The Beginning
“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.”
-Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway
Jack Fiddler was one of three sons born to the legendary leader of the Sucker clan, Porcupine Standing Sideways. He was a powerful shaman, a leader of his people, and a force against windigos and dark magic.
“Another ability was vital for a strong leader in the clans. Few men had it: the strength and fortitude to ward off death and attack from Windigo. To the clans, Windigo was satanic and universally feared in the forest. For Windigo was a human possessed with cannibalism and a voice so evil that its sound paralyzed human beings.”
- From Thomas Fiddler in Killing the Shamen (50)
Most shamans used their ability to help people. They fasted, waited on spirits of the forest to communicate where to hunt. They made medicine from herbs to cure ailments. They gave thanks to Manitou1 for all they had. They were spiritual leaders who took care of their people.
But not everyone with power used it for good. There were those who became manipulative. They would trick women. They would use it against other clans, starve out their hunters, using magic to blind them to the whereabouts of animals. In Porcupine’s time there was a powerful shaman who lived near him with his family.
This family, the people of White Pine Narrows, were cannibals. They practiced dark magic. Created half-men spirits that would attack the Sucker clan. Porcupine fought them using powers from the creatures in the forest. He dreamt dreams, had visions, and performed ceremonies that kept their dark powers at bay. After years of attacks, he killed the leader of White Pine Narrows.
It was morning. Porcupine’s wife woke up early just as the winter sun was rising. Snow covered the ground. Wood they had gathered in the months before lay stacked beneath piles of birch bark. She made her way quietly, crunching through snow in soft leather shoes.
The men were still in the lodge. She thought about them as she piled sticks in her arms and headed towards the log structure. Smoke poured out of the top. She entered to find them worse off than they had been the day before, scattered on the ground. Laying with their eyes open, but not seeing. They looked like a room of the dying.
She made her way to the fire, stepped around their bodies as she walked. When she bent down and unburdened herself, she heard Porcupine call to her. His voice came out weak, a croak. She went to him, propped his head up onto her lap, bent down to hear what he had to say.
“A windigo is coming.”2
She moved his hair away from his face.
“How do you know?”
Porcupine’s eyes were staring past her. She knew he was seeing something from the other world.
“We can hear them.”
She looked around at the other men. Some were on their sides, ears pressed to the ground. She listened, tried to hear the same.
“What does it sound like?”
His eyes met hers then.
“Like thunder.”
“They used to say that when a windigo was after some victims, people who had power would be drawn into a state when the windigo was nearby.”
-Stevens and Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 12
She stood then and looked outside, pulling back the door so she could see. Flames rose in the distance. Porcupine met her eyes.
“It’s coming,” was all that left his mouth.
The women and children gathered their things and fled. Porcupine’s wife grabbed her knife and axe, went in to where the men were preparing, and placed the axe in his hands before shoving the knife into his clothing.
“When he met this windigo, all of a sudden, the wind started blowing. Clouds formed and trees bent to the ground like blades of grass blowing in the wind. Sounds like shots being fired were heard.”
-Stevens and Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 12
The wind calmed. The flames disappeared. The people waited, and soon, Porcupine appeared in the distance. When he reached the circle of women and children, they asked him what the sounds of shots were.
“It was my whip.”
Each time he whipped the windigo, it sounded like a gun shot ringing out.
“This windigo’s hair stood straight up on its head and rabbit fur grew out of its back. Each time Porcupine whipped the windigo, it rubbed its head with its hands to see if its head was still on its body. This windigo was the man from White Pine Narrows Lake that Porcupine had warned, but because he never listened…he was killed right there.”
-Stevens and Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 12
The remains were carried away, and for a long time after, the people said that thundering noises could be heard in the place where the windigo was killed. Drops of its blood had fallen to the ground.
