At the Font of the Marvelous: Exploring Oral Narrative and Mythic Imagery of the Iroquois and Their Neighbors

5 The Story of Windigo

69 5 The Story of Windigo as an anthropology student during the 1960s, I was taught that windigos were mythical cannibal giants known to Algonquian speakers (Cree, Ojibwa-Chippewa, various Algonquin bands, Montagnais-Naskapi) from Saskatchewan to Quebec. Embodying cold and the far north, these beings were said to be reflections of their boreal forest setting. Algonquian people who believed in windigos, I also learned, were subject to a mental disorder called “windigo psychosis” in which the sufferer craved human flesh as food and believed he or she was becoming a windigo giant. This was caused partly by the prospect of starvation, an ever-present possibility for people living in small groups and dependent on hunting success over the course of long winters. That only these people suffered from the illness—and not their neighbors living in similar subarctic conditions—was because Algonquians held distinctive beliefs and values disposing them to think that way. While undergraduates were taking in this sort of thing, their teachers were beginning to wonder about it to judge by an upsurge in windigo research at that time. From the 1970s through early 1980s, the topic became something of an academic boom industry devoted to reexamining the windigo disorder from a variety of perspectives. Those favoring psychological explanation included Raymond Fogelson (1965), who offered a typology of supposedly distinct forms of windigo illness—each a behavioral syndrome diagrammed with boxes and arrows characteristic of systems analysis. Thomas Hay (1971) proposed that the psychosis existed in the absence of cultural institutions that, elsewhere, channel or displace cannibalistic urges. Anthony Paredes (1972) argued the disorder was best understood through study of an individual’s dreams and life history. 70 | At the Font of the Marvelous Others pursued a more materialist tack. A nutritional cause—seasonal vitamin deficiency—was debated (Rohrl 1970; Brown 1971). An environmental cause—increasing frequency of starvation due to post-European game depletion—was examined (Bishop 1975; Waisberg 1975; J. Smith 1976). The comparative framework was enlarged when Robin Ridington (1976) documented the existence of erratic behavior linked to belief in a cannibalistic monster among non-Algonquian people. Fogelson (1980) demonstrated that belief in a cannibal monster was far more widespread than the distribution of Algonquian speakers. And, there seemed to be increasing interest in oral narratives about windigos (McGee 1972). Assuming that cannibalism was a metaphor for a group’s recruitment policies, D. H. Turner (1977) interpreted a western Cree story to be a parable of social structure. Two researchers argued that a story about a cannibal giant defined what was culturally and ethically human (McGee 1975; Morrison 1979). Curiously, both interpreted the same story, a narrative from the Miqmaq of New Brunswick—far beyond the land of windigo psychosis as traditionally charted and in a place cannibal giants were not called windigos. Then, seemingly discouraged, the inquiry turned negative. According to Richard Preston (1978, 1980), meager data on the subject had been overwhelmed by interpretive schemes more indicative of anthropological than Algonquian thinking. Lou Marano (1982) claimed the subject itself was nonexistent. Windigo psychosis was simply the Algonquians’ rationalization for killing marginal people under stressful conditions. Credulous anthropologists had bought the lie and, from it, spun their own fabrication, placing the onus on the victim, not the executioner. There it seemed to end although, several years later, Jennifer Brown and Robert Brightman (1988) made available important new historical evidence. Further, Brightman (1988) demonstrated that windigo illness did indeed exist as a culturally specific disorder. Regina Flannery, who had spanned the anthropology of windigoism from its inception in the 1930s through the interpretive malaise of the 1980s, said much the same thing. At the turn of the twentieth century, native people certainly had a well-developed sense of the “windigo complex”—that is, belief in windigo beings of both human and nonhuman form coupled with ideas and stories The Story of Windigo | 71 about people “going windigo” (Flannery et al. 1981). Even with the reality of a windigo disorder apparently reaffirmed (and rehabilitated?), however, the subject was played out. It ceased to be a frontline intellectual pursuit featured in peer-reviewed publications.1 Elegiac in tone, much of this literature conveys regret that windigo is a thing of the past. Acts of windigo cannibalism and execution, most agreed, had ceased by the early twentieth century. Such behavior was strongly discouraged by increasing Christian presence and the imposition...