[This week, I’ll
be camping with family up in Maine’s
beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts
for this longstanding
form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in
comments, please!]
On the camping trip scary story that also offers cultural and
cross-cultural commentaries.
I’m not sure what kind of collection it was—whether it was an anthology of
folk tales, of scary stories, of cultural myths and legends, of Americana—but I
do know that only one story from it impacted this young AmericanStudier enough
to stick with me nearly three decades later: an account of a party of hunters on
a camping trip in rural Canada encountering the supernatural demon known as the Wendigo. I can even
remember the way I felt inside when my Dad read the lines about the rising and
howling wind, which at least in this version of the tale signaled the imminent
arrival of—or perhaps even contained—the creature. Let’s just say that, unlike the boy who left
home to find out about the shivers, from then on I
knew exactly what that condition felt like, and didn’t need to venture outside
of the pages of that very scary story to do so.
So I’m here to tell you that the Wendigo is, first and foremost, a deeply effective scary story. But the creature
and story, across their many versions, also offer complex and compelling lenses
into American cultures, on two distinct and equally meaningful levels. For one
thing, apparently Wendigo stories can be found in the belief systems and
communal myths of numerous Algonquin-speaking native tribes across both the
United States and Canada, including the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Naskapi, and
others. While those tribes share a basic language system, they are as
culturally and socially distinct as they are geographically widespread—and yet
they share closely parallel images and accounts of these cannibalistic demons
of the woods. While we have to be careful about how we read such potentially
but ambiguously symbolic shared mythic figures—Joseph Campbell-like, sweeping structuralist pronouncements about what’s
at the heart of all mythology being largely discredited these days—there seems
to be no question that the Wendigo represents a part of the collective identity
and perspective of these various tribes.
But as they have evolved, Wendigo stories have also come to represent
something else, and perhaps something even more telling: tales of the perils of
cross-cultural exploration and exploitation. That is, in many of the last
century’s Wendigo tales, including both the Blackwood one linked above and the
one that I remember from my childhood, those being threatened or destroyed by
the creature tend to be non-native hunters and campers, often if not always
venturing into native territories, encroaching on previously protected or
sacred spaces, or otherwise seeking to make their mark on a land not quite
their own. Weird Tales such as Blackwood’s often highlight
the dangers posed by an sort of spiritual boundary-crossing, so this particular
trend is certainly not unique; but in these cases, I’m arguing, the boundaries
being crossed are not only spiritual but also, and perhaps more importantly,
cultural. Which is to say, while the Wendigo has always been cannibalistic, the
particular identity of those upon whom he feasts has significantly, and
symbolically, shifted over time.
Next camping
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?
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