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Digital Literature Review, vol. 1 (2014).  © Ball State University. All Rights Reserved. 
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article to dlr@bsu.edu. 

Incursion Into Wendigo Territory
Jackson Eflin, Ball Sate University

This article explores modern urban legends that appropriate the idea of the Wendigo, a spirit 
from various Native American tribal legends. These urban legends are informed by a cultural 
guilt of the dispossession of Native American territories, but the victory of monster over protag-
onist demonstrates the futility of these attempts to comprehend histories of atrocities. 

“There	are	places	that	can	take	your	memory	away.”	–	Jack	Wawastases

Much has been taken from the indigenous peoples of the Americas: land, history, iden-
tity, name, and voice. The colonization of the Americas took place on both a physical and 
cultural level, and so, in the end, even myths were colonized. But as the line of the Frontier 
was pushed westward, a curious legend slipped through the cracks, and the attempts to hunt 
down and capture this legend go on today. Called Wendigo, Windigo, Whitiko, Atchen, 
Chenoo, or a host of other names by different peoples, the legend of the cannibal spirit who 
brings snow and hunger in its cloven gait was just as terrifying to settlers as it was to na-
tives, and so attempts to settle it persist. The people and the places that created the Wendigo 
are colonized now, mapped and measured, a thousand cultures swallowed up by trading 
posts and concrete roads. But the memory of the Wendigo and all it represents haunts the 
collective unconscious of America, a howling reminder of colonial dispossession. The use 
of the Wendigo in modern urban legends shows how America is wrestling with this guilt. If 
we accept Cynthia Landrum’s assertion of “urban legends represented as warnings or cau-
tionary tales” (266), then these narratives can be seen as cautionary tales against forgetting 
the history of the territories America has colonized.

Understanding the Wendigo’s place in both native and colonial mythology gives a 
perspective into the larger conflict it represents in the collective unconscious of America as 
a whole. This paper will examine the original myths of the Wendigo and how their use in 
the lore of modern urban legends circulated on anonymous internet forums represents an 
ongoing struggle over a stretch of cultural territory by deconstructing the presentation of 
Wendigos in these stories and how the intentional presentation of the monster reflects repre-
sentations of Native Americans. 

Before proceeding, it is vital to explore a bit of where the Wendigo myth comes from. 
This is a thorny issue, as these stories are in many ways not mine to tell. Deirdre Keenan, 
exploring the difficulties of representing the overlap of her Irish ancestral history and the 
history of Native Americans asks, “[H]ow can I represent indigenous voices rather than 
‘voices that have been ventriloquized’ out of an ‘imperialist nostalgia?’” (186). This essay 
comes from a similar place as Keenan’s, written by a colonizer, not a native, and thus these 
examinations of traditional myths should not be seen as authoritative recitations but as 

mailto:dlr%40bsu.edu?subject=


10

Notes
1. It should be noted that the lines between these cultures are somewhat fuzzy, and the way they are defined comes from both native and Western categori-
zations. Originality of the Wendigo myth thus can vary wildly depending on the source of the story. 
2. The Wendigo is consistently described as possessing, as opposed to the more apt infecting. This repeated use of possession to describe “going Wendigo” 
suggests an unconscious connection between the Wendigo and ownership.
3. A religious official doing trance work to facilitate glossolalia. Le Jeune reinterprets this as demonic possession. 
4. “Atchen” or “Chenoo” is generally accepted to be the Montagnais-Naskapi word for the Wendigo, or at least for a being of such similar mythology that the 
differences are primarily linguistic. 

