Wendigo Stories and capitalism
More Than Monsters: The Deeper Significance of Wendigo Stories
The moral lessons contained in wendigo stories are also used to support the task of social critique in the late Native American scholar Dr. Jack D. Forbes’ book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (1978). There, he uses the cannibalistic wendigo as a metaphor for the behaviors and attitudes central to patterns of social domination visited upon his own people in the Americas and subjugated peoples everywhere. He writes:
“Wétiko is a Cree term…which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, to an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism… I have come to the conclusion that imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil… It should be understood that wétikos do not eat other humans only in a symbolic sense. The deaths of tens of millions of Jews, Slavs, etc., at the hands of the Nazis, the deaths of tens of millions of blacks in slavery days, the deaths of up to 30 million or more Indians in the 1500s, the terribly short life spans of Mexican Indian farm workers in the US, and of Native Americans generally today, the high death rates in the early industrial centers among factory workers, and so on, all clearly attest to the fact that the wealthy and exploitative literally consume the lives of those that they exploit. That, I would affirm, is truly and literally cannibalism, and it is cannibalism accompanied by no spiritually meaningful ceremony or ritual.”
More Than Monsters: The Deeper Significance of Wendigo Stories
The wendigo stories of Algonquian peoples offer a window into the endurance of cultural resources used to transmit significant moral values, and underscore the power of Native people using these stories to engage in social critique.
