Hey. Wanna hear something scary?
It came from the sea one day, such a speck on the horizon that we speculated maybe a seal had found itself afloat on a raft of well-congealed debris. It set the old men alight with stories of strange things they’d seen at sea and fishing in dark waters far from home. By night, however, it was an eyeless brown head and yellow forehead, wrinkled with worry, but inching ever closer. The nose was thin and pointed outward. The head bobbed along, its mouth, if it had one, always just beneath the surface of the crest. It pointed at us until we were too sick to look any more. All the men slept inside that night. By morning, its belly scraped the sand and as the sun rose from behind it, the head burst open.
Boats filled with black and white figures, howling and barking to each other. They rowed slowly toward the land, where our homes and families were! We watched in horror as the figures became more and more visible. Their hands and faces were so pale and gaunt, lined with blue and purple. Someone said they could not have had any blood in them. On the shore, we ran for our lives to arm ourselves and pray. The last to return spoke frantically of how some had yellow eyes and some were the blue tone of a person frozen solid by winter. A man said as they stepped off the boats, he saw one with skin peeling from their lips.
At first, we avoided them and the fear ate at my belly. It twisted me inside so it hurt with hunger, but I could not eat. We whispered about the nightmares. I told about one night I saw my own head in the water, cracking open and more spilling out, spilling from my mouth. “Don’t say it!” my best friend hushed. “They put the dream there. Your mouth is letting them out! Don’t make it true.” She put her hands on both sides of my head. We agreed we wouldn’t talk about the dreams anymore.
Then more and more, we heard talk about the real creatures. “They’re people. Like us,” they would say. I would never go and hid my face as they came and went with my people. Some started speaking like them, wearing their black cloth. “They are people, like us, from somewhere else,” I heard, but I could not see a person look at me the way they looked at me. I saw them suck the very stories from our mouths, gave us new names, and we found ourselves using their words even though they had taken ours, even when I never spoke among them. Then, when they used the words taken from our mouths, they didn’t mean what they once meant and lost all their power. We lost the power to fight back with those words. We lost the ability to teach our children with those words. So we used the words they put in our mouths to teach our children, even though they were poisoned from the first use. My people were murdered and starved, our children stolen. All of this we could fight. But who could imagine, how do you fight your own poisoned story?
If not an older brother or sister – we all have that cousin, neighbor kid, or spooky auntie or uncle who practically came to life with the opportunity of just the right darkness, lack of adults, and low volumes to whisper the phrase “wanna hear something scary?” Little is it known, it derives from an ancient incantation which knocks on the doorway to raise the spirits and also the hairs on your arms and neck. (That is your own spirit jumping in your skin with surprise.) This is the reason grown-ups can’t be around. They hush and remind you that it’s for your protection, because when you speak names, the spirits can hear you. You’re knocking and they will answer. So you’re smudged and cedar-shoed and sent to bed, where cousin can put her face too close to yours and whisper what can’t be said. The scary thing that she only heard because she listened to two aunties whispering to each other, too close and under the cover of darkness over that tin coffee percolator.
“Nuh-uh!” you whine, shattering the thick grayness that insulated the exchange from the outside. “I’m going to check the internet. That can’t be real.”
I could write a thesis comprised entirely of indigenous people the world over, citing only the most scholarly of sources, all saying the same thing: no one listens to us, our writing goes unread, our representations aren’t seen, we speak and no one hears. However, none of them say it is not because we are not speaking. Jane Sequoya discusses the concept of the “authentic Indian” being a construct, a “figment of the imagination” created by colonizer narratives of the shamanistic savage or cowboy movie tropes (290). The truth of the matter is that settler audiences are the majority and the ones marketed to. While a publishing house may make the argument that science-fiction, fantasy, or horror require their own shelves, I have no need to market my culture near a Starbucks and find a little sci-fi in every fantasy and a little horror in every fairytale. The colonized constructions are what sell. The U.S. knows selling better than almost anywhere in the world and where there is a market, there is a profiteer with not one ounce of hesitation in chopping off parts, cutting out tongues, or raping the earth to package and sell those precious resources.