Wendigo Territory, Eflin

reflections that show a shape of history, but not the only shape. 
Appearing in myths from the Great Lakes and regions north and west, told by the Cree, 

Algonquin, Ojibwe, and Mi’kmaq peoples,1 amongst others, the nature of the Wendigo 
varies wildly, but the common threads are of cold and hunger. In the stories, a tribe’s village 
will often be having trouble feeding itself due to the scarcity of game or other machinations 
of a Wendigo in the area. The Wendigo will use a wide repertoire of tricks, from vanishing 
the meat off of still-living game to mimicking the face or voice of a hunter, to lure prey away 
from home, where it will eat or possess them, causing them to “go Wendigo.”2 Usually the 
Wendigo is defeated by destroying its icy heart. In these stories, the death of the Wendigo 
signals the end of starvation, and in some cases the end of winter and the coming of summer. 

Howard Norman argues in his introduction to Where	the	Chill	Came	From:	Cree	
Wendigo	Tales	and	Journeys,	that the Wendigo upset the “old agreement” of the hunt, that 
humans hunt and animals are hunted. As part of the arrangement, the Cree allow hunting 
ground to rest and replenish and they tell stories about the slain animals to honor them. 
The Wendigo, however, obstructs hunting, or hunts in the village, where no one is sup-
posed to be prey. Wendigos use their tricks to isolate a person, a manifestation of a very 
real fear of losing your way while hunting, and the danger of a lost hunting party turning 
to cannibalism if unsuccessful. This taboo against cannibalism is one of the metaphors 
the Wendigo makes material. 

D. H. Turner, in “Wendigo Mythology and the Analysis of Cree Social Structure,” relates 
a myth in which a man and his son eat their grandchild and wife, respectively. This act of 
devouring incorporates one into the other, which Turner explores as an upsetting of the tra-
ditional method of incorporation of others into the family through marriage. He highlights 
this by referring to the characters as “Grandfather/Grandson” and “Father/Mother,” show-
ing how the consumed still have presence in the consumer. He explains that Cree tribes 
space themselves across the landscape to facilitate proper social relations. The transgressing 
of boundaries, both physical and genealogical, disrupts the natural order of things. 

In both of these interpretations, the Wendigo is responsible for the radical upsetting of 
properly defined lines, both in landscape and social structure. The Wendigo carries the fear 
of consumption in two ways, both the simple fear of being eaten but also the fear of “going 
Wendigo” yourself, being possessed or infected, the Wendigo getting into you. Either way, 
someone is where they do not belong, and this trespass is terrifying.

The Wendigo’s connection to territory goes back to when colonists first encountered it. 
The writings of Jesuit Minister and Evangelist Paul Le Jeune, which contain the earliest 
known reference to the Wendigo, also contain a territorial theme:

…this Devilish Woman3 added that [the Wendigo] had eaten some Atti-
kamegouekhin—these are the tribes that live north of the River which is 
called the Three Rivers,—and that he would eat a great many more of them 
if he were not called elsewhere. But that Atchen,4 (a sort of Werewolf), would 
come in his place to devour them, if they made a village, as they had decided 



11Wendigo Territory, Eflin

to do; that he would come to get them, even up to the French Fort; that he 
would slaughter the French themselves. (Le Jeune 7)

The wording, “even up to the French fort…the French themselves” has a subtle implication 
of the French being on some higher order. Something about their French-ness, their civi-
lized-ness, apparently makes their space better, gives them some inherent guard against the 
evils of the wild. This establishment of the “better space” is an attempt to reassert colonial 
power by relegating native space as being in some nebulous way inferior, more prone to 
predation. The description of the Atchen as “some kind of werewolf” is also a colonial 
move. This changes the threat from a native one, and thus beyond the territory of colo-
nial mythology, to something within European understanding. While there are similarities 
between the Wendigo and the werewolf, both animalistic anthropophages who were once 
human, the werewolf can become human again, whereas once you “go Wendigo” you never 
go back.5  This subtle move to put down stakes in this unfamiliar territory shows the con-
queror’s response to the unknown, to redefine or jettison to a safe distance. Even if it isn’t 
understood, it is at least pushed to the periphery.

