Windego, and other Monsters

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WINDEGO: An evil spirit of the northland, a monstrous creature who comes prowling in winter, hungry for human flesh; it is remorseless, pitiless. 

If the year was a lean one, winter was a hard time for the hunter/gatherers who lived in the NWT. The People would leave their summer camps in small groups and scatter into the vast emptiness, away from the lakes and rivers where they'd all come together as a tribe to trade and celebrate the fat season of summe. Our of necessity, they'd change their tribal, summer way of life to retreat to live in isolation, hunting and trapping the range around them, away from others who were now engaged in the same thing. Sometimes, it did not go well; the hunters were not lucky; the game was scarce or had changed from their accustomed paths of migration. 

Then, the spectre of starvation haunted the isolated camps, and sometimes people were driven to desperate measures in order to survive. A man who had eaten his family in order to stay alive, was said to have "gone  Windego." Such a primal sin was viewed with horror, so a monster was created to explain this counter-cultural behavior. A few of those stories came to be written down in early colonial times, but the oral versions were well known to those who were exposed to the fierce winters, who sometimes had experienced, first-hand, hunger and the awful struggle to survive. 

It is said the Windego eats his own lips and checks, so his skull is always partially visible, and he arrives surrounded by a stench so horrible that it even overpowers the bitter winter wind.  People, driven to this extremity, were believed to have been taken over by this dreadful being, and that was the reason they had committed the unholy crime of cannibalism.  In fact, during the 19th Century, early Canadian psychologists defined "going Windego" as a "culturally based" disorder.

(Thunderbird--well known to the Northern First Nations--

among the Tlicho, Thunderbird was referred to indirectly, as "Father."

He's one of the good guys.)

Today, the Windego is, in some quarters, viewed as a cryptid. Wikipeidia defines cryptids as "animals that cryptozoologists believe may exist somewhere in the wild, but are not believed to exist by mainstream science." Cryptozoology primarily looks at anecdotes and blurry photos, the sort of  claims rejected by the scientific community. These monsters now feature in YouTube videos in all manner of ghastly forms, but this vision of the Windego is of only passing interest to me.

"Windego" appears to me--not as a myth created by "superstitious 1st Nation's People," --but as an acutely observed form of human personality disorder. I didn't figure this out on my own, but by listening to Buffy Sainte Marie's song called "Priests of the Golden Bull." 

She makes a connection with the storied monster and the unfettered greed and disregard for the cooperative behavior which holds together our societies. Look around. The Dark Triad personality, (where a subject possesses a toxic combo of Narcissism, Michiavellianism and Psychopathy) is having a good run these days among CEO's, Tech Bros, politicians, and the sort of "religous" figures who live in gated mansions and always need their followers to send more money. 

In a world where it's considered smart to get rich while ignoring the human suffering or the irreparable harm pursuit of this quarter's profits causes a community -- or the arm done to the water, the air, or the planet -- Ms. Sainte Marie sees the ever-hungry, cannibalistic Windigo. The "Greed is Good," mentality is on display everywhere. 

Take a look at ever so many modern companies, their successes measured by how many jobs they've eliminated, or how they've stolen pension funds from retirees in the course of a merger, or how many rural communities they have destroyed, for instance, building a petrochemical refinery or an industrial pig farm next door to a small town which doesn't have the clout to fight back. 

"Gentrification" in cities raises rents until the essential workers--those who run the store checkouts, clean the buildings and streets, teach and/or care for children and seniors, can no longer afford to live close to where they are employed. Other casualties include small entrepreneurial businesses of all kinds, from restaurants and local bars, to independent bookshops and corner convenience stores.

Today's Windego doesn't just live in the deep woods. These days, he (or she) is seen as a "celebrity," on our television screens, and all over the internet and Twitter. Many are even elected to high public office. Worst of all, their "Not my brother's keeper" attitude is now held up to young people as the smart way to live. 

Instead of dwelling on psychos and cannibals, instead, let's take this time of All Hallows, All Saints and All Souls to find some peace and to give thanks: to remember our ancestors, our friends, mentors, and family who have passed beyond the veil. Let's also remember our honored dead, the kind of people who served and helped, rather than injured, the common folks of our communities and our country. 

~~Juliet Waldron 

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Monsters In Your Head

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Black Magic ventures into a shapeshifter's world

The Famous Big Foot Pic

Everybody’s had a monster. In childhood, it might hide under the bed, or out in the woods behind the house, or lurk beneath the surface of an otherwise calm and placid lake. When I first started looking into some of the Canadian roster of scary creatures, I saw some that already were familiar.   

The first and most famous is Big Foot or Sasquatch (or, variously, the Floridian Skunk Ape or the Jersey Devil, etc.), who legendarily has quite a large territory here in the Americas.  A similar creature is also is said to exist in Asia, as the Nepalese Yeti or Abominable Snowman. Farther west, there are the Mongolian Almas. In all iterations, however, these guys are tall, hairy, large – and by many accounts smelly.  

This is explained as a surviving close cousin, a beast still living, now hiding in forests and on mountain tops.  Sometimes its identified as surviving Gigantopithecus or the later Neanderthal. These mysterious creatures are said to have a world-wide – but extremely thin -- distribution.  As genetically isolated and small as these populations would have to be, and beset as they must be on every side by us--the most lethal predator this planet has ever produced--I think we human-beans are imagining things. We are--however powerfully--simply retelling ourselves some very old, very scary stories.

Disney Company's Jungle Book

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of a creature fancier as anyone. I was pleased to learn that there are plenty of monsters in Canada, aided by the indisputable fact that there still are huge wide open spaces without a lot of us. I recently learned that the Dene and Tlicho tribes of Great Slave Lake both have a legendary man-animal called "Nakan." This creature is closer to man in appearance than ape, at least on my amateur's scale.

I've just learned about another Nahnni Valley cryptid, the Dene's Nuk-luk, who sounds like the same sort of ape-man. He shares with the Tlicho's Nakan bad, skunk-like smells and, he sometimes wears raggedy clothes. On the person-hood upside, he has a house which he’s dug underground. In fact, that’s the way you find where Nakan hides in winter. Like hibernating bears, on cold days –and there are plenty of those in NWT -- you can see their breath rising from ground level breathing. You may be hungry enough to assault with intent to kill some sleepy bear, but a Nakan—well, it’s best to leave these awful beings alone. 

They are tremendously strong, have beards and lots of hair, and want to bring you into their sex life--no matter which sex you are! They most often steal women, but sometimes children too, “because they have none of their own.” I’m not sure why Nakan—or Big Foot for that matter--never seem to have any females. It’s not very mammalian for an animal to reproduce by budding or cell division.

My personal explanation for these man-amals is that they are black bears, standing up on their back legs in order to get a better look-see. Frankly, bears would be sufficiently terrifying for someone like me, who, at 6, suffered from screaming nightmares which involved bears searching for me--snuffle, snuffle, snuffle--while I shuddered under my bed.

Canadian monster lore is a well-stocked larder, thanks to so many 1^st Nation traditional stories. Some characters, however, like the familiar werewolf, or his more versatile shape-shifter cousin, Loupe Garou, are European imports.

Wendigo or Wittigo is a nasty character from Ojibway, Cree, and Assiniboine legends. Universally, among 1st People, the three worst sins are greed, gluttony and selfishness. If you behaved like that, not sharing food with your kin, you might turn into a Wendigo. The Wendigo are very tall, with yellowish rotting skin—and a taste for dining upon the flesh of their best old ex-friends.

Of course, starvation, not unheard of in Hunter-Gatherer societies, could lead to episodes of cannibalism. Making that choice, however expedient, would nevertheless cause a person to transform into the loathsome, man-eating Wendigo, worst of all terrors.

Opopogo—a famous water creatures--lives in Lake Okanagon in BC. He’s Canada’s Loch Ness/Lake Champlain type snaky monster,  reputed to be 40-50 feet long. Some witnesses say this guy has horns, too. Some say he's a member of the plesiosauria family, now surviving in remote fresh water lakes. 

Now, the 1^st Nation’s people had a legendary hostile spirit who was said to live in this lake, one who did not enjoy having them disturb his peace while they paddled across. It was traditional 1st Nation practice, if they had to cross the lake, to sacrifice something as they set out, a chicken or another small animal, in order to appease this angry power. Today's informants, however, say that this "monster" was a spirit, not a creature from the “primitive survivor” category of the cryptozoologist's version of the animal family.

This guy's got attitude

Whether Opopogo exists or not – the jury is still out – images of him, horns and all, may be seen on hockey jerseys for the team out of nearby Kelowna. 

Opopogo Opopogo Opopogo Opopogo Opopogo… ! How it trips off the tongue! Any monster with such a phonetically enchanting name deserves to be better known, don’t you think?

Last and not least is Waheela, a gigantic wolf with a huge head, sharp teeth, a wide splayed foot, and a reputed height at the shoulder of four feet.  Covered in long white hair, Waheela enjoys ripping the heads off people who trespass in his territory--the Nahanni River basin in the Mackenzie Mountains National Region--which is aptly named "The Valley of Headless Men." This dire-wolf like beast seems to be a relative of the Inuit's Amarok, who is gray and hunts at night. Amarok catches and eats foolish or desperate hunters who might still be outside their villages. 

Perhaps these are all simply cases of the monster hiding inside our own heads, what psychiatrists describe as "projection."  That’s probably what, the X-Files, Scully would say to Mulder, although he probably wouldn’t be listening. Imagine the way he’d just go on muttering aloud about historic sightings! His iteration would certainly go on for a long time, because any catalog of monsters just has to begin 'way far back in our collective history.  And, really, folks, we're the scariest animal that ever walked onto this planet?  Like Pogo said a very long time ago "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

    

~~Juliet Waldron

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