The Wendigo: Part II
If You Go Into the Northern Forests
If you missed last week, you may want to read Part I, where we give an introduction into the story of the Wendigo and the strange tale of Jack Fiddler.
Louis Bird1 speaks to me. His voice possesses my headphones, vibrates in my ears while I clean the house. Fold the laundry. Cook dinner for my family. He tells the story of the Windigo.
“Every time when people over hunted the area and people get too many, that’s when they over kill all the animals and then begin to suffer. And it happens every so often…every 65 years.”
-Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
These are the old stories he has gathered from his grandfather’s grandfather. From elders who tell the stories in Cree. He remembers the stories and passes them down in English, records them so the next generation can understand. He travels all around Canada and assists in the Our Voices project to gather and preserve the stories of his people, the Omushkego (Swampy Cree) people of Canada.
When he says that the people would begin to suffer every lifetime or so, he means that when the animals disappeared and the winters were long, the windigo would come. Some people who lived in the remote forests would remain normal, surviving in the way their people had for thousands of years. Others would become possessed by the spirit of the North. They would kill and feast on human flesh.
Was it just for survival? It was my first thought when I heard of the Wendigo. It comes in winter, when the people are hungry. If they’re starving, who knows what lengths they would go to. We see that time and time again in history. But the First Nations clans know the difference. Thomas Fiddler tells this story.
“It was a time when we had a coldest winter and no-one could hunt because the flu came around. Game was scarce. They had no nets for fishing, only hooks…There was a man and woman who had a child, a boy. They stayed near Narrows Lake when everyone left…Later they decided they would move south too…he died of starvation…The wife stayed at the camp…”
- James R. Stevens and Thomas Fiddler, Killing the Shamen (63)
That woman, Kichi Kakapetikwe, did not leave her husband’s body. She wrapped him in a blanket and kept a fire going. She drove a hole through the ice in the nearby lake and tried to fish, but never got enough food. Her baby survived with her, wrapped in rabbit skins. When she was found she was barely alive and nearly frozen.
A man found her, and took her and her child to Cliff Dweller Lake. When the people went back to get her husband, K’atchup’s body, they found meat missing from his hips. She had cut it out and smoked it over the fire to survive. That woman went on to live to a very old age. No one said she was a windigo.
“So it was the custom, the belief was that any person out of the ordinary who experienced a shortage of food for some period of time lost his mind. They go mentally sick…And when they regain their life, the don’t regain their mind. It has destroyed them already, the proper being. And they always have that craving to eat human flesh, even though there is plenty to eat and years after they survive…It’s just like being an alcoholic.
- Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
An Ancient Possession
A Wendigo is more than a person who cannibalizes. It is a spirit, a monster, that transforms a person. Gives them supernatural strength. Takes over their body and uses them to destroy. Turns their hearts to ice. In some ways, it is an indigenous tale of possession. We know this in itself is not a belief unique to the Algonquin people. Its varied stories and causes are found all over the world throughout all of history.
In the West, the most intriguing true stories from modern times are those few documented by the Catholic Church. But the Canadian indigenous peoples differentiate between wendigos and other malevolent spirits. They are not a generic demon that enters the body of a sick or starving person. A wendigo is a specific spirit from the north that stalks the camps of those weakened by lack of food, and enters wherever there is an opportunity.
Fasting was a spiritual tool used by the Indians to aid in dream journeys or to help shaman talk with animals in the forest. Indeed, fasting is a common spiritual practice used to alter consciousness. To attune a person to the world that lives alongside ours. But starvation lended itself to a darker spiritual opening in the Canadian forests. In this state, with the people hungry and physically weakened, the windigo would come. Many times, dreams would precede a possession.
“If a person had a dream in which the North spirit, or windigo, offered them food, and they failed to discern this being’s identity, they might be tricked into eating another human in their dream. After this, the victim would be doomed to have these cravings in their waking life.”
- Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, 21
George Nelson, a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader recorded his encounters with windigo cases in Saskatchewan in 1823. Not only did he detail indigenous beliefs and stories, but he witnessed some of the recorded accounts himself. In one of these retellings, he speaks of a man who described a dream where the North spirit came to him and offered him something to eat.
“He came to me in a dream and laid out dish after dish for me to eat. The first one, he told me it was duck. I went to put it in my mouth, but a stranger was sitting next to me, and he told me not to eat it. When I looked into the dish, I saw that the duck wing was actually a child’s arm.”2
Again and again, the man refused to eat the food, all of it being human flesh. The man believed that had he eaten anything offered in the dream, he would have become a cannibal destined for death.