What’s the point of a fairytale? Fairytale, fantasy, folklore, science fiction and horror have deep intersectional roots. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone question the legitimacy of a fairytale, but I’ve also never heard someone seriously explain to me about the candy house in the woods in which they were held captive for three days. So, I’d like to put aside the idea that of course those Reddit stories about the Wendigo weren’t real, none of them. I want to ask what happens to the stories when they are stolen from the mouths of the people? The same thing that happens when Disney animates Cinderella, of course. Only, that’s not all that happens. It’s not merely that Selu is now a princess or Nanaboozhoo has a “Let It Go” style belting musical number. Ashenputtel still exists when you bring Cinderella to the forefront of cultural consciousness. Her lessons carry on because the people who wrote Cinderella still understood the core concept, purpose, and impact of a story like Ashenputtel. These settler retellings of Native American lore do not. They lose the soul and become the Iago and Professor Ratigans from a great oral tradition to a horror subreddit. In the same manner that the “subaltern” perspective is written out of history, battles told by those who wrote the book on them, the Native exists only in the history, only to be written out of the history and our history being written out of these stories. Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains how Indigenous people approach writing:
“With a view to rewriting and rerighting our position in history. Indigenous peoples want to tell our own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes. It is not simply about giving an oral account or genealogical naming of the land and the events which raged over it, but a very powerful need to bring testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmented and dying (103).”
I was consuming the material of some YouTube channel which tells spooky stories about cryptids and odd encounters, unsolved mysteries and true crime, when the playlist began an episode which focused entirely on the Wendigo. The narrator stated that they were sourced from Reddit. They were alleged to be true encounters. Wendigo encounters are my favorite stories for a very specific reason – the lessons learned from the warnings of the Wendigo. I scoffed at parts of stories being re-told that were clearly garbage from someone who was either making the story up or was incorrect about their encounter. I got tingles and burrowed my head further beneath my blankets at parts that seemed so real and just like the ones I had heard growing up, like the original Grimm’s fairytales filled with hot-iron shoes, the swift plucking of eyeballs, and the eating of livers and hearts to solidify a pact of power with evil. The end of the video broke my heart as the narrator said something I had never heard him say before, “when all is said it done it seems the legend of the Wendigo is just that – a legend. It survives today in Native American lore and internet creepypastas.” I had never heard the writers so firmly dismiss stories, then, it was also the only Native American story I had ever heard them tell.
These stories come from our position, from a place like fairy tales or some even more like Biblical passages that express and teach beliefs, morals, values, and history. They are not just horror stories revising storytelling methods and tropes or Mothman encounters to keep away pesky settlers (usually). Certain areas were left barren of Native settlements prior to colonization and were not to be foraged or hunted for truly held beliefs about the land itself, the spirits and energies there. The loss of belief, the sordid misappropriation and retellings of them on the internet hold no harm to those settlers who read them. To those Natives looking to reconnect or further explore certain stories, though, the subversive sucking out of the story’s soul, of its culture and context, can be detrimental.
The bastion of spooky subreddits form a new oral tradition, which grants stories which may normally only be whispered in the dark between trusted family or friends to be written and documented. However, you’d be hard pressed to find an official and available publication on the spooky spirits of Native people actually written by an Indigenous author. Natives are natural storytellers and have always passed culture down by oral tradition, in some ways, specifically for the reason of protecting them from settlers who will misuse them. Some also continue to hold the superstition to not speak names of spirits, to not tell stories, erase their links to you from any encounter, because (yes, even though I put the possibility of reality aside) it calls them to you, like whistling into the night sky.
I had to know why so many settler story tellers felt some kind of way about the truthfulness of Algonquin and contemporary encounter Wendigo stories. There, among the redditors, many not too unlike trolls and goblins themselves, one of the main reasons I dug up was the varying reports of what a Wendigo looked like. Settler stories were reporting something like a deer skull in place of a head or growing larger the more victims they consume. With a quick google image search, I was unhappy to find that these two descriptions, at odds with the oral tradition, is the common iteration drawn by, again, predominantly settler artists.