Over the next four hundred years, the Wendigo would stalk the edges of American 
discourse. For native writers it was often used as a metaphorical device, as seen in Tracks 
or Solar	Storms. In Tracks:	A	Novel	by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich, the narrator contex-
tualizes the maddening depression brought on by deaths from plague by saying that “We 
had gone half Windigo (6),”6 that is, gone half mad from the extremes of loss and winter. 
The narrator’s abusive mother in Linda Hogan’s Solar	Storms is said to be possessed by 
the Wendigo. On the other hand, for colonial writers it was a fertile ground for mining 
boogeymen. August Delerth added it to the canon of the Cthulhu Mythos in Ithaqua. In Pet	
Semetery by Stephen King, the necromantic properties of the eponymous cemetery are at-
tributed to a Wendigo having soured the ground. All of these references draw on the power 
of a symbol with deep cultural roots, though in Hogan’s and Erdrich’s cases the invocation 
of the Wendigo integrates the narratorial present with their cultures’ pasts, while Delerth’s 
and King’s invocations attempt to connect their characters’ troubles to a longer narrative 
that breaches cultural boundaries. The use in Ithaqua and Pet	Semetary can be seen as 
what Boyd and Thrush call “the settler society’s attempts to make a usable history out of its 
colonial past” (xxiii). This colonial past is full of ghosts that haunt the colonized present, 
and the native-born spirit that haunts the Americans around King’s cemetery is just another 
example, the anxieties of colonial guilt refusing to stay buried.

This brings the narrative to the modern-day, where the Wendigo is quite fashionable 
on the imageboard. Since the story nicknamed “Cabin Fever,” posted in 2012, started the 
recent Wendigo fad, over fifty Wendigo-related stories have become creepypastas. Such sto-
ries are posted on 4chan, a largely anonymous forum where posts are usually deleted after a 
few days of inactivity. Thus good stories are copied down as text documents, which can be 
easily copied and pasted into a new thread. This “copy and paste” method of story 
sharing became abbreviated to copypasta, the subset of horror stories being referred to

Notes
5. In all fairness to Le Jeune, explaining the Wendigo is rather difficult. It acts a bit like a Werewolf in its anthropophagia and living in the woods, but its 
supernatural powers make it seem like a sorcerer. For this paper I will use a hauntological lens, addressing it like a ghost in order to examine a cultural role it 
plays. Technically the Wendigo is a type of Manitou, an Algonquin word that refers to a variety of spirits.
6. The phrase “going Wendigo” or “to go Wendigo” is a recurring phrase that indicates a person has been fully possessed and overtaken by the cannibalistic 
mania of the Wendigo.



12Wendigo Territory, Eflin

Notes
7. I should point out that this isn’t the story’s actual name. All these stories were posted as forum comments, and were thus title-less. For ease of reference I 
have given them each a name.
8. A couple years ago: Here the narrator reveals that this story is not only not recent, but is constructed from information from various points in his life. This 
ties into my research, especially Deirdre Keenan’s writing about construction of narratives and histories. The separation from the immediacy of the events 
brings into question legitimacy of both memory and narrative.
9. Menom: a member of the Menominee Nation, an indigenous tribe native to Michigan and Wisconsin.

as creepypasta. A majority of the Wendigo creepypastas follow the same format, with young 
adults being hunted by some thing in the woods, and so repetitious is the formula that new 
stories are often met with accusations of unoriginality. I’ll be looking at two of these stories 
closely, to show how they reflect this pattern of cultural colonization. While there are a vari-
ety to choose from, these two have clear and unambiguous links to the Wendigo, as opposed 
to merely a shade bearing its shape without realizing it is doing so.

These stories are valuable to examine because they are a snapshot of modern American 
culture. The Wendigo appears in many other stories, both on 4chan and elsewhere, but the 
stories examined here have the added advantage of being anonymous. Unattached to faces 
and names, each individual post must be read on its own merits, with no history to distort 
them. And yet despite being free of history, the stories keep circling back to aspects of his-
tory that haunt the cultures that created them. The inescapability of the Wendigo, even in a 
space beyond identity, shows how deeply its teeth are dug into the culture of America, thus 
the stories repeat with only small changes, always trying to grasp the shape of a history that 
refuses to stay quiet.  

The story that started the trend, “Cabin Fever,” was posted some time in summer 2012.7 

The narrator, “a city kid from Chicago,” goes camping with cousins on their family’s land 
in Alabama. During the first day of camping, the teenagers run into a neighbor, Tanner, who 
joins them. Between them, there are five girls and six guys. A typical camping day goes by, 
and Tanner pops home to ask permission to stay the night, two campers going with him as an 
honor guard. An hour later they come running back into the cabin, followed by everyone else, 
reporting strange goings on in the woods: someone following them on the path, spasming, 
back turned the whole time. They assume it’s some mischievous rednecks until one of the 
cousins begins to panic, “going on about how he went to school with a native kid that was 
telling him about the goat man.” He is chastised for worrying everyone, but continues, “going 
on and on about how it’s the goat man ‘and how we’re in his woods.’” The narrator interrupts 
the narrative for a moment to explain that at the time he had never heard of the Goatman:

but then a couple years ago8 the year before I graduated from college I had a 
Menom9 for a roommate and I ended up asking him about it. And to sum it 
up, it’s basically a fucking man with the head of a goat and he can shape shift 
and he gets among groups of people to terrorize them. It’s also supposed to 
be kind of like the Wendigo and it’s bad mojo to even talk about it and even 
worse if you see it.

They eventually calm down, cooking three sausage packs, each with four sausages in them. 
An argument breaks out when the narrator is accused of taking two, which he denies, having 
given one to everyone specifically.

About then it dawns on them what is wrong, just as a camper who had accompanied Tan-
ner starts screaming for everyone to get out. Everyone flees the cabin and, upon counting, 
realizes that now there are only eleven people where there had been twelve. The narrator 



13Wendigo Territory, Eflin

realizes that, with so many people who all knew only a few others in the group, it had been 
easy for the Goatman to slip in. The story continues in this vein for quite some time, jug-
gling numbers so that it is easy to lose track of how many people should be there. 

Eventually Tanner darts home for a gun. Upon returning, he and the narrator realize the 
Goatman slipped in and out again, and the narrator starts to panic: “But at least I feel better 
because we can be American and shoot the fuck out of whatever it is if it comes back.” 
Terrifying sounds of the Goatman trying to get in last through the night, sounding like an 
animal failing to imitate human speech, until a few shots are fired into the darkness, driving 
it off. Screeching noises persist, echoing in the woods. 

Tanner stays awake through the night and realizes that at some point some one, or some 
thing, has slipped into the cabin. Not wanting to scare anyone he says nothing, watching as 
it pretends to sleep, standing up occasionally in the dark to jitter and lie down again. They 
hurry home the next morning and, arriving at the house, the Goatman gives Tanner a dead-
eye stare, lags to the back of the group, and then vanishes into the forest. 

The Goatman in this narrative explores the classic idea of haunting that can be described 
as the “present absence.” Avery Gordon wrestles with this idea, exploring how absences 
in narrative, history, and memory can only be reconstructed by examining the shape of the 
gaps they leave behind. She differentiates the ghost from haunting, defining haunting as 
“that which appears to not be there, a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with 
taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or empirical evidence if you like, that 
tells you that a haunting is taking place” (Gordon 8). The ghost, to Gordon, is the marker of 
a gap in history, culture, or memory, “cajoling us to reconsider” (6). This applies significant-
ly to this narrative, which is riddled with absent presences. 