Another man, Duncan Cameron, who worked for the North West Company as a trader in 1786, recorded the following in a book before leaving the Red River settlement in 1814. An Ojibwa woman had killed her husband because she believed he was going to murder and eat her and her children.
“Her suspicions were aroused by seeing him drink a large quantity of raw blood, quite warm out of the body of an animal which had just been killed and opened. He appeared, as she said, quite wild and distracted in his looks, and she became so much frightened that she immediately split his head in two with an axe, before he had time to become invulnerable.
She, moreover, said that it was high time to kill him as he often told her he dreamt he would become a ‘man eater’.”
Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, 100
It wasn’t only dreams that could lead to a person turning windigo. Starvation was a key element, but not the only one. The thing that seems to differentiate the stories of people cannibalizing for survival and the murderous spirit that possessed people in the far north, is the refusal of food even when it is made available again. The members of the Donner Party did not go on a killing rampage after eating the dead in the snowy Sierras. Yet those who turned wendigo did.
In a rare account of a fur trader turned windigo, John Long details in his memoir strange stories from the winter of 1779. His men were almost dead of starvation when a band of First Nations men arrived and saved them.
They offered food and provisions. After the men had eaten, the chief told them the story of Long’s colleague, Mr. Fulton. He had gone out with a trading party, and later divided the men into two groups, one of which went out to fish. They caught nothing, their hunting was fruitless. The hunger led to Charles Janvier’s transformation into a windigo.
“The bad spirit had entered the heart of Janvier,” the Indian chief told Mr. Fulton.
That spirit drove Janvier to seek a person to eat. He told his companions that he would kill the next Indian who came their way. When an Ojibwa man arrived with two otters and two rabbits, he gave them to the starving men.
“I don’t have anymore ammunition. I’m going to see Mr. Fulton to get more.”
Janvier accepted this, then asked the man to put a log on the fire. When he went to do it, Janvier killed him with an axe. He dismembered him and cooked his flesh. After, he forced the other men in the party to partake and eat with him. The others did so, only to vomit it up later. He would go on to kill another companion, recorded as St. Ange. He ate him, and forced Lewis Dusfrene to eat him as well.
The men finally started to catch fish, but despite the extra food, Janvier’s mind was not right ever again. Later, when they returned to camp and were questioned on St. Ange’s absence, Dusfrene conveyed to Mr. Fulton that Janvier had killed and eaten him.
Mr. Fulton then thought it was a proper time to interfere; and to cover him, if possible with confusion, asked “which was the best part of a man.” Janvier replied with ready insolence that those who had eaten human flesh could easily tell: but being repeatedly urged and at length thrown off his guard, he replied in great wrath “the feet.”
Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, 104
Before he was executed, Janvier said he would have eaten his own brother if he had the chance.
A Predator Among Us
Many of the most disturbing stories from the fur trade detail strange, lone Indians from other clans or families who wander into a wintery camp, stinking and starved to the bones. They are alone, and tell tales of family members left behind who starved to death. Yet the inhabitants of the camp feel a sense of dread when the person tells them the stories.
Alexander Henry the Elder details such a story from 1761.
“After being here a fortnight, we were joined by a body of Indians flying like ourselves from famine. Two days after there came a young Indian out of the woods alone and reporting that he had left the family to which he belonged behind in a starving condition and unable in their weakly and exhausted state to pursue their journey to the bay.
The appearance of this youth was frightful, and from his squalid figure there issued a stench which none of us could support. His arrival struck our camp with horror and uneasiness, and it was not long before the Indians came to me saying that they suspected he had been eating human flesh, and even that he had killed and devoured the family which he pretended to have left behind.
These charges, upon being questioned, he denied, but not without so much equivocation in his answers as to increase the presumption against him. In consequence the Indians determined on traveling a day’s journey in his track observing that they should be able to discover from his encampments whether he were guilty or not.
The next day they returned, bringing with them a human hand and a skull. The hand had been left roasting before a fire, while the intestines, taken out of the body from which it was cut, hung fresh on a neighboring tree. The youth being informed of these discoveries and further questioned, confessed to the crime for which he was accused. From the account he now proceeded to give, it appeared that the family had consisted of his uncle and aunt, their four children and himself.”
Through more interviews, he admitted that on direction from his uncle, his cousin and himself had killed and eaten him. They then killed the other members of the family before leaving to find more supplies and food.
