Imagine a monster that grows in exact proportion to every meal, so it can never be full. This episode follows the Wendigo from the boreal forests of the Algonquian-speaking peoples, where it personified winter famine and enforced communal cooperation, through its life as a contested psychiatric diagnosis, and into its modern role as a metaphor for colonialism, corporate extraction, and consumption without limit.

We look at Basil Johnston’s description of the gaunt, ice-hearted giant, a 1918 story from the Chippewas of Rama First Nation about a boy fattened like livestock, and the backward-dancing satirical ceremony used during famines. Then we examine the documented cases: the 1661 Jesuit Relations, the 1878 Swift Runner tragedy in Alberta, and the 1907 arrest of Cree chief Jack Fiddler, before turning to the academic fight between skeptics like Lou Marano and James Waldram and the scholars who defended the reality of Wendigo psychosis.

• The proto-Algonquian owl connection and why the creature belongs to the north and the cold
• Why Swift Runner’s case, 25 miles from a Hudson’s Bay post, was read as a psychological break
• Traditional treatments with hot animal grease meant to expel a forming heart of ice
• The Wendigo as social cannibalism in the work of Jill Lockhart, Brady DeSanti, and Linda Hogan
• From Algernon Blackwood and Marvel’s Hulk to Until Dawn and Nathan Adler’s reclamation in Wrist