Windigo ways

For many of us, as children, we frequently learn the lessons of our society and culture through stories, often frightening tales that hold profound life lessons. That was as true in traditional European cultures as it was in Anishinaabe society, where the story of the Windigo taught children the fundamental lessons necessary to be a productive member of a commons-based society where concepts of private property and the accumulation of wealth were not only frowned upon, but practically unknown.
Those few who did consume in excess were a danger to other band members because at times, particularly during the Hunger Moon of late winter, food was scarce and sharing was essential to survival for all. The thought of hoarding food at a time when others were hungry would have shocked the conscience of any self-respecting member of such a society.
The Windigo, so the story goes, was a human who fell victim to self-indulgence and greed, and in that fall from grace, was turned into a monster who consumes without end, suffering a gnawing hunger that never dies. Such a person would be banished from a culture based on sharing, doomed to forever haunt the world alone.
The author Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation, closely allied with the Ojibwe, sees much more in the story of this Native bogeyman than just a children’s tale.
Kimmerer, a professor at State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and director of its Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, sees the presence and the damage wrought by the Windigos of our present day.
“The native habitat of the Windigo is the north woods,” she writes in her now classic environmental bestseller, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” “but the range has expanded in the last few centuries… the footprints are all around us once you know what to look for.”
Kimmerer sees the rampages of the Windigo in the self-destructive epidemics of addiction, to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and technology, as well as environmental devastation.
Windigo footprints are all around, notes Kimmerer: “They are the tracks of insatiable consumption.”
Kimmerer recalls a scene while walking down a street in Manhattan. “Where the warm light of a lavish home spilled out over the sidewalk on a man picking through the garbage for his dinner. Maybe we’ve all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We’ve accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger when it is belonging that we crave.”
Indeed, Kimmerer finds the Windigo at work on an even grander scale. “We seem to be living in an era of Windigo economics of fabricated demand and compulsive overconsumption.” It leaves Kimmerer fearful of a world that seems turned inside out, with the dark side made to seem light. “Indulgent self-interest that our people once held as monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as ‘quality of life’ but eats us from within.”
It’s easy to understand Kimmerer’s fear in a world, and in an America, where billionaires – the ultimate Windigos – set the agenda and pervert our very government to serve their interest in the endless accumulation of more and more. While a few billionaires have used portions of their vast wealth for good, the billionaires currently throwing their weight around in Washington have never shown the slightest hint of generosity. For them, life is a never-ending quest to take an even larger piece of the pie, with no consideration of how doing so might affect others.
Perhaps that should come as no surprise since our capitalist society has come to measure success almost solely in terms of money. It’s so ingrained in the popular American mindset that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way – that there are alternatives that could lead to a more just society and a greater sense of belonging.
We live on a finite planet. It is madness to assume we can ever find a sustainable and satisfying future without changing our ways. What if we found value in healing the planet and we healed ourselves at the same time? What if we recognized Windigo thinking for what it was: A hollow lie that leaves everyone and everything poorer for believing it?