E16 The Windigo: From Legend to Pop Culture

Great Lakes Lore

Episode Notes

The legendary monster of Algonquian lore, the Windigo (or Wendigo), regularly appears in popular culture, but how well is it represented? What is the Windigo? Samantha and Aaron dive into the legend of the Windigo, explore actual Windigo cases, and then put television and comic books to task. Who passes and who fails? What do we lose when the monster is removed from its cultural context? Find out in this week’s episode of Great Lakes Lore!

The Windigo’s MO- 1:39 Cannibalism!- 5:52 Jack Fiddler the Windigo Hunter- 8:47 The Swift Runner Case- 12:37 The Windigo and Canadian Law- 14:52 L’Espagnol- 17:57 Midway Break- 20:26 Algernon Blackwood- 27:32 Native American Legends in Pop Culture- 29:55 X-Files and the Manitou- 32:56 Hulk Smash Windigo!- 39:02 Charmed- 41:46 Supernatural- 43:22 Windigo Psychosis- 49:25 Wrap-Up- 53:20

Jack Fiddler

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer "Cannibals and Colonizers: An Analysis of the Wendigo in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine" by Elaine Tousignant from The University of San Francisco

"The Windigo Psychosis: Psychodynamic, Cultural, and Social Factors in Aberrant Behavior" by Thomas H. Hay

"The Windigo in the Material World" by Robert R. Brightman in Ethnohistory 35, no. 4 (1988): 337–79.

Gitchi Bitobig, Grand Marais: Early Accounts of the Anishinaabeg and the North Shore Fur Trade by Timothy Cochrane Nazare, Joe. “The Horror! The Horror? The Appropriation, and Reclamation, of Native American Mythology.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 1 (41) (2000): 24–51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308417.

DeSanti, Brady. Journal of Religion & Popular Culture, Fall 2015, Vol. 27 Issue 3, p186-201

Evans, Catherine L. “Heart of Ice: Indigenous Defendants and Colonial Law in the Canadian North-West.” Law and History Review 36, no. 2 (2018): 199–234. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26564583.

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