Windigo

Windigo

Reflection

The Windigo was once a winter story —
a teaching told to protect the people,
a way of naming the danger of appetite without end,
a way of guarding against hunger that grows beyond reason.

These weren’t simply monster tales.
They were cultural technologies —
frameworks of survival wisdom,
moral instruction,
social institutions for community cohesion,
and warnings against greed in a world
where sharing was essential for life.

But when newcomers arrived with rifles, railroads, and endless appetites,
the caution became reality.
The Windigo was no longer a spirit of warning.
It became a spirit moving through people,
devouring buffalo, land, language, futures.

A teaching meant to prevent destruction
was twisted into the very wound it tried to stop.
The stories became prophecy fulfilled.

A Vision of What Was Lost

I once saw a photograph in a museum:
a mountain of buffalo skulls,
white bone piled against endless sky.
The work of Wendigos.

Picture this:
Buffalo moving like thunder across grasslands that stretched to the horizon,
sixty million strong.
Their hooves drummed the earth like heartbeats,
their breath steamed in winter air,
their massive bodies dark against golden prairie grass.

For the People, buffalo were everything.
Meat to survive winter.
Hides for lodges, moccasins, and water carriers.
Sinew to bind tools.
Bones to craft needles, pipes, and scrapers.
Even the dung burned clean when wood was scarce.

Nothing wasted. Everything sacred.
Songs called them near.
Dances honored their sacrifice.
Ceremonies thanked them as relatives, not resources.

And then came slaughter.
Bounties on heads. Carcasses left to rot.
Railroad passengers shooting from windows,
turning lives into spectacle.

Sidebar: The Railcar Shootings

Railroads in the mid-to-late 1800s actively encouraged passengers
to shoot buffalo from train windows as sport.
It was advertised in newspapers. Rifles were sometimes provided.
Travelers wrote of it gleefully in diaries.

It wasn’t hunting for food or survival — it was spectacle.
Carloads of passengers leaning out, firing into herds,
leaving the bodies to rot where they fell.

This wasn’t random cruelty. It was systemic.

• Clearing buffalo reduced collisions on tracks.

• Destroying herds was a strategy to control Indigenous people
  who relied on them for survival.

• And by turning extermination into “fun,”
  the violence was normalized through recreation.

Most passengers never questioned it.
It was simply “what was done.”

Collapse of a World

In less than a decade, sixty million became a few hundred.

The People starved.
Ceremonies were banned.
Languages silenced.
Children confined to dusty reservations,
fed rations that weakened their bodies
and broke their traditions.

This is what a cultural Windigo does:
it doesn’t just eat your body.
It eats your tomorrow.
It severs your relationship with the living world,
with your ancestors,
with your children’s future.

The Larger Truth

Scholars like Jack D. Forbes have called this wétiko —
a cannibal psychosis that can possess entire civilizations.
Winona LaDuke names it Wendigo Economics —
the economics of the cannibal,
destroying the very source of its own survival: Mother Earth.

The tragedy is not only what was lost,
but that the original teaching foretold it.
The Windigo story was a protection.
Ignored, it became our reality.

Closing Reflection

How do we become people who tend the web of relationships
rather than tear it apart?

How do we remember that we are all connected —
human, buffalo, prairie grass, sky?

And is this dream of cooperation possible
when the Windigo spirit still moves
through our institutions,
our economies,
our ways of relating to the living world?

The Windigo reminds us that the hunger we refuse to face in ourselves
can consume everything we love.
The only cure is remembrance —
that nothing is wasted,
everything is sacred,
and we belong to one another.