Wendigo Stories
Between the years of 1810 and 1820, Jack Fiddler, Peter Flett and Joseph Fiddler were born, three sons of the shamen leader, Porcupine Standing Sideways. They grow up with the spiritual teachings of their father. Learn to listen to the creatures of the forest. Have visions and dream dreams to lead them to good hunting and fishing. They also learn to fight shamens and evil spirits with magic.
Shamens do not often battle. For the most part they are too busy surviving, finding food for their people, seeking visions for the hunt. In times of plenty, when food is available, life goes on in its usual cycle. In all this teaching, Jack Fiddler arises as a particularly powerful shamen. Attuned to the forests and a dreamer of dreams. He is known not just among his people, but among the Hudsons Bay Company posts.
Throughout the 1880’s, the Sucker clansmen are seen at the Island Lake post in and out of season. Porcupine is too old to travel. His sons, Jack Fiddler, Joseph Fiddler and Peter Flett, make the trips for him. The other clans of Sandy Lake come as well to trade furs for goods.
They don’t know it yet, as they bring the furs of rabbits and lynx, but 1890 will bring a devastating winter. It will wipe the already lean forests clear of animals. Harsh weather stays for four years, and Porcupine, rumored to be 120 years old, dies in 1891. With no animals, the people are weakened. Alone in the forests, they are stalked by the cannibal. The windigo is roaming.
“All the hunters, many now with English names, now will face times of trial. The winter sweeps the forests from 1890-94, leaving the lands barren and freezing in whiteness. During the long snow days, evil other-than-humans appear. Creatures disappear and the windigo, the cannibal, often roams. There are stories of the windigo circulating.”
- James R. Stevens and Thomas Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 32
John Rae of the Sturgeon clan sat around a fire with his family. They had eaten, and watched the flames quietly. Some laid on their side. Some sat on birch logs. Edward Rae, John’s boy, looked at his father. The firelight flickered in his eyes, and Edward knew that he was going to tell a story.
“There was a man who turned Windigo,” he started.
They turned to listen to him. The night was closing in around them. The air cool with the end of summer. A soft wind blew the wet of a nearby river. Ruffled their hair. Dampened their skin.
“A trapper used to live in the woods when the winter was gone with his wife and his children. But when the winter came, he would always return to the main camp. The people would wait for him.
“But one winter, the man doesn’t come. A friend of his in the main camp, an old man named John Doggy, worries. He tells his wife, ‘This isn’t like him. He wouldn’t stay out in winter away from the main camp. Not after dark. Something is wrong.’
“Now the man had a trap line set up. And John Doggy knew where it was. He decided to go down to the HBC and recruit help from a man he knew there. They gathered chains, strong rope and two strong tarps, then left with a dog team to find the trapper.
“They knew the trapper would be coming back to Beren’s River. They made a fire, and sat to watch for him. They put spruce boughs on both sides and sat. Waiting, waiting. Then they saw him coming out of the bush carrying a pail in his hand.”
The fire crackles, and the children scoot closer to their mothers and siblings.
“He made his way towards them, and all the while they had chains and rope ready. When the trapper got to the fire, John Doggy invited him to sit across from them. When he did, John Doggy jumped over the fire and grabbed the man. His partner gave him the rope and they tied him up by his hands and his feet.”
“After they tied him up, the trapper started growling and he grew larger and larger. There was a noise coming from the trapper that sounded like pieces of ice grinding together. Then they used the chains to tie him up…After they finished tying him up, they looked in the pail the trapper was carrying; it contained two small feet of his child. It was an extra meal for the journey back to the main camp.”
- Stevens and Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 33
“They took that man to a white man’s lodge, where they gave him alcohol to calm him. They put him on a train and took him to a mental hospital. They gave him shots and firewater to control him. In the mental hospital, the Windigo started to ask for his wife and children.”
“He would stay awake for three hours but he would be crying all the time…He was sure he killed his wife and children. He had treatment, but eventually he just died. John Doggy stayed there until the man died, then he went home.”
