Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History

DANGEROUS

SPIRITS

THE WINDIGO

IN MYTH

AND HISTORY

Shawn Smallman

This book is dedicated to Margaret, who always supported me and my work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Photo Section

Glossary

Foreword

Introduction

chapter one

THE WINDIGO IN TRADITIONAL

AND CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES

chapter two

MORE THAN A CANINE HUNGER

Frontier Encounters with the Windigo, 1636–1916

chapter three

STUNNED, TEASED AND TORMENTED

Missionaries and the Windigo, 1818–1960

chapter four

PRISONS, MENTAL ASYLUMS, AND RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I OWE A GREAT DEBT  to many people who helped me in this project. Anne Lindsay worked tirelessly to locate material in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives and shared her immense knowledge of fur-trade history. This project would not have been possible without her support. Amongst many other gifts, she introduced me to many key people. Stephen Boggs replied to my letter and shared his field notes from work on the Berens River, Manitoba, in the 1950s. Robin Wallace helped me access key material in the Provincial Archives of Alberta. Diane Lamoureux was invaluable in identifying the faith-based records at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, which are a priceless resource on religious history and ethnohistory. She was also vital in introducing me to other people who could help my research. Mary Flynn kindly sent me material from the Sisters of Providence Archive, an incredible historical source for western Canada. The staff at Library and Archives Canada helped me track down and obtain a great deal of material. Joan Petit at Portland State University identified some key Canadian newspaper resources available online.

Robert Brightman responded to endless emails, which touched on everything from Cree linguistics to cultural practices. He also read the chapter on myth, which his feedback greatly improved. I am immensely grateful for his support. Jeff Muehlbauer answered a question about Plains Cree linguistics through his outstanding blog (moniyawlinguist.wordpress.com). Jennifer Brown shared her work and insights during the early stages of this project, without which this would have been a much weaker book. John Long responded to emailed queries through Ann Lindsay. Nathan Carlson shared many materials, took part in endless discussions regarding the topic, and let me read his unpublished undergraduate thesis, which is the best study of the windigo phenomenon in Alberta. Cecil Chabot shared his article and critical information on the Eastmain windigo incident. Gilles Lesage shared information on resources in Manitoba.

Many people read drafts of this book. Evguenia Davidova read three chapters in their early stages and caught many errors. I hope to return the favour at some date. Michael Treleavan and Stephen Andes read the section on missionaries and helped to place Canadian events in a broader context. Jen Cyr, an outstanding PSU graduate student, produced the bibliography and edited the introduction and conclusion.

Grace Dillon and Kim Brown at Portland State University supported my application to the Ruth Landes Memorial Fund and took part in many conversations on this project. Sara Loreno produced the maps in this book and responded to a million minor queries. I also want to thank David Banis in Portland State University’s geography department, whose help was critical for this work.

This book was made possible by financial assistance from the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, a program of the Reed Foundation. Without that support, and the sabbatical that it funded, this book would never have been written. I also received a Creative and Scholarly Activities grant from the CLAS dean’s office at Portland State University.

Lastly, I want to thank my wife, who has spent eight years hearing endless accounts of the windigo. She supported me throughout this long journey, which included my absences on archival-research trips.

Physical Map of Canada SARA LORENO

Swift Runner, executed for cannibalism, Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, 1879–80. LAC, GEORGE M. DAWSON, NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF CANADA FONDS, A51141

Painting of the interior of a Cree tent, March 25, 1820. LAC, ROBERT BELL, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA COLLECTION, PA-040077

Cree feast at Rupert House (now known as Wakaganish), Quebec, 1869. On February 16, 1900, word reached the Rupert House post that a windigo named Richard had hung himself two days before, after he had so terrified his family that they fled into a storm. F 2179-3-0-0-13, ARCHIVES OF ONTARIO

Clouston Gorge on the Eastmain River, Quebec, 1892. This is close to where a terrifying windigo incident took place in 1888, at the Eastmain HBC post. LAC, A.P. LOW, NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA FONDS, A038090

First Nations camp at Oxford House, Manitoba, 1890. It was here, over half a century earlier, that HBC chief factor Colin Robertson recorded the effects of a newfound religious fervour among the local First Nations population. LAC, ROBERT BELL, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA COLLECTION, PA-050926

