The scary part for me is that some of the legends that my parents, uncles and aunts told include actual family members in our family tree.
I remember one story I heard many times when I was kid about a man and his family that fought against a Wendigo like being and then went on the run. As they fled, they were pursued for days by this Wendigo in different places, lakes and rivers that mom and dad were familiar with. They were able to avoid the Wendigo and lived to tell their story and survived. For the longest time as a kid, I just assumed it was an ancient legend about people from a long, long time ago … like medieval fairy tales that talked about things and people from hundreds or thousands of years ago. I didn’t learn until I was an adult that this story in particular was about my great grandfather and his first family (he had married three times and had three separate families). I don’t know why my family just ignored that detail but when I learned that fact it immediately brought the story closer to my timeline to about less than a hundred years ago. That thought freaked me out because it made me realize that some of these stories weren’t just legends … they were real life stories of people I was related to. Whether or not it was about a Wendigo or not … it was definitely an event that traumatized a lot of people that eventually turned into a legendary tale that we still share today.
Life in the wilderness was a lot different until about 50 to 100 years ago. There was definitely a lot of shady, life threatening, freaky, desperate stuff happening that included murder, kidnapping and cannibalism that all stemmed from hunger, loneliness, isolation and famine. It wasn’t all just Indigenous people living some kind of magical utopia while living off the land in harmony.
The scary part for me is that some of the legends that my parents, uncles and aunts told include actual family members in our family tree.
I remember one story I heard many times when I was kid about a man and his family that fought against a Wendigo like being and then went on the run. As they fled, they were pursued for days by this Wendigo in different places, lakes and rivers that mom and dad were familiar with. They were able to avoid the Wendigo and lived to tell their story and survived. For the longest time as a kid, I just assumed it was an ancient legend about people from a long, long time ago … like medieval fairy tales that talked about things and people from hundreds or thousands of years ago. I didn’t learn until I was an adult that this story in particular was about my great grandfather and his first family (he had married three times and had three separate families). I don’t know why my family just ignored that detail but when I learned that fact it immediately brought the story closer to my timeline to about less than a hundred years ago. That thought freaked me out because it made me realize that some of these stories weren’t just legends … they were real life stories of people I was related to. Whether or not it was about a Wendigo or not … it was definitely an event that traumatized a lot of people that eventually turned into a legendary tale that we still share today.
Life in the wilderness was a lot different until about 50 to 100 years ago. There was definitely a lot of shady, life threatening, freaky, desperate stuff happening that included murder, kidnapping and cannibalism that all stemmed from hunger, loneliness, isolation and famine. It wasn’t all just Indigenous people living some kind of magical utopia while living off the land in harmony.