“The Indians entertain an opinion that the man who has once made human flesh his food will never afterward be satisfied with any other.
It is probable that we saw things in some measure through the medium of our prejudices; but I confess that this distressing object appeared to verify the doctrine. He ate with relish nothing that was given him; but, indifferent to the food prepared, fixed his eyes continually on the children which were in the Indian lodge, and frequently exclaimed, ‘How fat they are!’
…his behavior was considered and not less naturally, as marked with the most alarming symptoms, and the Indians, apprehensive that he would prey upon their children, resolved on putting him to death. They did this the next day with the single stroke of an axe, aimed at his head from behind, and of the approach of which he had not the smallest intimation.
- Alexander Henry the Elder, Tales and Travels in Canada and the Indian Territories Between the Years 1760-1776
In letters to his father, George Nelson also detailed the strange story of an Indian woman who appeared at a trading post in Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan in the 1810’s. Her hair stuck out in every direction, her clothes were wild and her manner desperate.
Traders took her in and tried to give her food, but despite being ravenous, she only pretended to eat, instead shoving bits of food down the front of her dress. Her stench filled the entire post, and the traders were uneasy with her presence. They suspected she was a windigo.
When one of their dogs dragged a human shoulder blade from the trail, they were almost certain she had cannibalized someone. But being unable to prove that their suspicions, the traders directed her to a nearby Cree camp. As soon as she arrived, the Indians knew what was wrong. They tried to feed her marrow and animal fat, but she refused, instead embracing the children in the camp eagerly.
In the middle of the night, the woman left her animal skins, and crawled over to where the children were sleeping. One of the men awoke, and hearing her, buried a tomahawk in her skull. Despite the deadly blow, she turned and fought him. The letter states she may have even killed him, had his companions not rushed to help.
A Transformation Over Time
A person did not turn windigo all at once. Most of the stories speak of a process that takes place over days and weeks. Some involve dreams that become reality. Some wendigo transformations happen after a person cannibalizes for survival. Still others resemble sickness or delirium, but to the Indians, it was only a matter of time before the person turned. You had to kill a windigo before they became too strong. Once that happened, they were believed to be impenetrable.
“Another story I heard about Jack Fiddler was told to me by Adam Fiddler, his son. This man who lived in a tent was going to turn into a windigo. This man started to turn windigo; ice pressured, scraped, crunched inside this man’s body. People heard this happening. This man was taking real deep breaths. He was getting ready to scream and in the moment that he would scream, he would be windigo.”
- Stevens and Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 51
This belief was what drove Jack and Joseph Fiddler to kill fourteen supposed windigos. In their beliefs, deeply engrained through legend, passed down through the oral histories of their people, the windigo would destroy entire clans if given the chance. Sometimes, very rarely, they could be cured. But almost always, the only way to rid a person of the spirit was death.
The Destruction of a Wendigo
Louis Bird has his own stories told to him by the elders. The story of Anwe, the cannibal killer. There was, in Anwe’s day, an entire family of cannibals. They would eat fish, beaver, other animals. But the craving for human flesh never left them. They would kidnap people, hold them captive, kill and eat them when they had the craving.
Anwe was recruited to kill them and free the forests for the peaceful clans around them who were suffering and afraid to go into the forest. He tricked them into thinking he was starving and weak, then killed the clan, starting with the oldest of the men, then moving on to the younger men. Then the women. They had captives with them at the time, and when Anwe freed them, he recruited them to help dispose of the windigo bodies.
“Gather them up, cut them into pieces so that they can not come alive again. Then we will burn them.”
When Anwe burned those bodies, the hearts remained in the fire. They heaped more firewood atop the fire over and over again, until finally the hearts burned up. This is a common occurrence in the stories of the Wendigo. The body is burned, but the heart takes much longer to be consumed. It is frozen, turned to ice. It was common to look at the heart after a suspected windigo was killed to see if it was frozen in the middle.
“Although his body was quite warm when I opened him, his heart was already full of ice within him…”
Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, 101
And,
“So that’s why they burn them, so they burned them because they are no more human, they’re extraordinarily bad people, bad things. So they have to burn them, so they usually believe…they have ice, instead of a heart of flesh. That’s why they tell a story. They said all that remains is a heart like ice. It’s hard to burn…they used to cut it with an axe and actually burn it right out. And any blood that there has to be cleansed. Everything they have. If there is any clothing, it has to be burned. Everything right down to the ash. And in that area where they do it, they avoid that section…for a long time, until it’s healed over everything, and then it’s fine.”
Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
Modern Tribal Stories
At the end of Jack Fiddler’s life in the early 1900’s, the Indians, the missionaries, and many fur traders believed in and feared the windigo. Those who did not still encountered unbelievable tales from the clansmen they respected. A few of them, especially those who lived and traveled in the boreal forests during the winter, had unexplainable encounters of their own that led them to question whether there was a mental illness that could cause cannibalism and mania, or whether there truly was a spirit or creature.
To hear Louis Bird tell the stories, they sound like moral teachings. Ethical warnings to never kill another human, even in the most dire of circumstances. To never kill more animals than you need, because that greed will lead to a time of famine. And in that famine, the windigo will come and destroy you.
“So this story about the cannibals period, it’s a terrible thing for the Omushkego people and for other tribes who experience that. It’s nothing a person likes to talk about, but it is very interesting. It’s just like watching a horror movie today. You know we have horror movies that…makes you scared when you look at the movie, but these stories are the same way.”
Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
There is another type of windigo that Louis Bird speaks about.
“Now we have talked about cannibal wihtiko3 and there are people who have been said to become a wihtiko because of abuse over a person.
Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
He goes on to explain that when a person is abused by their family, an elder in their community, or their children, they can transform. When they have been mistreated for too long, the person “just walks away,” and is no longer human. Instead, they become more spirit than human.
“They can be a terrifying person, can kill, can exist without any food, and do almost anything they want. And sometimes they want revenge, would just punish people who have mistreated them. And that’s a certain kind of windigo. That is a very terrible one too. They don’t actually have to eat the person.”
Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
When I heard that, my mind wandered to the countless people in our prisons. Abused as children, and violent criminals as adults. But he goes on to say that not only do these people become dangerous. They disintegrate and have no more physical being.
…they try to find his track, yes they find a track first time…The person’s track just simply doesn’t show anymore. It just disappears, and that’s what they say, when you go extremely bad, you are no longer a human…That’s a mystery that our people have never been able to explain.”
Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
The reason that people turn windigo is greed. The overhunting of the land leads to starvation. Overpopulation causes famine, and the cannibals rise up in those days. But there are also people who are so abused that they step outside of their bodies, and something else steps in.
“And it still happens today, not right now, but it happened within my lifetime.”
Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
In 1957, a woman who lived in Manitoba between Gilliam and Churchill lived with her family, her mother and step-father. She fell in love with a young man and wanted to marry him. But she had no father. Her mother abused her terribly, and her stepfather wanted a relationship with her. This made her mother very jealous.
Her heart was broken when her mother forbid her from marrying the boy she loved. She was so angry, she opened her mouth and started to scream. Her hair stood on end and she started to run to the riverbank near her home.
An old woman, a neighbor, tried to touch her, knowing that if she didn’t the girl would be lost forever. But the girl was too fast. She ran into the river, diving over a cliff. Neighbors ran out to see what happened, but they couldn’t see anything in the icy waters below. She was gone.
The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) came in and they couldn’t find nothing, and they bring in the expert divers, with the diving gear to go under the water to see, and they never found the body. Never. Nobody ever found the body.”
Louis Bird, 0002-Our-Voices-Cannibalism, 2003.
An Explanation
Not all of these stories are easily explained away as mere superstition. To say they are all fake is to discount dozens of accounts, maybe hundreds. We will believe these same fur traders about parts of their memoirs and letters. Write it down in our history books. Take business lessons from the rise and fall of the fur trade. Study conservation and try to learn from the mistakes made.
But when those same traders utter the word “windigo” our eyes roll. We might take the moral lessons provided by the teachings. Don’t kill, don’t abuse, don’t abuse the animals and the earth around you. We go to bed at night with full bellies, never considering the woods and their mysteries, casting off the rest as superstition.
What dangers would we be exposed to if we lived the way the First Nations people did? What dreams would come at night, their temptations and illusions luring us into a death sentence? What strange encounter would lay in wait, stalk the camp as we sat by a fire with nothing but boiled water for food? What then?
Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, 98
The Cree spelling for windigo
I was researching Wendigos for my post and your posts came up! I'm glad they did. You went so deep into the possession and Jack Riddler story. I'm going to reference yours posts in my post on Monday. I am so fascinated by this part of the Wendigo history as well.
That was intense. I’ve never heard of this before. Gave me goosebumps.