A Cree family travelling along the Wabasca Trail, Alberta, 1912. LAC, G.H. BLANCHET, DEPARTMENT OF MINES AND TECHNICAL SURVEYS COLLECTION, PA-017459

Two Cree men in northern Alberta, circa 1936. LAC, DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR FONDS, PA-040711

A Cree woman at Long Lake, Ontario, near the site of the HBC post, 1905. The Long Lake post experienced a windigo execution sometime between 1911 and 1916. C 275-1-0-6 [S 7644], ARCHIVES OF ONTARIO

Hudson’s Bay Company Post, Lake Abitibi, Ontario, 1905. The First Nations people in this region tell a version of the heroic tale of a windigo killer known locally as Ka-an-watch. C 275-1-0-3 [S 7578], ARCHIVES OF ONTARIO

Personnel of the North West Mounted Police, Dawson, Yukon, 1898. Seated: Sergeant Major R.E. Tucker; back row (left to right): unknown, Staff Sergeant G. Bates, Corporal Sidney Marshall, Staff Sergeant E. Stillman, Corporal W.J. Bowdridge. LAC, STUART TAYLOR WOOD FONDS, C-042755

View across the Hayes River at York Factory, Manitoba, 1878. The Hudson’s Bay Company built its post here in the late seventeenth century. This was the site of a windigo case in 1798. LAC, ROBERT BELL, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA COLLECTION, PA-039925

Francis Wark Beatton, who described an instance of windigo transformation in his journal. Beatton was the local HBC post official at Trout Lake, Alberta, in the late 1800s. IMAGE D-04319, COURTESY OF ROYAL BC MUSEUM, BC ARCHIVES

The main HBC buildings at York Factory, northeastern Manitoba, 1915. LAC, G.H. HERRIOT, CANADA DEPARTMENT OF MINES AND TECHNICAL SURVEY FONDS/PA-023099

Sled dogs outside HBC buildings at York Factory, n.d. Dogs were the natural enemies of windigos in many First Nations narratives. LAC, ROBERT BELL, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA COLLECTION, PA-040077

First Nations children holding letters that spell out goodbye at the Fort Simpson Indian Residential School, Fort Simpson, NWT, 1922. Indigenous children across Canada were taken from their homes and placed in these schools, where they often suffered abuse. The church-run schools were intended to eradicate traditional beliefs, such as the windigo, which were seen as superstitious or backward. Today, some modern First Nations artists and authors use the windigo to symbolize residential school abuse and other forms of discrimination their people have suffered at the hands of Euro-Canadian colonizers. LAC, J.F. MORAN, DEPARTMENT OF INDIAN AND NORTHERN AFFAIRS FONDS, PA-102575

Wood supply for the residential school at Vermilion, Alberta, n.d. LAC, DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR FONDS, PA-040757

Lake Windigo on Star Island in Cass Lake, Minnesota, n.d. A rich oral tradition regarding the windigo survives in the area, particularly regarding Lake Windigo. MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

GLOSSARY

Algonquian A Native American culture group that extends from California to Virginia, but which is predominantly found on the northern plains and boreal forest of North America. This is geographically the largest culture group on the continent. A divergent spelling is Algonkian.

Algonquin A First Nation that is one of the many Algonquian peoples. Their language is related to Anishinaabe/Ojibwa.

Anishinaabe An Algonquian people also known as the Ojibwa/Ojibwe, located in the Western Great Lakes and upper Midwest. The plural form is Anishinaabeg. This book uses the terms Anishinaabe and Ojibwa.

Atoosh In East Cree, this word indicated a spirit being that could either be a cannibal giant or a spirit similar to the windigo, which could transform a human being into a murderous creature.

Chenoo A giant cannibal spirit being in the belief system of the Mi’kmaw of Atlantic Canada.

Cree A

diverse group of Northern Algonquian peoples who received the name Cree from the French. These peoples shared a related culture that stretched from northern Alberta through Quebec, but likely thought of themselves as diverse peoples until well after European contact.

Innu An Algonquian people in northern Quebec and Labrador. This culture group was known historically as the Naskapi (who lived in the coastal region) and Montagnais (who lived predominantly in the interior).

Manitôhkân An image or sculpture that was an object of veneration or worship, as it represented a particular spirit. The term comes from the Plains Cree.

Manitou Great spirit or creator. The term can also refer to a sacred and positive power.

Midewiwin A healing society in Anishinaabe society.

