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hello everyone and welcome to myths
matter with jamesport now I want to talk
to you guys about the Wendigo myth
specifically this week because there's
some really interesting things that are
happening with it like the coyote myth
there are lots of renditions of it which
is why we showed the Wendigo both as a
wraithlike monster and as human beings
who just happen to be cannibals because
different cultures different tribes
render the window in both different ways
but what's really interesting about the
Windigo myth is how it grew over time
and became more prevalent so the
extraordinary thing about the way the
Windigo myth grows is the fact that it
was not a enormous leak Amida there was
just one of many of the different
monsters or terrors that we'll get told
within these cultures but as european
expansion into the area around the great
lakes sort of picks up pace you start
getting more and more tellings of the
Windigo myth or at least the window
shows up in more and more tales in the
records that we have of it and this
actually makes total sense right this is
exactly what myths are supposed to do
for us because they give us an insight
into the culture what's the Windigo myth
about it's a myth about starvation right
- myth about hunger and we get these
groups being pushed off their
traditional lands pushed off the places
where they know where to hunt and they
know where to fish in the areas where
they may not be able to support
themselves as well so of course
naturally what happens well this myth
sort of becomes more common because the
nature of myths is to help us process
the world and understand it and relate
what's going on to us into our society
and so the Wendigo myth grows as these
tribes are forced out by Western
expansion so the really interesting
thing about this
is that as academics have gone back and
studied the Wendigo myth there's a line
of thinking that's been developed that
says that the Wendigo myth is
representative of western expansion and
this makes some sense right on a surface
level you've got this pale ravenous
beast but on a deeper level you have
this way of processing but two totally
different worldviews because you have
this group of Western settlers operating
on our modern economic notions coming in
and continuously taking more and more
land and you have the native peoples who
are asking wait don't you have enough
you already have land why do you need
more why do you need hours and the
Windigo had served in the mythological
structure of these cultures for a long
time as a warning against
overconsumption don't kill all the
beaver don't eat all your food don't
over fish or you're going to end up
hungry and starving and as a Wendigo
right and the Wendigo itself was always
ravenous no matter how much it ate it
was always even more hungry and I in
some ways that had to be how the native
people were seeing the settlers coming
in and taking more and more and more and
not understanding why more was never
enough but what's really mind-blowing
about this it's the idea of Wendigo
psychosis what is that you ask good
questions it's a psychological diagnosis
that Western settlers sort of created as
they entered the land around the Great
Lakes and they encountered these native
tribes they heard myths of the Wendigo
they heard about sort of some of these
shamans or medicine people of these
tribes curing people of being possessed
by the Windigo and they developed this
notion of Wendigo psychosis that is
largely minute debunked but was a very
popular psychological idea especially in
the nineteenth century and it was this
idea that certain members of the
indigenous people would despont aeneas
ly be overcome by this intense craving
for human flesh
mamie try to resist it but they would
still be there they would I expect ibly
just want to consume human flesh and I
think this is a tale that gets adopted
in some ways because these groups wanted
to make other or more strange or more
primitive the groups they were
encountering to justify taking some of
that land but you get tails of it
you get recordings we have logs of
explorers and settlers and other
European groups I think we even have
some criminal court records of people
who were possessed by the Wendigo or
specifically in all these Western logs
had Wendigo psychosis now this idea has
been almost completely debunked in
modern times but it's really interesting
how this myth got adopted and then
reviewed through a Western lens as oh
this isn't a myth this is these people
trying to explain a psychological
condition and then applying that's like
a lot of cognition back onto them in
order to sort of lower the status of
those people or make them in some ways I
mean in some ways to dehumanize them
right and so that's the tale going full
circle and so this myth tells us about
the culture itself through this idea of
the Wendigo this warning against
consumption about what they were dealing
with in terms of its growth and
prevalence as they got pushed out of
their native lands as a way to process
two different worldviews as they're
trying to understand this Western
expansion to their territory and then
finally reinterpreted through this
European side as a psychological issue
that occurs only to these other people
right and so it's fascinating it tells
us a lot about the psychology and the
history and what both these groups were
going through and how they were thinking
of one another
as this period unfolds and that's why we
look both to myth and the history as we
study a culture as we learn about who we
are and how we got here
so with that join us next week for the
oldest written myth of all the epic of
gilgamesh see y'all then
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