-Stevens and Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 34
“John Doggy is the one that told me this story. He was an old man when I last saw him. He said that when that Windigo got big, he would slap him, and tell him that he would kill him if he didn’t quit growing.”
The Arrest of Jack Fiddler
“Windigo is a dangerous and threatening reality in the clan folk’s comprehension of their boreal forest. For those raised on the outside of the forest the windigo fact was difficult to accept. William “Big Bill” Campbell, the HBC postmaster at Island Lake became upset when one of the young hunters who traded with him was shot as windigo…”
-Stevens and Fiddler, Killing the Shamen, 35
This is the same Big Bill whose conversation with Sergeant Daisy Smith leads to the investigation of Jack and Robert Fiddler. Constable O’Neill and Constable Cashman rode dog sleds through the Canadian wilderness in a land previously untouched by Canadian law in search of the accused murderers.
The two are guided by James Kirkness, a man half-Indian and half-Scottish, who was rejected by the white people at Norway House as a bastard. An old shamen took him in and taught him to see the ways of the forest. He was adopted later in his childhood by a Methodist Missionary, who taught him to read and write as well as the fundamentals of Christianity.
James leads them to his Hudson’s Bay Company outpost on the south side of Narrows Lake. They don’t arrive until May 13th. It is warm when they start out, the winter seemingly gone under a strong south wind. Five days later however, the winter returns, and a harsh storm moves in, preventing travel.
On May 20th, O’Neill records that Adam and Robert Fiddler, the sons of the Chief of the Sucker tribe, Jack Fiddler, enter the outpost. They have made their way through iced over waterways to trade the few furs they collected. They sit with the soldiers, and agree to a council meeting with the red coats, never before seen in this part of the country.
“When the rivers open, the council can be held. Until then we can not travel.”
“June 1st. Bring the rest of your band. Make sure Jack and Joseph Fiddler are here.”
The day arrives for the council to convene, but the Sucker people never come. The rivers are still frozen, impassable. The north wind continues to blow, and the bitter cold hangs on longer than any living Indian at the time could remember.
On June 7th, 1907, the soldiers meet with 14 men of the Crane family at Kirkness’ store. The Cranes are tightly knit with the Sucker people. They help each other in times of need, intermarry, and hunt together. O’Neill and Cashman are eager to talk with them. The next day, a council is held, and the two soldiers tell the Crane people about the laws of Canada. They then broach the question that has driven them this far into the wilds.
“Have any deaths taken place among your people?”
Norman Rae, a hunter, speaks up. “Last fall, a windigo was destroyed.”
“A windigo?”
“A woman. She turned windigo.”
“Who killed her?”
“Jack and Joseph Fiddler.”
The two soldiers have all the evidence they need. The next day, Robert Fiddler and eight of his men arrive at the store. They have somehow made it through the near frozen waterways. That night, Cashman and O’Neill devise a plan. Knowing that the rumors are true and that Jack and Joseph Fiddler are the suspects, they decide to go to Caribou Lake and arrest the men themselves.
They tell no one of their intention, and Robert Fiddler, the son of Jack Fiddler, arrives and leads them to Windy Lake starting three days later. But the lake won’t permit passage. It is frozen over, later in the season than it has been before or since. It is as if the men are being held at bay. The north wind keeping Jack Fiddler safe for another day.
Jack Fiddler and his men are building canoes out of birch bark on June 13th when the soldiers arrive with Robert Fiddler. When they reach the camp at noon, they are greeted with joy and surprise. The women and children want to shake their hands. The red coats that they have only known through rumors are in their territory for the first time. Celebration ensues, and the soldiers accept the hospitality while they wait for Jack and Joseph Fiddler to return from hunting.
The two men arrive back at camp on June 15th, and the soldiers request a meeting. In a tent with Jack, who has seen at least seventy winters, the men explain the nature of the crime committed.
“Called Jack Fiddler and Joseph Fiddler into our tent and explained to them the crime they had committed, and that they must come with us to Norway House. Warned them not to speak to anyone about the murder, not even to us, until questioned at Norway House.”
