Human or Windigo?: How We Rooted Ourselves in Darkness and How We Can Branch into Light

Windigo "Deer Monster" Illustration by Dane Cozens

Colonizers of this world have used organized religion, geographical terraforming, ethical justifications, and even biological warfare against the best interests of human populations. Colonization of land and people often involves the extraction of physical materials necessary for survival, but it also involves the colonization of our thought and beliefs, allowing empires to also influence our ideas, ethics, and conceptions of reality. Along the way of colonization, European settlers enacted genocide and ecocide on Native cultures. The Anishinaabe peoples of North America have a belief in a monstrous, human-like spirit, the Windigo. There are many who hold a mindset that is perfectly described by this word, which is evident when observing the actions of those in authority.

Ethics illuminate our choices, revealing what kind of people we truly are. The Windigo mindset of greed and destruction still exists. Activism paves the way for us to spread the humanitarian mindset that is necessary today. One person’s voice can give rise to powerful activism. With courage, we can topple fear and oppression.

A common motive of the European settlers was to spread paranoia and ideas amongst the settled population about the Native peoples, which helped to establish the picture of the untamed natural world. One of the methods colonizers used to destroy the Native peoples' worlds is called terraforming. In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, author Amitav Ghosh describes and analyzes the process of terraforming:

“Wars of terraforming were thus biopolitical conflicts in which entire populations were subjected to forms of violence that included massive biological and ecological disruptions. In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville captures the nature of this kind of conflict, which was fought primarily not with guns and weapons, but by means of broader environmental changes”. (Ghosh)

The Natives were caretakers of the land before it was violently stolen from them and shaped into an entirely different world. Terraforming became a new method of not only growing an empire, but directly reshaping the inhabited land that belonged to Native people. As terraforming continued, violent genocide cut down Native populations by the millions. This displays the dark nature of the Windigo in action, destroying and consuming everything for itself, but never feeling sated or satisfied.

In the history of colonization, there was a heavy practice of erasure, genocide, and ecocide. Colonization often times cannot be separated from the practice of erasure, which includes genocide. Colonies or even whole countries over time have been built on an attempt to create what is known as a tabula rasa, a Latin phrase that means “blank slate” or “scraped tablet”. Windigo intentions fill a mind with pure hunger of domination and consumption, and in the process of violent consumption, things that once existed are erased without a second thought or remorse. We see this tendency in capitalist societies organized around infinite economic growth.

The Windigo is named after a deep, hidden, selfish part of all of us that cares more about its own survival than anything else. The Windigo is a ravenous monster with an insatiable hunger. Capitalism creates a vicious cycle of extreme wealth accumulation, reducing the amount of currency available to the middle and working classes. This economic infrastructure transforms people into Windigo-like figures. We can see this impacts of this selfish nature taken to the scale of an entire settler colonial culture in the actions against Native peoples in the history of the United States of America.

While the legend of the Windigo describes a monstrous version of someone who was once a human, the philosophy of the Windigo is alive in many - especially those with power - as we have seen historically and in the present day. There is an abuse of power, privilege, and a shortage of empathy. Many are historically and systematically impacted by the Windigo actions of those in power. While uprooting ethnic groups, clear-cutting thousands of acres of forests, or signing off on orders to fund genocide, humanity as a whole suffers alongside the land. The light - a possible solution to this darkness - remains difficult to define. Humanity might push themselves further into conditions of scarcity and a polluted, dark life. Inequalities that persist now have accumulated for decades or centuries and can be still further exacerbated. However, humanity will never lose its grasp on free speech, solidarity, and moral courage.

Fighting the Windigo means to do the right thing; to speak up when necessary; to see Earth as a living organism; to value the knowledge of Indigenous peoples; to restore reciprocity; and to utterly reject the ideas of endless consumption, severance from nature, and domination.

Botanist and Essayist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “To defeat him (the Windigo), we must live as if the world were a gift.” We must instill the ideas from gift economies into our lives, economies, politics, relationships with the Earth, and beliefs to starve the Windigo.

To speak out is power. To acknowledge, to converse, to protest is power. To willingly stay silent for those who have been censored or fear erasure is letting the Windigo win. The grass is never greener on the side where we stay silent, whether that silence is maintained because we are uncomfortable or because it seemingly takes far too much effort to advocate or fight. Fighting the Windigo is a daunting task, but the lives, the land, the knowledge, and the cultures consumed by it is a far more damning loss.

Erasure is powerful, but our voices can be even more powerful, lighting the fire of change that we need for a much brighter future.

Let’s “Starve the Windigo” once and for all, just as Kimmerer wrote.

-- Romeo Shamoun and Megi Tsvetkova

Works Cited:

Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse. Hachette UK Distribution. 2022.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions. 2015.

Fixico, Donald L. “When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization.’” History.Com, A&E Television Networks, 18 Apr. 2025, www.history.com/articles/native-americans-genocide-united-states.

“Genocide of Indigenous Peoples.” Holocaust Museum Houston, 2 Aug. 2023, hmh.org/library/research/genocide-of-indigenous-peoples-guide/.