Wîhtikôw, the Winter Cannibal Monster

The wîhtikôw (windigo) is the cannibal monster of the Cree winter: a gaunt or gigantic man-eater with a heart of solid ice, associated with famine, isolation, and the north. Cree tradition holds that a person could become wîhtikôw by resorting to cannibalism in famine, by dreaming of the being, or through hostile sorcery, and communities took urgent measures, including melting the ice heart with fire or burning the body, to stop a windigo before it killed. Documented windigo cases from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, especially in northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, made this being one of the most intensively studied figures of Algonquian religion; in a well-recorded 1896 case at Trout Lake, Alberta, the afflicted man spoke of ice rising within his body and begged his relatives to kill him. In the East Cree communities of James Bay the same monster is known as atuush.

Domains

• winter
• cannibalism

Powers

• to hunt and devour human beings
• to turn people into cannibal monsters like itself through dreams, possession, or famine cannibalism
• to grow gigantic and gaunt, strengthening with winter cold and starvation

Sources

• Brightman, Robert A. 'The Windigo in the Material World.' Ethnohistory 35, no. 4 (1988): 337–379.
• Carlson, Nathan D. 'Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of "Cannibal Monsters" in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910.' Ethnohistory 56, no. 3 (2009): 355–394.
• Teicher, Morton I. Windigo Psychosis: A Study of a Relationship between Belief and Behavior among the Indians of Northeastern Canada. Seattle: American Ethnological Society / University of Washington Press, 1960.