Mi’kmaq A First Nations people in Atlantic Canada. The term is plural and is used to refer to the nation. The singular (to use as an adjective) is Mi’kmaw.

Mishebishu A panther or serpent-like being that lives in lakes and rivers and engages in perpetual warfare with the thunder- birds. It is dangerous to speak of this being, except in winter when the waters are frozen over.

Oblate A religious congregation within the Catholic Church.

Ojibwa See Anishinaabe.

Omeshkego A Cree people who inhabit the Hudson Bay Lowlands. Also known historically as the Muskegon Cree.

Pawakan I

n Plains Cree, spirit helper that would appear to young men during a vision quest and help and protect them throughout their lives. It can also refer to a totem figure of a spirit helper. The plural is Pawakanak.

Shaking Tent A temporary structure constructed out of poles thrust into the earth, typically wrapped in skins or canvas, used to house shamans as they consulted with the spirits. The structure would shake violently once the spirits were contacted.

Wigwam A housing structure typically built using bark interwoven upon a bent-branch frame.

Windigo Also wendigo, wee-tee-ko, wîhtikow, and witiko (amongst many others). A cannibalistic spirit being that can transform a man, woman, child, or animal into an asocial and murderous being. This term can also refer to a giant cannibal being in oral narratives of ancient times. In Plains Cree belief, this term often refers to a clown-like being. The meaning of the term evolved through time. I use the term windigo, because it is the most common English spelling.

FOREWORD

"Windigo psychosis may well be the most perfect example

of the construction of an Aboriginal mental disorder by the

scholarly professions, and its persistence dramatically

underscores how constructions by these professions have,

like Frankenstein’s monster, taken on a life of their own."

JAMES WALDRAM—REVENGE OF THE WINDIGO (2004)

ONE LIKES TO IMAGINE OUR  heroes as tricksters.

For some reason, as an Anishinaabe person, I have always thought of Johnny Depp as a hero. Maybe it’s because he claims Cherokee ancestry (which no biographer confirms), but you might know the old joke: In America, every white person’s great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess. Maybe it’s because of his role as William Blake in James Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), or the film he directed and starred in about a sacrificial indian, The Brave (1997). So his portrayal of the iconic white representation of indian heroism in the Disneyfied meditation on manifest destiny, The Lone Ranger (2013), bothered me.

Depp says that his costume, black face/white face crowned by a dead crow, was inspired by a Kirby Sattler painting. From what I can tell, Kirby Sattler is a white man who doesn’t claim that his great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess. He simply interprets indian identity according to personal ideological aesthetics:

The portraits I paint are composites created from a variety of visual references coupled with my imagination. While being broadly based in a historical context, my paintings are not intended to be viewed as historically accurate. I used the combination of face paint and headdress as an artistic expression to symbolize the subject’s essence and his affinity to the Crow.

Typically, the Crow remember themselves as Apsáalooke. After a history of conflict with other Native American tribes, they mostly ended up in Montana. The name Crow derives from contact with Europeans via transmission through other tribes, who, having displaced the Apsáalooke, might have chosen the label people of the crow pejoratively. Historical methodology being what it is, we may never know.

Nevertheless, whether or not the Apsáalooke wore dead crows as hats cannot be confirmed. The paintings of Kirby Sattler do affirm, however, mainstream America’s tendency to equalize indians as symbolic essences. In turn, this act symbolizes the essence of Euro-Western social science.

Yet Johnny Depp, my hero, wears a dead-crow hat and dons black face/white face to participate in a pseudo-blockbuster that cost $200 million to create and earned only $86.9 million.

One likes to imagine our heroes as tricksters. In The Lone Ranger, Johnny Depp’s Tonto is a windigo hunter. But Tonto is Cheyenne. Unless one wishes to speculate on gossip among the southwestern Arapaho, the Cheyenne, and the Algonquin peoples of northeastern North America, accounting for the prevalence of the windigo legend in Disney’s representation of Cheyenne culture is problematic. The hat made out of a dead crow, inspired by a painting that habituates the social science prevalence of symbolizing the essence of the subject of indianness, does not evince deep reflection on cultural distinctions that distinguish peoples from people.

Maybe, though, my hero is a trickster.

The trickster is a stock character of Native storytelling, the Brer Rabbit of indianness. He plays tricks. He plays jokes. He always gets the upper hand. And he is always present.

