The Bone Wendigo Key Ring

One interesting thing I noticed while doing the research for this was the fact that most artistic depictions of wendigos feature antlers and deer heads, but none of the written sources contain any mention of these features. The antlers and other deer-like features are as recent as 2001. I haven’t looked into it much further, but it seems quite plausible to me. However, knowing that some of the traits I associate with a monster (to the extent that I chose to include them in this painting) stem from a modern American filmmaker’s interpretation of the monster rather than the extant culture in which it originated raises some interesting questions about what a monster really is, and the cultural meaning behind it. The short stories I read had a third interpretation of the wendigo, describing it as a powerful spirit of the wild rather than a cannibalistic deer monster, which is both closer and further away from the cursed as a result of their own actions nature of the original tales. I’m not going to get into a discussion about which of the modern interpretations is more right, monsters change over time and that’s part of what I find so interesting about them, but I am going to talk about the cultural aspect both because it’s interesting and because it is important to bear in mind when dealing with cross-cultural entities. The first short story I read as part of my research was Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo. It was a good story and although the treatment of the native American character, both by the other characters and the narrator, was really poor and made me very uncomfortable the monster itself was great. Then I read August Derleth’s Ithaqua which although the depiction of the wendigo was very similar culturally it was a different thing entirely. While the first story was one that was about a monster and was also racist, in the second the monster was very much part of the racism. And that’s where things get complicated. Monsters are meant to be bad things, which makes them easy to use to dehumanise groups of people or reinforce fears of the other. I’m not saying that this was the intent of the stories, but that when writing about a thing that is a source of fear and also associated with a particular culture many things end up associating fear with the culture itself, which is not a good thing. In spite of this I am usually inclined to see the spread of a monster beyond its native culture as a positive thing. When a monster spreads from one culture to another it will end up being interpreted differently, but the fact that it spread in the first place is evidence of commonality. The adoption of another culture’s monster is evidence of a common fear, a shared need for that type of narrative. The wendigo means something to the Algonquian people who have a history of facing the threat of starvation, but the monster with a hunger it can never satisfy is also relevant to many others around the world. We need the cautionary tale of greed that only begets more greed, which is why I think the fact that the monster being used outside its original context is a good thing, as long as it is done with a degree of care and consideration for the culture that birthed it.