- From the journal of Constable O’Neill
Jack responded incredulously.
“What has your Great Father to do with the Sucker people? This is the country of the Anishinapek who do as they please in their own hunting grounds.”
Jack went on to ask what would stop his men from killing the soldiers, right then and there. Cashman explained that many white men would come in their place.
In the end, Jack and Joseph Fiddler, along with two eye witnesses, Angus Rae and Norman Rae, agree to go to Norway House with the two soldiers. They hold a council before leaving, informing the eighteen Sucker men present that Jack and his brother will face charges. The men weep openly and ask that they go easy on Jack on account of his age. Before leaving the soldiers also inform them that under Canadian law, they can only have one wife.
“You have seen with your own eyes,” Robert Fiddler replied, “that there are almost twice as many women among our people as there are men. If a man is allowed only one wife, what are the other women to do for husbands?”
- James R. Stevens and Thomas Fiddler, Killing the Shamen
Canadian law had come to the Sucker clan.
At Norway House
The four men arrive in the custody of Cashman and O’Neill. A preliminary hearing is held. An Inspector Pelletier writes his findings to Commissioner Bowen Perry. He tells them the men will have to be tried.
“These people are not civilized in the least, in fact many of their Tribe have never seen a white man…”
James Kirkness interprets for the Indians and the white men. Angus Rae, one of the two witnesses to the woman’s death, answers the questions truthfully.
“I saw the woman…in my wigwam; she had very little life left in her; she could not speak; she yelled with pain. I saw Jack Fiddler hold the woman down when she was out of her mind.”
When the hearing is done, Pelletier reads out the warrants. Jack and Joseph Fiddler are both charged with murder. The newspaper headlines go wild. Devil Worship. Murderous Savages. Pagans.
But the people who know the clans, who lived and worked with them tell a different story. They don’t believe in windigos, but they believe that the Indians kill the sick and insane for the following reason:
When an unfortunate member of the band is stricken as above, the hunter dare not leave to procure food…Under such circumstances what is to be done? Under a surgeon’s knife, if a patient dies that is the end of it. With these Indians, they have but one way of disposing of the matter. Again be it remembered for the good of the many, they are hundreds of miles away from doctors and asylums.”
-J.K. McDonald, “Manitoba Free Press”, 1898
Despite the witnesses who attest to these men’s ignorance of the law and belief that they were killing, not to murder, but to cure, Jack and Joseph Fiddler are held in jail. Jack takes it particularly hard. He is old, and begins to struggle with fainting spells. Sergeant Daisy Smith writes to his commanding officer on September 7th after the prisoners had been held for 12 weeks, asking that they be returned to their families.
The case is out of the control of those closest to the forests. Only a trial will determine the fate of Jack and Joseph Fiddler. Until Jack decides to take the matter into his own hands.
At seven in the morning on September 30th, Constable Arthur Wilkins wakes Jack, Joseph, and the two Raes to eat breakfast. He walks them down to the river bank just below the Royal North West Mounted Police headquarters at Norway House, and tells them to make a campfire for their meal.
While they work, Constable Wilkins watches from a large rock. They start a fire and get water from the nearby river to boil. Jack Fiddler, however, is not among them. He walked over fifty yards away, somehow unseen by the police officer. Once he was in the forest, he slipped off the sash that he wore around his waist, and kept on walking.
Ten minutes later, Constable Wilkins realizes that Jack Fiddler was missing. He alerts another officer and a search begins. By three-thirty that afternoon, a man from Norway House finds his body. A half-mile away from the barracks.
His body is laid out on a rock. His sash is tied around his neck, the other end, tied between two trees. Blood trickles out of his right ear. His eyes and mouth are closed, his hands at his side. He died by strangulation, escaping the judgment of Canadian law by his own hands.
