Fun fact: the wendigo translates from Algonquin to "the-spirit-of-lonely-places."

The wendigo was associated with the cold and hunger of winter, the deep cabin fever loneliness that sets in when the night takes over most of the day.

The wendigo arose in hunger, were hunger personified: ravenous cannibals, usually emaciated and corpselike.

Everyone had different ideas of where wendigos came from and how they spread.

Some thought they were created by people so desperate they resorted to cannibalism. Or people whose greed and selfishness turned them into monsters while still human. Or people who'd spent too long near such monsters.

Wendigo psychosis, cases of people convinced they'd been possessed by a wendigo, are sensational and gory but not as interesting as what the wendigo represented.

See, among the Ojibwe, the wendigo was a symbol of what happens when greed, selfishness, and antisociality merge to form something harmful to society and the environment.

Wendigos represented anything, from beliefs to individuals, whose selfishness and greed tore apart the structure of society and destroyed communities.

White men heard about the wendigo, and focused on the stories about men eating their families, men disappearing into the forest and found hunched over a neighbor's body, etc.

They never noticed that *they* were the wendigos, and their beliefs were wendigo beliefs.

If you could show a 19th century Ojibwe man Jeff Bezos, or the president, he'd instantly recognize them as wendigos. People whose inhuman greed and selfishness had turned them into ravenous monsters cannibalizing others to satisfy their hungers.

If you told him about the economic system that had created them, and allowed them to thrive, he'd be horrified to discover that an entire society had voluntarily become wendigos.

Show him tv ads and he'd be utterly horrified to find ravenous antisocial hunger and selfishness on a scale impossible for him to imagine.

He'd see the entire country as a wendigo society, devouring itself at an ungodly pace, poorest and most vulnerable members first.

What's interesting is that the wendigo symbolizes the fear of someone forgetting that they live in a society.

Every day on social media, you are assaulted with wendigos. Wendigos refusing to wear masks, spitting on people, making billions of dollars while employees starve, etc

Your wendigo president tweets self-congratulation as his actions cause 100,000 to die in needless agony.

Your wendigo companies lay you off, and ask you to make your own masks.

Your wendigo neighbor throws a loud party in their backyard, exposing his immunocompromised neighbors to death.

You go online and it's wendigos as far as the eye can see, an infinite sea of ravenous all-consuming hunger can willingness to kill anyone who tries to stop the feeding frenzy

If you showed literally any Algonquin from the past the state of america, they'd recognize every aspect of it as being possessed by wendigos. Not a single thing that hasn't been tainted into ravenous greed and willingness to fuck over anyone else.

He'd think about the scariest wendigo story he'd heard, and then compare it to just the number of school shootings each year, or police brutality, or the number of elderly who freeze each year, or *any* part of how america works

The scariest wendigo story isn't a man eating his family in the cold of winter, it's a country cheering itself as it shovels its most vulnerable into the fires of capitalism.

Basically: karen is a wendigo, not a slur.

Oh, another fun fact: the wiindigookaanzhimowin, a dance to ward off the wendigo, involved wearing a mask