Maybe sometimes he laughs because it suffices to don a dead crow for a hat.

Always he uses comedy to draw attention to the strangeness of human tragedy.

The trickster is a Native convention and a rhetorical device.

Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor has much to say about the trickster’s significance to Native language games, which he privileges as comic discourse in opposition to mere responses to colonialist demands or social science theories. Social science theories constrain tribal landscapes to institutional values, representationalism, and the politics of academic determination, says Vizenor in his essay Trickster Discourse (1990). Social science is a monologue, not a discussion, because social scientists reduce tribal literatures to an ‘objective’ collection of consumable cultural artifacts. Like war paint. And hats made out of dead crows.

It smacks of the 1960s TV ethos of Star Trek, which envisioned strange new worlds where no man had gone before, except that when they got there and found something like men on strange new worlds, they hunkered down and tried to adhere to a prime directive, which mandated no imposition of superior ideology and value systems on the primitive people who inevitably taught them something valuable.

Vizenor says:

Tribal literatures are burdened with colonialism and tragic world views; however, there is a curious humanism in tribal narratives on minacious consumerism. Serious attention to cultural hyperrealities is an invitation to trickster discourse, an imaginative liberation in comic narratives … Tribal narratives are creative productions rather than social science monologues; the trickster is a comic trope, chance in a narrative wisp, tribal discourse, and an irreversible innovation in literature … Comic signs in tribal narratives, and then tragic modes in translations and imposed histories, are seldom mentioned in social science research and ‘discoveries.’1

When fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European explorers discovered North America, they heard the Indigenous peoples living there refer to them as manitou. Limited understanding of that term led them to believe that the people thought of them as gods. While one might translate the term manitou as god, we should not mistake manitous for gods. Manitous are not divinities in the predominantly Christian Euro-Western sense. Manitous are spirits in the belief systems of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and other Algonquian peoples of North America that Shawn Smallman focuses on in this valuable collection of windigo tales.

Algonquin tradition simply identifies the windigo as one of many manitous. As Smallman points out, typically the windigo is a malevolent manitou whose insatiable appetite for human flesh can never be satisfied, and the windigo also has the power to turn humans into cannibals who suffer the same voracity. However, Native storytellers such as Basil Johnston challenge the assumption that the windigo is exclusively malevolent. The windigo can confer rewards upon the moderate. The windigo is a metaphor for excess, and by extrapolation it encourages moderation.

Smallman’s argument deserves respect as a history of true horror stories relating to the Euro-Western encounter with windigo psychosis, in contrast to sensationalized fictional accounts that smack of legend and folklore. Windigo entered the mainstream through compilations, translations, and borrowings, including Mary Hartwell Catherwood’s The Windigo, from her 1894 book The Chase of Saint-Castin and Other Stories of the French in the New World; Herbert T. Schwarz’s Windigo and Other Tales of the Ojibways (1969); Howard Norman’s Where the Chill Came From: Cree Windigo Tales and Journeys (1982); Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz’s Wesakaychak, the Windigo, and the Ermine in American Indian Trickster Tales (1999); Anne M. Dunn’s Winter Thunder: Retold Tales (2000); John Robert Colombo’s Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction (1982); Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983); Eden Robinson’s Dogs in Winter from her collection Traplines (1996); Stephen Graham Jones’s The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (2000) and All the Beautiful Sinners (2003); Michael Jensen’s Firelands (2004); Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003); Edmund Metatawabin’s Hanaway (2004); Louise Erdrich’s poem Windigo (2010); Armand Garnet Ruffo’s A Windigo Tale (2010); and Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998). Cinema participates as well. Windigo aficionados should see director Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999); Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) and The Last Winter (2006); Norma Bailey’s (from the book by Gordon Sinclair Jr.) Cowboys and Indians: The J.J. Harper Story (2003); Grant Harvey’s Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004); and, of course, Jerry Bruckheimer’s The Lone Ranger (2013).

These allegorical adaptations invoke the sociopolitical tensions of contact between Euro-Western imperialism and Indigenous cultures. Windigo—as recently as the Disneyfied reiteration of manifest destiny and American white–red relations in Lone Ranger—often excuses Western capitalistic expansion and cultural appropriation as a rational response to the symptoms of a windigo psychosis. The niceties of former social science substitutions for the term cannibalism dissolve. After all, the term windigo derives etymologically from the Algonquian word wétikowatisewin, which denotes diabolical wickedness or cannibalism. Parse it any way you like. Imperialism is cannibalism, the consumption of one people by another.