One of the absent presences is the smell that always seems to signal the coming of the 
Goatman. At the start it smells “like ozone,” but towards the end of the narrative it evolves 
into “an actual nasty gross blood smell, like cooking blood and singed hair.” The smell 
comes and goes, but at one point the smell just vanishes. The narrator tells us “usually 
smells fade away or get less. It just literally was there one second and then not the second.” 
Not only does this underline the supernatural nature of the threat being faced, but it also 
calls attention to absences. Later, when the Goatman, in the form of one of the campers, is 
writhing, as though she were laughing, but silently, causes the narrator to realize that the 
woods are totally devoid of any sound, no birds or squirrels to be heard. Again, the actions 
of the spectre draw attention to absences, and while this absence is literal, others are less so.  

The Goatman is never given a form or a voice, and is only ever able to imitate, only able 
to interact with the world in the form of an intruder. The native figure never speaks with its 
own words; instead the words of the invader are put into its mouth, and it is ventriloquized 
like a puppet. Kathryn Shanley explores this idea of ventriloquism as an unvoicing of native 
peoples, their stories told by people claiming to speak with their voice. The native voice 
here is removed. Shanley states, “[T]he exclusion of Indian voices perpetuates the idea that 
non-Indians can speak for Indians better than Indians can speak for themselves” (688). The 
unvoicing of natives removes the ability to tell their own story, and thus define themselves. 
This puts the native in a spectral position, present but unable to affect change, intangible.

When the Wendigo is given voice, even the voice is spectral as it cannot be defined. 
In many creepypastas, there will be a moment where the author will try to describe the 
noises, always failing to properly articulate them, defining them as “not human, not like any 
animal ever heard.” For the author of “Cabin Fever,” the creatures trying to imitate human 
speech sound “like those YouTube cats and dogs whose owners teach them how to ‘talk.’” 



14Wendigo Territory, Eflin

Notes
10. From the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, whose character Sethe describes a “Rememory” as a memory so powerful that it hangs in the air, and can be 
encountered by anyone walking through the space. The word is a part of the novel’s running theme of the use of memories to reconstruct the past.

The narrator describes the way all people of all languages have a certain cadence, and that 
this is like none of them.

The Goatman’s not-quite-human behavior and inability to quite mimic human speech 
plays on the literary device of the uncanny, that which reveals the strangeness in the familiar. 
Gesa Mackenthun states that “the literary mode of the uncanny fulfils a memory function; 
it brings to light forgotten or subjugated knowledges. The greatest uncanny effect is when a 
‘Rememory’ (to borrow Morrison’s term)10 invades the family home” (98). It is the subju-
gated knowledge being pushed to the forefront that is more terrifying than the Goatman’s 
physical trespass. The characters put a great deal of effort into keeping the Wendigo out of 
the family’s home, despite its seeming ability to come and go freely. After all, according 
to one of the panicking campers, these are “his woods.” The fear of these buried memories 
resurging to recolonize territory from which they had been pushed shines through here in 
the Goatman’s almost casual ability to reinvade spaces thought entirely safe. The Goatman 
literally unsettles, both by being a fearful presence and by uprooting the settler’s assump-
tions that the settled land is a controlled property, as opposed to an unwilling hostage. The 
unvoiced monster brings to light the voiceless victims, silenced so that their presence may 
be ignored or forgotten.

Another creepypasta dealing with issues of the control over native presence and space, 
“Territories,” was posted on July 23, 2013. Posted along with the opening text was a map 
pointing to a point in the deep Canadian wilderness west of the Great Slave Lake. The 
narrator is in the Canadian Army, 3rd Canadian Division, his traveling companion a reserva-
tion-born Algonquin named Pannoowau. They drive off road for a few days and eventually 
make camp a few miles from their car. In the night they are disturbed by something moving 
around their campground.