Modern iterations of the Christmas character Belsnickel of Germany have carried over and maintained their popular lore in Brazilian-German populations as well as Pennsylvania Dutch communities. In my childhood and older books around PA Dutch country, Belsnickel was an unpleasant, but not altogether frightening character, depicted and described as just a fairly isolated woodsman or farmer. He was skinny, wore mismatched furs and overalls, carried a sack and switches, to “treat or beat” the children depending on their behavior, as my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother would say. Again, however, holding one of these old books up to a google image search will show a vast difference as the popularity of Austria’s Krampus lore spread across the internet. Suddenly, the Belsnickel is looking less cranky and more Krampus.
Often, when we talk about Globalization, we speak in politics and economy: taxes, tariffs, trade, borders, resources, etc. These are important to examine, but there’s also the question about free trade of ideas, traditions, stories, and what happens to them as they are subreditted outside of their contexts. Arif Dirlik examines the rhetorics and identity politics of Globalization in relation to the politics and economics of capitalism. It’s on this battleground where I have to differ and question the Wallerstein graphic of World Systems Theory, not only as a person coming from a “third world nation” which sits inside the borders of a “first world country” and wondering about all of those communities across the globe which maintain similar contradictory populations. What’s to be said of the tri-world system while the third world is topped by first-world choices and rule or huddle within the borders clinging to sovereignty while in the shadow of the sovereign? Dirlik sees it as ironic that “the managers of this world situation themselves concede that they (or their organizations) now have the power to appropriate the local for the global, to admit different cultures into the world of capital (only to break them down and re-make them in accordance with the requirements of production and consumption) (580).” This has been older than the conversation surrounding it, only that more recently as the “third world” are better able to look into that void, to face the mechanics of the head which floated to them in the water and see the ropes and rudder, that we can truly see the eyes of the void looking back.
Smith outlines the origins of colonization, imperialism, and manifest destiny continuing into modern Globalization as always coming to a place of a justification that it is for the good of all mankind to reach into the ends of the earth and rip the pages from every corner and cave to assemble the book of life. Yet while taking our resources and knowledge, position the indigenous as “ignorant and underdeveloped (savages)” – superstitious while simultaneously seeking what it is we have to offer them.
“Other researchers gather traditional herbal and medicinal remedies and remove them for analysis in laboratories across the world. Still others collect the intangibles: the belief systems and ideas about healing, about the universe, about relationships and ways of organizing, and the practices and rituals which go alongside such beliefs (99).”
The collections of belief systems, however, are always misinterpreted or incomplete and these have been visibly corrupted by those settlers who appropriate them. Whether is is most obvious due to visibility or truly just most egregiously corrupted by those who repackage and market rituals, teachings, and practices for profit, I’m not sure. However, the top two ways in any how-to list of identifying a fake “shaman” or “medicine men” is: 1) They advertise services. 2) They charge money and have set prices for said services. We all need to survive and when I was 8 years old selling bracelets for money to go to the movies, I wasn’t above telling people that they had magical properties because I washed them in the river, they were kissed by forest rabbits, and dried by moonlight (this sounded very witchy and legit to 8 year old me.) However, to those who really believe or care, some things are too sacred.
The sale and trade of romanticized stories either from or about people of the “third world” has been occurring since long before the discourse of Globalization. Perhaps some mixture of that and capitalism has closed the book (pun intended) on stolen stories as a resource of the “third world” or “subaltern.” Perhaps Globalization has quieted the mystique of the foreign and exotic when instead of reading Byron’s Orientalist sludge about how sexy he is, I can watch an Arabian King touch a glowing orb next to an orange, New York Republican on my TV. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks if the “subaltern” can speak and concludes, in brief, “not really.” Yet why would people not prefer to hear the stories from their originators? Is there some secret, pervasive fear that if the indigenous people, who know this land best, speak about dangerous spirits, ones that describe some of our practices, some part of us may know of something real and horrifying? Doesn’t that make it more exciting? Why dilute the material with false reports and make it unbelievable?
