I read a dissertation on wendigo sickness written by someone married into a Cree family that spent a lot of time living in the bush. His take, which was very interesting, was that the idea of the wendigo was a way to talk about killing someone who was ill when the group was in a starvation situation. Sick people still had to eat, but couldn't help get food, and also had to be tended to by someone else who then couldn't look for food.
The northern fur trade created a bunch of changes in how people lived in the north, in particular it incentived more people to stay further north in the winter. Starvation became more frequent, and so did the wendigo killings. If I remember right the victims were generally very sick people.
It's an interesting topic and it doesn't seem that there's much written about it that isn't really lurid (I confess, that's what piqued my interest).
I want to read about the prion disease angle.
Edit: To be clear, I have no cultural connection to the wendigo phenomenon and have no way to evaluate what anyone has to say about it. I'm just interested in how people live in the northern boreal forest.
That's super interesting, when I was young the bedtime scary stories of "they look like people but do not act like people" got to me, so the whole uncanny valley always makes me think of the wendigo
Edit: also the Cree were pretty close to the Ojibwe, considered allies, there might be some lore crossover. I remember my dad telling me about how some Cree family moved into the duplex and my grandpa called them "cousins"
The native people I'm descended from had the "wendigo" and the theory was it was a cautionary legend about cannibals with prion diseases.
I read a dissertation on wendigo sickness written by someone married into a Cree family that spent a lot of time living in the bush. His take, which was very interesting, was that the idea of the wendigo was a way to talk about killing someone who was ill when the group was in a starvation situation. Sick people still had to eat, but couldn't help get food, and also had to be tended to by someone else who then couldn't look for food.
The northern fur trade created a bunch of changes in how people lived in the north, in particular it incentived more people to stay further north in the winter. Starvation became more frequent, and so did the wendigo killings. If I remember right the victims were generally very sick people.
It's an interesting topic and it doesn't seem that there's much written about it that isn't really lurid (I confess, that's what piqued my interest).
I want to read about the prion disease angle.
Edit: To be clear, I have no cultural connection to the wendigo phenomenon and have no way to evaluate what anyone has to say about it. I'm just interested in how people live in the northern boreal forest.
After some additional reading I suggest you do not get into the habit of eating human brains.
That's super interesting, when I was young the bedtime scary stories of "they look like people but do not act like people" got to me, so the whole uncanny valley always makes me think of the wendigo
Edit: also the Cree were pretty close to the Ojibwe, considered allies, there might be some lore crossover. I remember my dad telling me about how some Cree family moved into the duplex and my grandpa called them "cousins"