Pannoowau assists the narrator in trying to track whatever thing is stalking their camp, 
leaving “kind of ‘morphed’ human footprint[s].” At one point they hear a terrible shriek, 
“like the sound a pig makes when it’s being butchered while still alive.” Pannoowau 
declares that “Bad Spirits walk among us,” which the narrator disbelieves. Eventually 
Pannoowau convinces him to return to camp. However, their trail back vanishes, and Pan-
noowau, not wanting to worry the narrator, says nothing. This is when a critical portion of 
the narrative happens. Pannoowau is explaining his methods to get unlost:

“I figured if we walked in the same direction we came, we would get to the 
camp. Even our own tracks are gone.” “We need to stop now and figure out 
where in the hell we are.” I took my backpack off and opened it up, searching 
for my map and compass. While I was busy in my backpack, I saw Pannoowau 
scramble for his rifle from the corner of my eye. He brought it up and fired off 
three rounds. I looked at him and said “What happened?” I also brought up 
my rifle, but noticing Pannowau’s face was white as the snow on the ground. 
“Weendigo...” he said.

The narrator and Pannoowau make it back to camp, whereupon the narrator finally sees 
the Wendigo standing there at the edge of the treeline around camp: “It looked so skinny 
that its bones were almost pushing out of its skin. The eyes appeared so sunken, almost 
black, and the bony fingers were jagged like twigs. It was just standing there, watching us.”



15Wendigo Territory, Eflin

Notes
11. Trumbull, Natick Dictionary
12. Other indications are present, notably the irregularity of the weather, described at 5°, far colder than it would be in the region in question during hunting 
season, as well as the nonexistence of the narrator’s military regiment at the time the story took place.  

The Wendigo, while visually frightening due to the uncanniness of its form (close enough 
to human but far enough to seem wrong) does nothing dangerous. It merely watches. The 
narrator and Pannoowau begin firing on the creature, but when the smoke clears it had 
vanished without a body. They run for the car, but on the journey Pannoowau is separated 
from the narrator unnoticed. The narrator makes it to his car and starts to drive for the main 
road when he sees Pannoowau in front of him. “I screamed, ‘Get in the car!!’ Instead of 
running to the passenger door, he twitched and seemed to float towards the driver’s door. 
My instincts once again kicked in and I slammed the pedal.”

The narrator makes it back to the government roads and contacts the police, telling them 
that his friend was hurt in a hunting accident. The story ends by informing us, “They still 
haven’t found him.” 

Pannoowau is a fascinating character in this narrative. The narrator informs us, “He also 
lives in Alberta, but was born on a reservation. His family had taught him all the legends and 
customs when he was growing up, but he handles modern society well.” This congratulatory 
nod to Pannoowau, who “handles modern society well,” seems to carry a subconscious idea 
that natives ought not to be able to, relegating the native to an undisclosed past, coming from 
a reservation, a space removed within popular conception from modern spaces, his ancestry 
giving him some greater connection to the land. Meanwhile the narrator is part of the army, 
an active, voluntary agent of the colonial government. They come from two different worlds, 
and their alliance and eventual separation suggests an instability of this arrangement. Interest-
ingly, the name the narrator gives to his native companion, “Pannoowau,” means “he lies” in 
Algonquin,11 something that wouldn’t be obvious to the common reader but seems to be an 
in-joke or subtle acknowledgement of the falseness of the story. Now, naturally that could be 
it, a subtle nod to the way a fictional story is being told as truth in the traditional mode of the 
urban legend, a tacit admission that this story is a fabrication.12 But the connection to lies and 
storytelling runs deeper. It is through Pannoowau that we learn that “bad spirits” are present, 
that the threat is a “Wendigo” that will get them killed. When they are lost, he says nothing 
until confronted. As they draw closer to the inevitable meeting with the Wendigo, he seems to 
grow stranger, more distant, more connected to the land. This is a recursion of a frequent role 
that native characters are relegated to, that of the noble savage. According to Shanley, “many 
of the ‘Indian’ voices most popular in mainstream America reinscribe nineteenth-century 
romantic images of Noble Savages” (677). These “romantic images” assuage a guilty colonial 
conscience. Ascribing nobility to the “savage” is what Renato Rosaldo describes as “a particu-
lar kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what 
they themselves have transformed” (69). This imperialist nostalgia retells the dispossession 
of indigenous peoples as an inevitability instead of a crime, suggesting that the conquered 
savage could never have survived into the modern era and couldn’t help being lost to history. 
Stating that Pannoowau “adapts to modern society well” places him in this romanticized past. 
This justifies his knowledge of tracking and spirits. But in the end, Pannoowau goes Wendigo. 
This seems to subvert the idea of the romanticized native, an image meant to assuage a guilty 
conscience. The monster must be shot, unquestionably, and, if it has no right to life, it certain-
ly has no right to territory. Colonialism is thus justified by making the native a monster that 
needed conquering. But it is not until this attempt to reassert colonial power occurs that the 
monsters come out.



