blog post 3

Meghan Ruginski

ENGL 102-037

Prof. Santos

February 9th, 2017

Blog post #3

Wendigos

One thing that I found really interesting to read this week was the “Wendigo Footprints” chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The first time I had ever heard of what a wendigo was, was in the tv show Supernatural. In the show, a person was captured by the monster while camping in the woods and the two main characters had to save them and also figure out how to kill it. I never knew that this creature was actually referenced in different cultures. For the Anishinaabe people the creepy story of a wendigo is mostly told to children to make them behave better.

Kimmerer describes a wendigo as a human being that became a cannibal and who will make their victims cannibals as well. The monster is always hungry but the more that it eats the hungrier it gets and it is just an endless cycle. I like the way that the author brings this into our world today. She says that the “wendigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else” (305). If we really think about it we all have a little bit of a wendigo in us, not as a cannibal, but we are more concerned with material things. We are in an endless cycle of addictions to alcohol, gambling, and technology that we lose sight of what really matters, and it leads us to self destructive tendencies,  just like when the wendigo keeps eating even though it won't satisfy them. Overall I believe that we need to change our way of life so that we can decrease the amount of “wendigo” tendencies in our life.