You may be wondering why the wendigo, which has become very popular in pop culture over the last 10 years or so, is usually depicted in Western sources with a deer head. This appears nowhere in Native American traditions, despite the creature having lots of folkloric variations. The association of the wendigo with deer is 100% Western, 100% modern, and has a long, weird history.
Just in case you need a primer, the windigo or witiko is a supernatural being from the Algonquin speaking nations of the eastern American continent. It appears as an emaciated figure, sometimes giant, sometimes covered in ice, sometimes both. In many stories, they have a literal heart of ice. Windigos are manifestations of cannibalism and winter, and hunt, kill and eat people. Someone who resorts to cannibalism to survive, or otherwise abandons their community for personal gain, will become one of them. A few stories tell of someone being “cured” and turned back into a human, but usually the only cure is to kill the monster. In the last several decades, native writers have associated windigos with capitalism and deforestation as an extension of their selfishness. If you would like to know more about the properly Native windigo in context, I recommend Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History by Shawn Smallman.
The
creature first came into horror fiction with Algernon Blackwood’s “The
Wendigo”. Note the spelling, which would become the standard in horror, and generally in non-academic Western sources. In that story, it is not associated with cannibalism, but
instead is a more generic “evil spirit of nature”. This wendigo stalks white people in the wilderness and turns a Native character into a new wendigo by seizing them and flying with them into the sky. This definitely better fits fears about non white people, fears about nature, and how the one is closer to the other than “civilized” people. Its description in
the story is vague (the most we get is that it has burned its feet away
by running into the sky). But when the story appeared in Weird Tales in
the 1930s, Virgil Finlay illustrated it like this, the first antlered
wendigo I know of.
This story was ripped off by August Derleth, a prominent Weird author in the 1940s and the main popularizer of HP Lovecraft. In his Cthulhu Mythos stories, he introduces Ithaqua the Wind Walker, which is an alien version of Blackwood’s monster. This fits into Derleth’s vision of the gods and monsters of HP Lovecraft falling into the four classical elements, with Ithaqua being invented to represent Air. Ithaqua is usually depicted as an icy, emaciated giant, so ironically is one of the more accurate wendigos to Indigeonous beliefs in pop culture.
Image from a recent French edition of Call of Cthulhu RPG, by Loic Muzy
In Pet Sematary, Stephen King uses a wendigo as the reason for why the titular cemetery is cursed. This is an update of the classic racist trope of the “Indian Burial Ground”, except this time what gets buried there comes back animalistic and evil. The racist implications of that are pretty apparent. This wendigo is seen briefly and has ram’s horns. It does not appear in the first film adaptation, but does in the more recent one… with deer horns instead, because those are trendy right now.
A good scholarly look at the real windigo versus the 20th century horror wendigo is “The Appropriation of the Windigo Spirit in Horror Literature” by Kallie Hunchman.
In the 1980s, a movie called Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo was produced, but it wasn’t released until 1995 by Troma. From what I’ve read, it’s a pretty transparent ripoff of Evil Dead 2, with the characters being picked off in a haunted cabin with a zombie in the basement. The “twist” is that the origin of the horrors is a wendigo released by breaking a Christian demonology-style sacred circle. This wendigo is realized in stop motion animation, and has the most deer-like body yet.
A number of other independent horror movies in the 90s and 2000s used wendigos as a plot element. These follow the Blackwood/King approach of having the wendigo being something evil, ancient and Native American, reflecting white anxieties about living on stolen land more than Native anxieties about cannibalism and greed. Wendigo (2001) has the creature sicced on a white family when they hit a deer with their car. The Last Winter (2006) posits that global warming and fossil fuel extraction have unleashed the ghosts of dead animals, which are wendigo apparently, to revenge themselves on mankind. Which approaches the idea that greed is wendigo sickness, but I don’t think intentionally as a reference to modern Native literature. The “wendigo” in this movie are spectral moose and caribou.
The mainstream breakthrough of the deer-headed wendigo was in, appropriately enough for this blog, Pathfinder RPG. In “Spires of Xin-Shalast”, the last volume of Rise of the Runelords published in 2008, a wendigo is a major encounter. I suspect that either the author (Greg A. Vaughn), or one of the editorial staff had seen Frostbiter, as the setup involves a cabin haunted by dwarven cannibal ghosts who all killed and ate each other due to a wendigo’s influence. This wendigo is a hybrid of the Blackwood and Cree versions in terms of its MO: it is a cannibal ice spirit that wants to make more cannibals, and does so by abducting people and running off into the sky with them. Its design is the standard for what most Western artists depict wendigos as these days: an emaciated humanoid with the head and antlers of a deer (and the burned off feet of Algernon Blackwood, which are less common):
This wendigo definitely made a splash at the time; it was the first time I remember seeing a deer-headed wendigo, and art of that design started to become common. It pushed away previous wendigo depictions, which were typically werewolves (as French Canadian trappers had blended the concept with their own loup-garou, and Werewolf the Apocalypse had a whole faction of racist Native American “wendigos”) or shaggy and ape like (based more on the look of the Marvel Comics villain).
What turned wendigos from “folklore/horror monster” to “fandom blorbo” was Hannibal, which first aired in 2013. In that series, the first murder is a woman’s body impaled on a stag’s head, after which protagonist Will Graham has visions of a black stag, and a man with the antlers of a stag, representing murder, evil, and of course the cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecter.
Since Hannibal was super popular with the shipping fandom set, wendigo themed characters became popular in its wake, creating a wholly new way to culturally appropriate the wendigo. This was magnified by Over the Garden Wall, which came out in 2014, and its villain The Beast. The Beast is never called a wendigo, but is an antlered giant associated with winter, and so is commonly head-canoned as a wendigo and associated with them in fandom circles.