Contemporarily, a settler could have encountered something on this land and now that story is theirs, their experience. While it is inarguably their story and their experience, they do not get to appropriate an Algonquin story and try it on, stretching it out to fit as a cloak on their narrative. Physical location nor place of birth alone does not a native make when it comes to culture, which is the umbrella under which I believe these kinds of stories fit. To take a lesson from these encounters, from the stories of these encounters, you need to know the true reason for their purpose and the values placed behind them. These values are very cute for new-age healers or hippies, but speak to a more terrifying aspect of the modern colonized world that no one likes to look at.
Sequoya explains how the marketable Indian is the imagined-authentic, described previously. No one wants the complicated or nuanced Native. Nobody wants to listen to the Native talking about sovereignty, genocide, and treaty rights, but happy to hear the Native talking about spritualism and spooky stories. Except for when those stories relay messages of genocide and run subversive to the values which allowed the settlers here to commit it and continue standing on their structures of power.
Twyla Baker defined translation exhaustion as “the idea that Indigenous people (or any marginalized person/group) engaging with the larger population on a given subject or topic related to bias, must first set the stage on historical context all the way to the current day state of affairs before even addressing said topic of bias – over and over again – due to the lack of education the listener has (@indigenia).” I bring this up because any person familiar with the context and purpose, the true cultural meaning of a Wendigo knows why I used them as an example this entire time. I resent explaining it, though I know I have to. I resent it every time my infinitely kind and understanding colleagues point out some reference, word, character, name, location, or historical event that I feel should be common knowledge and tell me that I will need to explain the significance for audiences.
So why the Wendigo? What are its lessons which I see forced out by the globalization, fracture, and perversion of its character? The Wendigo is a spirit, which causes confusion among settlers who try to describe it saying it can possess a human or attack in spirit form or it becomes from a human who eats human flesh. I’m not passing on or clarifying a story here, so I won’t delve into all the ways it is not an “or” situation and the ways the spiritual can pass through the tangible. Ultimately, the Wendigo is a cold-weather beast which shames human greed – hoarding in times of need or being too jealous and hungrily wanting more than you need. It teeters and attacks both ends of extremes and especially denounces predatory individualism, painting the portrait of someone who starves in their own wanting and excess. This story encourages the betterment of the community, a strong value for many native nations of community over personal advancement and a bitter irony of colonialist endeavors functioning, as Smith said, for “the good of mankind.”
Like most appropriation, I don’t believe any of this is done out of malice with the intent of erasure, but the entitlement to and apathy towards misappropriation has the same effect, regardless of intent. Sharing stories has been a bonding experience and method of teaching among human beings since vaping killed the dinosaurs. I seek not to erase the commodification of stories and especially of fiction. As a writer, this would be as stupid as being the dinosaur who vaped. I request that writers of fiction and story-tellers not misappropriate the cultural lore of others to wear as a footy pajama over their fiction, as if it will somehow make it more interesting and marketable. It does more harm to people than it sells your stories.
Bibliography
@indigenia. “translation exhaustion” Twitter. 22 Jan. 2019, 9:24 a.m.,
twitter.com/indigenia/status/1087762882983538689
Ahluwalia, Pal. “When Does a Settler Become a Native?: Citizenship and Identity in a Settler Society.” Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, edited by Guarav Desai and Supriya Nair, Rutgers University Press, 2005, pp. 500–513.
Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, edited by Guarav Desai and Supriya Nair, Rutgers University Press, 2005, pp. 561-588.
Sequoya, Jane. “How (!) Is an Indian?: A Contest of Stories.” Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, edited by Guarav Desai and Supriya Nair, Rutgers University Press, 2005, pp. 290–310.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. “Imperialism, History, Writing, and Theory.” Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, edited by
Guarav Desai and Supriya Nair, Rutgers University Press, 2005, pp. 94-113.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Die Philosophin, vol. 14, no. 27, 2003, pp. 42–58., doi:10.5840/philosophin200314275.
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