram diet and also one thousand percent more insane, the wendigo is an imposing and emaciated monster with a deer-like skull and long, curling antlers. But what's scariest isn't the creature itself. Like many post-apocalyptic or horror stories, we learn that the most terrifying creature all along was man. Didn't see that coming, did ya?

The wendigo stories popped up among northerly Indigenous tribes that had to deal with harsh winters, cold and famine. Makes sense considering these factors are the most common associated with people getting a little hangry. It's easy to draw parallels between wendigo accounts and stories of people being driven to madness. The wendigo is often depicted as a creature unto itself, but also as a primal, malevolent form of man. The wendigo is said to possess individuals with overwhelming hunger, a thirst for more they cannot quench. In some ways, it's similar to the Greek myth of Tantalus, sentenced to eternal thirst while standing in water from which he could not drink. Only Tantalus just kind of stood there like a dumbass, while wendigos went on, eating people and transforming more into wendigos themselves. Wendigos really had the grindset mindset, to put it in terms you'll understand.

It's here we find the fable element of the lore. After all, Algonquins didn't just come up with this horrifying beast for no reason. Wendigos were used as a cautionary tale, a symbol of greed, and a lesson to share, take everything in moderation, and basically don't be a dick or else, well, you are what you eat.

Speaking of, the wendigo is perhaps one of the only folklore creatures that has an actual psychological diagnosis named for it. Although a case has never been truly confirmed and cosigned, "wendigo psychosis" has been studied and told about since the 1600s. Mostly all these tales center around an individual starving and going insane or resorting to cannibalism and going insane. The majority of these diagnoses were linked to Indigenous tribes and therefore lessened in frequency upon contact with more modern medicine. Some speculate they were results of vitamin deficiency or other factors relating to enduring traumatic conditions. But mostly, they were a way for people to verbalize and explain what they saw happening. And like any folklore, these stories simply took on a life of their own.

For this reason, some Indigenous writers and scholars have criticized the wendigo being used as the antagonist or villain in modern-day media. Books and movies have scapegoated the wendigo as a monster to be thwarted, which in some respects, kind of removes context from the creature's original purpose. It also codes stories with a "white savior" mentality that this creature of Indigenous origin is something to be killed and done away with.

As with any folklore, it's important to understand its origins, how the story is told, and who's telling it. It's okay for versions to sprout and diverge like antlers—but even better if you know what they're connected to. And if you can rhyme with indigo, even better.

See you out there.