Which gets us to the modern day, where teenagers have misunderstood wendigo OCs, any character with antlers can be called a wendigo on the internet, and actual First Nations people with an actual cultural connection to the legend wish that people would just knock it off.
I remember someonre rightly pointing out that Hannibal’s depiction of the deer-antlered monster looked very much like the gallo roman god Cernunnos. Cernunnos is depicted with deer antlers and is associated with stags, which fit at least the visual patterns we see in Hannibal.
So I wonder if the deer antlers come from western artists associating the Native American spirit with a more well-known figure in the west that is Cernunnos? I mean, i don’t believe the antlers came out of nowhere. They weren’t from the original stories, so they must have come from other, western stories and some kind of amalgation with western myths?
I definitely think that giving the wendigo deer-like features is due to Western artists conflating it with Western mythological figures. You mentioned Cernunnos, and @cupofsorrows referred to the Erlking in their tags. The Virgil Finley illustration in my post above, the Patient Zero for the horned wendigo, looks a lot like “The Sorcerer”, a purported cave painting that was used to argue for a pagan Horned God figure in Europe stretching back from the Paleolithic.
As the wendigo has been used more by Western artists as an embodiment of fears of nature, instead of cannibalism and greed, this makes a certain amount of sense. Horned nature deities in European culture became increasingly demonized under Christian influence and moving away from the forests into farms and cities. In order to associate something with being ancient and pagan, artists and authors slap some horns on their monster, and use the word “wendigo” without its full cultural context because it sounds spooky, and they’re working from horror traditions rather than folk traditions.
I propose that current events also played a role. The antlered version of the wendigo burst into popularity in the mid aughts, after being one of multiple depictions in Western culture for decades. In the United States, most people are pretty far from the natural world. . Deer populations in the US spiked around 2000, and even though their overall numbers have declined, the number of them in cities on the East Coast has increased. So the biggest animal a lot of people are going to come into contact with, and in a disruptive and potentially dangerous context, is a deer. As the Western wendigo often represents the intrusion of nature into “civilization”, what better animal than the deer that jumps in front of your car or breaks down your fence?
A few people in the replies have noted that “you’re not supposed to say its name”. I did originally try to write a version of this where the word wendigo was censored, but it made it difficult to read, especially when I was talking about the vowel shift from the Ojibwe version to the pop culture version. I also have done research into the idea that the word “wendigo” is not to be spoken aloud, and have found that it is both recent and a minority opinion. The oldest source I could find is a story from the Abenaki author Jacques L. Condor in his book Condor Tales of the Supernatural in Alaska and Canada (2000). That said, Condor himself uses the word in the story (about a man who “says the name aloud and does not live to say another”), and multiple other Native authors and storytellers use the name when referring to the monster in both print and speech. Multiple papers and books by anthropologists and folklorists, some of which are cited above, make no mention of the idea. I suspect that its emergence onto tumblr is partially an attempt to curtail the massive cultural appropriation of the wendigo (which I agree is a problem), and combining traditions around other monsters. There are certainly entities in various Native American cultures that are not to be spoken of. The most widely known, and also a major target of cultural appropriation (*cough* JK Rowling *cough*), has the initials S. W. in English.
Honestly I think you’re being way too generous with the Cerunnos connection. When Americans think about the European horned god archetype at all, the overwhelming majority go straight to one place.
I’ve always assumed the deer head wendigo stemmed from associating deer with Native Americans in that racist, infantilizing, dance-with-all-the-colors-of-the-wind bullshit way. Deer= Native American aesthetics because, as you mentioned, they’re likely the only large wild animals and are thus mystical and part of the beauty of nature. To quote a guy who has been thoroughly cancelled but unfortunately I can’t think of a better source of deer vitriol:
I used to live in the city and I loved deer then because I was liberal and in the city and I’d see deer when you drive out with your friends out to the country and you see a deer and everybody is like, “Turn off the car, don’t scare it, it’s just so beautiful, look at the beautiful deer, look how he looks around it’s just so mysterious and beautiful. God gave us a gift everybody just enjoy the gift of the beautiful deer.” But now I live in the country, and deer are in my fucking yard everyday and they suck, they’re just rats with hooves.
So my assumption was always that some guy was thinking about what to make a wendigo look like, going “Wendigo… that’s a Native American monster. What goes with Native Americans? Let’s flip through the old internal dictionary of stereotypes real quick. Dream catchers, totem poles, feathers, beads, those little tassel things on clothes, bald eagles, deer… hey, deer. Deer! And wouldn’t it be creepy if a deer was kind of fucked up? Boy, there’s an idea that’ll never get old!” And then we were off to the races.
Now it’s 2022 and these damn kids are calling my precious cannibalism spirits ‘cryptids’ and only seem to be capable of recognizing them as either dumbed down arboreal minotaurs or an edgy alternative to mermaid AUs. The effete wendigo snob in me weeps.
I feel like these tags need to be saved for posterity, @thetygre
Compare the “not-deer”, which started out as a lil creative writing on Tumblr and erupted into public consciousness as a full blown cryptid, a deer that is Wrong.
I write lots about the disconnection from nature, but I would argue that deer have become a major locus of anxiety in American pop culture not because of their increasing unfamiliarity, but because of the upset equilibrium in nature that they increasingly embody: with the lack of predators and the resulting overpopulation of deer, it is becoming more common to see sick deer, emaciated deer, and in particular deer behaving in bizarre, horrifying ways because of diseases like Chronic Wasting Disease that basically turn them into zombies.