16Wendigo Territory, Eflin

In “Territories,” the protagonists don’t encounter any great danger, the Wendigo being 
heard but unseen, an absent presence in the night, until the narrator ceases to trust Pan-
noowau’s sense of direction and connection to the land and utilizes more modern technolo-
gies of the map and compass, both used to define space and therefore control territory. It is 
not until these symbols that force definition onto the land come out that the Wendigo comes 
out as well. The issue of colonial incursion into what was once untamed space is brought 
to the forefront, the intellectual conflict becoming manifested in a physical danger. How-
ever, the danger is still not quite present. Pannoowau is the only one able to perceive it at 
first. The narrator doesn’t see it until he reaches the perceived safe space of the camp. The 
camp is separated from the Wendigo’s space just beyond the tree line, the boundary entire-
ly conceptual and not at all defined. The closeness of the monster has all but broken down 
the conceptions of territory that are a vital aspect of the colonial process, the establishment 
of native and non-native territories now shown to be illusory as opposed to intrinsic. The 
flimsiness of these boundaries shows how the real memories of colonial violence, unfiltered 
by imperialist nostalgia, can resurface in what Richard Terdiman calls “the pasts we carry 
but do not entirely cognize [that] regularly rise to colonize our present” (346). This fear of 
being incorporated, rather than an incorporator, contributes to the fear of the Wendigo, the 
narrative betraying the narrator as it allows the past to unsettle the present. 

But the territorial nature of the Wendigo goes beyond physical boundaries. The coloniza-
tion of the new world cannot be total until the natives are pushed out of all of their terri-
tories, both physical and cultural. Landrum explores how captured lands and objects, “[t]
rophies of the Indian wars” (272), hold spiritual power, stating that “these ‘vessels’ of power 
carried the energy of the land and the people that they represented” (273). Using the exam-
ple of trophies taken after the massacre at Wounded Knee, Landrum states that by holding 
hostage these vessels of spiritual power, “the northern plains people were both militarily and 
spiritually disarmed” (262). By telling stories of the Wendigo, colonial culture can attempt 
to reassert its ownership of the captured trophy of the Wendigo, though the repeated victory 
of the Wendigo in driving the narrators out of its territory suggests that this ownership is 
highly tenuous, history resisting redefinition. The more that colonial culture tries to mold 
the Wendigo into a useable shape, the more it slips away, leaving the hand trying to grasp it 
reshaped around its absence, and the words trying to define assert control telling stories of 
fear and flight.

And this brings me back to the issue of stories and who gets to tell them. The act of tell-
ing the story is an intently defining act. The words used, portrayals of characters and places, 
by their very nature define history or culture in some way, even unknowingly. The act of re-
defining something belonging to someone else is a violent act, a charge into and occupying 
of cultural territory. But the unsettling nature of the Wendigo prevents it from being defined 
by the colonizer, allowing it to slip into and out of conquered territory.