As Smallman points out, the escalation of legal cases citing windigo psychosis and the proliferation of colonization fascinatingly entwine. Some might argue that Indigenous peoples were stressed by dwindling resources and deadly diseases introduced by European settlers and therefore resorted to cannibalism to survive. Starvation spawned by Euro-Western imperial colonization might have brought tales of the windigo into mainstream Canadian and American thinking. In fact, Smallman’s examination of the historical reports of windigo phenomena suggest that explorers, fur traders, missionaries, the police, psychologists, and social scientists sought to understand, define, and use this ‘disorder,’ as companies and the state sought to assert their authority in Cree and Ojibwa communities. Accordingly, an imperial context shaped both the discursive and practical responses of non-Algonquians to the windigo.

Nevertheless, Indigenous scholars emphasize that Euro-Western perspectives are incapable of accounting for this rare phenomenon, contending that only northern Algonquian cosmologies can authentically address the cultural tragedies signified by windigo stories. Dismissing the experience of the windigo as a form of insanity or the stuff of legend emboldens the imperialist myth that windigo psychosis is a politically convenient psychological disorder.

The kind of disorder that makes tricksters look crazy because they wear dead-crow hats.

GRACE L. DILLON, PROFESSOR

Indigenous Nations Studies,

Portland State University

INTRODUCTION

IN JANUARY 1910, PEOPLE IN  a Cree community had decided to kill Marie Boucon, whom they believed had been transformed by the windigo, a cannibal spirit. Word of this situation soon reached the police, however, and Sergeant McLeod took her away to safety, with her family’s permission. Unable to care for the woman himself, he brought her to the Sisters of Providence at the St. Henry’s Mission, which lay in Fort Vermilion, Alberta, over six hundred kilometres northwest of Edmonton. The trip through the deep forests of northern Alberta in winter, during the darkest time of the year, while caring for a woman with homicidal urges, terrified even the woman’s family. During the trip, Marie’s two sons carried rifles to protect both themselves and others from their mother. But when the party approached the mission, it was Marie who was terrified of these strangers, especially the sisters. She had never seen people like this, and she did not speak their language. She was also afraid that she might not be able to control her violent urges. For this reason, she asked that the tallest and largest of the priests stay with her, to keep her from attacking anyone. At first, the sisters tried to downplay her fears. The Mother Superior reassured her that she was not transforming into a cannibal and that she did not need a guard. Still, the sisters were careful, because they discreetly searched her belongings before placing her in a room next to the kitchen. For Marie, this was a frightening period; if she bit one of the sisters, they might kill her. It was a week before Marie dared to leave the house.

Eight days after her arrival, she had a difficult, restless day and pleaded with the sisters to have a priest or some big men sleep in her room that night. When Sister Theogene refused, Marie insisted that she might have to feed in the night. The Sister Superior spoke to her lovingly, told her that she was not a windigo and could not eat everyone. After this conversation, Marie went to sleep happy, and the sisters heard no more about cannibals. The sister who kept the chronicle noted that Marie had a great deal of stomach pain, which caused her constant suffering. But she drank a great deal of holy water, and nobody was as devout as she, for she never missed a weekly communion.1

In August, the chronicler noted that Marie had seemed well for a few months but in the summer heat had become outraged about the disappearance of her bag of magic medicine. She had burst into a room in a rage, threatening to beat everyone, especially the children: Do not say it out loud; it is a Sister who has done this good deed. After having opened the package we threw it into the fire. It contained stones, sand, roots, dry leaves, red ragged claws and hair. Poor Marie believes that she will die without these sorceries, and supposes that all those who look at her to be in its possession.2 Marie Boucon had been desperately drinking holy water to heal herself, perhaps to treat the ice she believed was forming in her heart, which marked a human’s transformation into a windigo. But she had also relied on her treasured amulet, which many Cree people used during this period to protect themselves from windigos. She must have hidden it carefully when she arrived, because it had somehow escaped the Sisters’ initial search. Perhaps she believed that by drawing on both Christian and Cree religious traditions, she would have the strength to overcome the evil that endangered her. Now that her talisman had been destroyed, how would she save herself from transforming into a windigo? To understand what Marie believed was happening to her, one needs to examine Indigenous beliefs in the northern United States and