Spirit Beings, Mental Illness, and Murder
Fur Traders and the Windigo in Canada's Boreal Forest, 1774 to 1935
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2735952 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shawn Smallman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 571-596 |
| Publication date | 2010-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethnohistory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0014-1801 • E-ISSN: 1527-5477 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00141801-2010-037 |
| OpenAlex | W2149499604 |
| Language | DE |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 7 |
This article builds on the extensive literature regarding the Algonquian belief in the windigo, a cannibal spirit, by examining how traders of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) viewed this phenomenon from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. As native people brought windigos to posts for care or sought help from HBC employees to protect their families, traders responded to this disorder based on their company's economic interests and their adherence to Enlightenment thought as well as on indigenous expectations of reciprocity. The fur trade and the windigo disorder were linked historically, so that the passing of the one marked the fading of the other, as the economic and cultural ties that shaped relationships between Algonquians and outsiders underwent a profound change in the early twentieth century. An imperial context ultimately determined how most Canadian institutions responded to the windigo, as colonial authorities created narratives around this disorder designed to increase their control over Cree and Ojibwa communities
Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Criminology · Economic history · Enlightenment · Ethnology · Fur trade · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Reciprocity (cultural anthropology) · Sociology · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · Ecology · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law
Narrative of an expedition to the source of St. Peter's river, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods, &c., performed in the year 1823, … under the command of Stephen H. Long
Grateful Prey
Where the Chill Came from
The Orders of the Dreamed
The Swampy Cree and the Hudson's Bay Company at Oxford House
"Varieties of "Starving
Reviving Witiko (Windigo)
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2011 - 2018 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |