Case file · Folklore / legend
Wendigo
A malevolent spirit of Algonquian peoples' traditions, linked to insatiable hunger, cannibalism and winter starvation.
1878 CE · 55.00, -115.00 · status: legend
The account
The Jesuit Relations of 1661 describe strange killings associated with the belief. In the winter of 1878, Plains Cree trapper Swift Runner, starving with his family, became a famous case of so-called wendigo psychosis. In some First Nations communities the concept also describes destructive greed, including damage to the environment.
The sceptical view
Psychiatry describes 'wendigo psychosis' as a culture-bound syndrome, tied to famine and desperate cannibalism. The wendigo is best understood within Algonquian cultures and their moral teachings, not as a generic horror monster.
Connections in the atlas
- Jack Fiddler and the windigo trial
- Wendigo (windigo)
- Abishabis, the Cree prophet
- Thunderbird
- Yee naaldlooshii (Diné tradition)