Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

As the author walks across a field in snowshoes, hearing a distant shriek in the blizzard, she says, “The Windigo is afoot” (303). The Windigo is a legendary monster of the Anishinaabe. It looks like a 10-foot tall man with yellow fangs and a heart made of ice. A personification of ravenous gluttony and greed, it is so insatiably hungry that it chewed its own lips off. It is a human who has “become a cannibal monster” (304) and whose bite transforms victims into Windigos themselves. Long ago, when the depths of winter would lead to starvation, cannibalism was a real issue for Indigenous people. The Windigo embodies this fear of famine, reinforcing the taboo against eating humans.

There are cultural, folkloric, scientific, and anthropological explanations for the prevalence of the Windigo mythology. The myth helps people learn “why we should recoil from the greedy part of ourselves” (306). It is a warning against self-destructive habits, which today include addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and technology. These warnings also apply to corporations and countries, evident in the environmental destruction all over the world. In the author’s view, the Windigo is now consumerism, whether that takes the form of a diamond mine in Rwanda or a closet full of clothes.