Modern cannibals of the wilds MYTH MADE REAL”The giant weendigoes that once prowled the forests have returned as corporations, whose appetites are more ferocious than the creatures of the storytellers. ‘We want more,’ they cry as the mills churn, ‘only more will satisfy us’
Citation metadata
Date: Aug. 1, 1991
From: Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada)
Publisher: CNW Group Ltd. – Globe & Mail
Document Type: Article
Length: 1,082 words
Document controls
Main conten
Byline: BASIL H. JOHNSTON
BY BASIL H. JOHNSTON WOODS and forest once mantled most of this land, this continent. It was the home of the Anishinabek (Ojibway, Ottawa, Potowatomi, Algonquin), their kin and their neighbours. It was also the home of the moose, the deer, the caribou, the bear, their kindred and their neighbours. It was as well the home of the thrushes, the sparrows, the hawks, the tanagers, the ravens, the owls, their cousins and their neighbours. Mosquitoes, butterflies, caterpillars, ants, moths, their kind and their neighbours had a place therein.
Not only was it home, but a wellspring from which all drew their sustenance, medicine and knowledge.
Also dwelling in the woods and forests were weendigoes, giant cannibals who fed upon human flesh to allay their perpetual hunger. They stalked villages and camps, waiting for, and only for, the improvident, the slothful, the gluttonous, the promiscuous, the injudicious, the insatiable, the selfish, the avaricious and the wasteful, to be foolish enough to venture alone beyond the environs of their homes in winter.
But no matter how many victims a single weendigo devoured raw, he could never satisfy his hunger. The more he ate, the larger he grew, and the larger he grew, the greater his hunger. The weendigo’s hunger always remained in proportion to his size.
Even though a weendigo is a mythical figure, he represents real human cupidity. What the old-time storyteller meant to project in the image of the weendigo was a universal and unchanging human disposition. But more learned people declared that no such monster ever existed, that he was a product of superstitious minds and imaginations.
As a result, the weendigo was driven from his place in Anishinabe traditions and culture, ostracized through disbelief and skepticism. It was assumed, and indeed it appeared as if, the weendigo and his brothers and sisters had passed into the Great Beyond, like many North American Indian beliefs and practices and traditions.
Actually, the weendigoes did not die out; they have only been assimilated and reincarnated as corporations, conglomerates and multinationals. They have taken on new names, acquired polished manners and renounced their cravings for raw human flesh for more refined viands. But their cupidity is no less insatiable than their ancestors’.
One breed subsists entirely on forests. When this breed beheld forests, its collective cupidity was stirred as it looked upon an endless, boundless sea of green – as in greenbacks. They saw beyond, even into the future. Money. Cash. Deposits. Bank accounts. Interest. Reserves. Investments, securities, bonds, shares, dividends, capital gains, assets, funds, deals, revenue, income, prosperity, opulence, profits, riches, wealth, comfort.
They recruited woodsmen with axes, crosscut saws and Swede saws, sputters, shovels, cant hooks, grapples, chains, ropes, files and pikes, and sent them into the woods to fell, hue, saw, cut, chop, slash and level. The forests resounded with the clash of axes and the whine of saws as blades bit into the flesh of spruce, pine, cedar, tamarack and poplar to fill the demands of the weendigoes in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Chicago, Boston, wherever they now dwelt. Cries of “Timber!” echoed across the treetops, followed by the rip and tear of splintering trees, and thundering crashes.
And as fast as woodsmen felled the trees, teamsters delivered sleighload after sleighload to railway sidings and to the rivers. Train after train, shipload after shipload of logs were delivered to the mills.
Yet as fast as the woodsmen cut, as much as they cut, it was never fast enough. The quantity always fell short of the expectations of the weendigoes, their masters.
“Is that all? Should there not be more? We demand a bigger return for our risks and our investments. Only more will satisfy us. Any amount will do, so long as it’s more, and the more the better.”
The demands were met for more speed and more pulp, more logs and more timber. Axes, saws, woodsmen, horses and teamsters were replaced, and their blows and calls no longer rang in the forest. In their place, chainsaws whined, Caterpillar tractors with huge blades bulled and battered their way through the forest, uprooting trees to clear the way for automatic shearers that topped, limbed and sheared the trunks. These mechanical weendigoes gutted and desolated the forests, leaving death, destruction and ugliness where once there was life, abundance and beauty.
Trucks and transports operated day and night delivering cargo with a speed and quantity that the horses and sleighs could never have matched.
Yet the weendigoes wanted still more, and it didn’t matter if their policies and practices of clear-cutting their harvest of timber and pulp resulted in violations of North American Indian rights or in the further impairment of their lives.
Nor does it matter to them that their modus operandi permanently defiles hillside and mountainside by erosion. They are indifferent to the carnage inflicted upon bears, wolves, rabbits, thrushes, sparrows, warblers. Who cares if they are displaced? What possible harm has been done? Nor does it seem as if these modern weendigoes have any regard for the rights of future generations to the yield of Mother Earth.
The new, reincarnated weendigoes are little different from their forebears. They are more omnivorous than their ancestors, however, and the modern breed wears elegant clothes and comports itself with an air of cultured and dignified respectability.
Profit, wealth, comfort, power are the ends of business. Anything that detracts from or diminishes the anticipated return, be it taking pains not to violate the rights of others, or taking measures to ensure that the land remains fertile and productive for future generations, must, it seems, be circumvented.
And what has been the result of this self-serving, self-glutting disposition? In 10 short decades, these modern weendigoes have accomplished what at one time seemed impossible; they have laid waste immense tracts of forest that were seen as beyond limit as well as self- propagating, and ample enough to serve this generation and many more to come.
Now, as the forests are in decline, the weendigoes are looking at a future that offers scarcity. Many others are assessing the weendigoes’ accomplishments not in terms of dollars but in terms of damage – the damage they have inflicted on the environment and the climate and on botanical and zoological life.
Basil H. Johnston is the author of Indian School Days (Key Porter) and a teacher of Ojibway (Anishinabe) language, history and mythology with the Department of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
BASIL H. JOHNSTON
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1991 CNW Group Ltd. – Globe & Mail. Globe & Mail
https://www.newswire.ca/
Source Citation
Source:
Seneca Library’s Database “Gale Academic Onefile”