The Trial
Joseph Fiddler did go to trial. The newspaper headlines had garnered an angry response throughout Western Canada. The authorities could not simply let him go without an uproar. On October 7, 1907, at nine in the morning, his trial begins.
Commissioner Aylesworth Bowen Perry of the royal North West Mounted Police is the judge. James Kirkness is the interpreter. A jury of six men are called to decide Joseph Fiddler’s fate. The trial begins with Constable Cashman’s testimony.
“Are there any white people who live among the Sucker band?”
“No.”
“No white people to instruct them in the law?”
“No. The closest white people live 120 miles away at Island Lake by winter trails, and 200 miles in summer by river travel.”
“How many live there?”
“William Campbell, the trader, and Mr. McKersie, a Methodist school teacher.”
The second witness is Norman Rae of the Crane clan. His wife is one of Joseph Fiddler’s daughters.
“What is the name of the woman who was killed?”
“Wahsakapeequay.”
“And who was she to him?”
“She was his daughter in law, the wife of his son Thomas.”
“What happened to the woman?”
“I was at the Sucker camp near James Kirkness’ HBC outpost on Narrows Lake. It was when the berries were ripe. Joseph and Thomas arrived with her, lifted her out of the canoe, and carried her on two poles up to the longhouse. She was very sick and would not be quiet. Some of the women were holding her to the ground to keep her under control. In the night she was moved away from everyone else and placed behind a clump of willows.”
The prosecutor, McKerchar, asks his set of questions.
“Did you see her, where she had been taken to?”
“I went over during the night and saw where she was taken to.”
“Was she still delirious?”
“Yes.”
“Did she have to be held down when you saw her there?”
“When I went there, nobody held her down, and the prisoner, Joseph, had a string — with the other man, the ogema3, Jack Fiddler. The string was in their hands and the woman was lying there."
Norman Rae would go on to testify that Jack and Joseph Fiddler placed cotton under the woman’s head and around her neck. They tied the string into a noose, and strangled her. He testified that he buried her body as was customary. When asked if he knew the white man’s law, he said he did not. When asked if he was taught to distinguish between right and wrong, he said he was not.
A third witness, Angus Rae, would testify after lunch. He was a young hunter in the Sucker family, another witness to the killing of Wasakapeequay. The prosecutor asks him to describe what he saw when she was killed.
“Was the woman lying still while they were putting the cotton and cord around her neck?”
“No, she was not lying quiet.”
“What was she doing?”
“She was moving her head. She was swinging her hands.
“Did she move her hands to prevent the cotton from being put on her neck?”
“She did not try to do anything like that.”
“Did she attempt to do anything to prevent it, or did she say anything?”
“No.”
“Did she make any noise?”
“She made the same noise as before.”
“Do you know why the woman was put to death?”
”My wife told me that people were saying that the woman was going to turn into a cannibal. The people in the wigwam were saying this.”
“Was it before or after the death that your wife told you this?”
“Two days after the death.”
McKerchar’s questioning then centers around Angus Rae’s knowledge of the white man and his laws.
“Did you ever hear anything said about the white man’s laws?”
“The only thing we ever heard about the white man was that he sent the Indians off to hunt furs.”
He inquires about windigo killings.
“What does the Sucker Band, to which you belong, do to anyone who is sick and cannot be cured?”
“One time I went over to the other camp visiting and I saw a man killed. One time, I saw a man killed named David. After they killed him they burned the body.”
“What tribe did this?”
“The same tribe.”
“What members of the Sucker tribe committed the killing in that case?”
“The prisoner, Joseph was there and three other men: James Meekis, Joseph Meekis, and Elias Rae, my brother.”
“Was the ogema there?”
“He was not there.”
“Who was put to death at that time?”
“David Meekis.”
Angus goes on to describe that David Meekis was sick and delirious. He was making big noises when he breathed.
“Do you know of any other cases of sick people being put to death besides these two?”
“I saw another man fixed the same way long ago.”
“How old were you when this took place.”
“I was very small at the time.”
“In what tribe was it?”
“In the Cane tribe.”
“Who was put to death at that time?”
“I did not see anyone put to death, but the body was burned when I saw it. I knew of it because I was told it was killing.”
“What was the name of the murdered man.”
“Ashkamekeseecowiniew. Peter Flett.”
That was how Porcupine’s son Peter had died years before. Put to death as a windigo. His body burned to prevent him from coming back to life.
“Did you ever hear the ogema say that anyone who died out of his mind turned into a cannibal.”
“Yes, that is what the ogema says.”
“Did you hear anyone else say that?”
“Yes, I have heard men talking the same way.”
“What men?”
“All the men talk the same way, among them my brother, John Rae.”
“Did you ever hear the prisoner, Joseph, say that?”
“Yes. I heard the prisoner say that more than once.”
“What would be the likely result if she turned into a cannibal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would anything happen to the band if she became a cannibal?”
“Yes.”
“What would likely happen?”
“She would kill people.”
Angus Rae would testify to multiple windigo killings among the Sucker clan from the past fifteen years. When he was finished, the jury sat silent and the last witness was called. His name was Reverend Edward Paupanakiss, a Norway House Cree. He worked as an Indian missionary for the Methodist church.
He knows the Sucker clan and Jack Fiddler in particular. He testifies that he has preached religion to them, and told them what was right and wrong according to the Bible.
“The old ogema, Jack, with whom I had a long talk at Island Lake, stated that they believed their dreams.”
“What other beliefs did he express to you?”
“That that was their religion; their dreams are their religion.”
“Did he speak to you about delirious people turning into cannibals if they abide in their out of mind state?”
“I don’t believe that he ever told me anything about it. I remember it from a very long time ago.”
“Where did you acquire that knowledge, from that band or from your general knowledge.”
“From when I was a boy I heard our own people; from our own people in our band; not from the members of the Sucker Tribe.”
When the prosecutor is finished, he addresses the jury, and asks them to find Joseph Fiddler guilty of murder. He asks them to look at the law ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and disallow pagan Indian beliefs as justification for killing. The jury gives the verdict of guilty, but asks for mercy on account of their superstition and ignorance of the law. The judge, Commissioner Perry, passes the sentence on Joseph Fiddler: death by hanging.
“May God Almighty have mercy on your soul.”
Two weeks later he would reverse that opinion, and Joseph Fiddler would be given a life sentence instead. No cases were ever brought against Angus Rae, John Rae, and the Meekis brothers, who were named as the killers of other windigos in the clan.
For the next two years, petitions went up to the highest Canadian Courts requesting that Joseph Fiddler be pardoned and released. He is sick and not doing well in prison. In the end the efforts work, and he is set free. The pardon comes three days after Joseph Fiddler died.
All three of Porcupine’s sons, leaders and shamens among the clans of Sandy Lake, die in tragic circumstances by the year 1909. The Sucker clan will sign a treaty with the Canadian government. They take the land called Sandy Lake, and in 1985, Jack Fiddler’s grandson Thomas will go on to publish Killing the Shamen with James R. Stevens, an academic interested in the case.
This is the story of the last clan to exist in the old ways in the boreal forests. The confrontation of western law and beliefs built on dreams and forest magic. The Indians believed that what they were doing was for the betterment of the clan. The white men who tried them believed they were pagans who needed the strong arm of the law to set them straight.
The trial is written into history as one of the most unusual cases at the turn of the century. But it is not the only case involving windigo. To finish off this series, I will cover the mysterious case of Swift Runner, a Cree Indian tried for the murder and cannibalization of his family in 1879.
The omnipresent spiritual and fundamental life force among Algonquian groups.
The narrated part of this post are not literal quotes. They are adaptations based on the stories told in Killing the Shamen.
Ogema, derived from the Anishinaabemowin word ogimaa meaning "chief"