windigo

noun

1. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative spelling of wendigo.

   “A windigo is an Indian who has eaten, or who (perhaps a poor lunatic) says he wants to eat, human flesh. At Sturgeon Lake (Bishop Clut tells us), among the Indians uninfluenced by religion, there were some supposed windigos. A sudden fear of them seized upon the other Indians, and they executed one windigo. The important point in such a case was to make the cannibal vomit up the ice which he was supposed to have in his inside.”

   “The Windigo is a flesh-eating, wintry demon with a man buried deep inside of it. In some Chippewa stories, a young girl vanquishes this monster by forcing boiling lard down its throat, thereby releasing the human at the core of ice.”

   “The noun windigo [Ojibwa wīntikō, Cree wīhtikōw] refers to one of a class of anthropophagous monsters, “supernatural” from a non-Algonquian perspective, who exhibit grotesque physical and behavioral abnormalities and possess great spiritual and physical power.”

   “No one is safe in such times, not even the Cree of Mushkegowuk. War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth.”