For one, the Wendigo can be seen to represent the native, portrayed as a lurking danger 
in the forest. The auditory difference, especially the narrator of “Cabin Fever” focusing on 
the sound of the speech, is noteworthy. The English language has a vast etymological family 
tree, deriving from both Germanic and Romantic languages, and can thus find similarity in 
most European language patterns, whether it be sonically or syntactically. However, lan-
guages from tribes in the Americas follow different rules and thus sound noticeably differ-
ent. There are different phonemes and rules for constructing sentences and declining nouns. 
Most European languages decline nouns based on masculine/feminine, where many



17Wendigo Territory, Eflin

languages from northern America decline based on animate/inanimate. Interestingly, some 
words like ahsin,	stone, decline as animate, suggesting an understanding of the land as 
having “potential for movement, for speech and volition—for personhood” (Smith and 
Fiore 62). The cultural differences runs so deep that even the thought behind the language 
is changed. The Wendigo in these tales triggers all the screen memories of the fear that 
plagued the colonizers of a people with uncanny faces, of a land with potential to speak.  

However, another reading interprets the Wendigo as the colonizer. This is not an uncom-
mon rhetorical device, seen in many narratives. Theresa S. Smith and Jill M. Fiore unpacks 
one such narrative, Linda Hogan’s novel Solar	Storms, wherein builders of a hydroelectric 
dam in once sacred ground are likened to Wendigos: “Like Windigos, the murderers of the 
land are gluttons who, with greed and trickery, seal their own fates in a landscape that offers 
no sustenance any more…they can only live by attempting to take life, both literally and 
figuratively, from others” (Smith and Fiore 76). In “Cabin Fever” the Wendigo is constantly 
in amongst the humans, taking on their forms and voices. If read assuming Wendigo-as-col-
onist, the meaning is clear. The Wendigo can easily assume the form of the colonist because 
the colonist has already become the Wendigo. This uncanny doubling unsettles both charac-
ters and reader, as it shows how flimsy the borderline between colonist and cannibal is. 

The indecisive quality of the metaphor, whether it makes colonist or native into the mon-
ster, indicates the ongoing struggle over the cultural territory in which the Wendigo resides. 
The perpetuation of narratives often so similar that they are rapidly growing unpopular for 
lack of originality suggests that colonial culture is revisiting the issue over and over, the 
guilty colonial conscience trying to redefine its past until the monster in colonized territory 
is no longer in the mirror as well. Perhaps this is why posters on an anonymous board find the 
Wendigo so terrifying and yet so enthralling. On an anonymous board, a space without identi-
ty, a monster that can be made to look like both native and colonizer carries the weight of both 
identities and histories, challenging the very idea that an identity can be free of history.



18Wendigo Territory, Eflin

Works Cited

Anansi. “Cabin Fever.” 4chan. 4chan, 27 Sept. 2012. Web. 6 Sept. 2013. 

Boyd, Colleen, and Coll Thrush. “Introduction: Bringing Ghosts to Ground.” Phantom	Past,	
Indigenous	Presence. Ed. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2011. vii-xl. Print.

Delerth, August. “Ithaqua.” The	Ithaqua	Cycle:	The	Wind-Walker	of	the	Icy	Wastes. Ed.
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Erdrich, Louise. Tracks:	A	Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Print. 
 
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Le Jeune, Paul. “A Sort of Werewolf.” Windigo:	An	Anthology	of	Fact	and	Fantastic	
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Norman, Howard A. Where	the	Chill	Came	From:	Cree	Wendigo	Tales	and	Journeys. San 
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Rosaldo, Renato. Culture	&	Truth:	The	Remaking	of	Social	Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press,
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19Wendigo Territory, Eflin

Works Cited

Smith, Theresa S. and Jill M. Fiore. “Landscape as Narrative, Narrative as Landscape.”
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Shanley, Kathryn W. “The Indians America Loves to Love and Read: American Indian 
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Terdiman, Richard. Present	Past:	Modernity	and	Memory	Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell University
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“Territories.” 4chan. 4chan, 23 July 2013. Web. 6 Sept. 2013.

Trumbull, J. Hammond. Natick	Dictionary. Washington: Government Printing Office 
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Turner, D. H. “Windigo Mythology and the Analysis of Cree Social Structure.” Athropologica	
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