By Jenni Makahnouk
This submit is a part of the Indian Act 150 collection
The Indian Act is usually handled as a governance construction: an object to be interpreted, amended, or dismantled by means of coverage reform. This framing assumes neutrality the place there’s urge for food. This text argues that the Indian Act features much less as a static authorized instrument and extra as a consuming drive—one which survives by means of the continuing ingestion of Indigenous self-determination. Learn by means of Indigenous epistemologies, the Indian Act emerges as Wendigo, if you’ll, an Indigenous malevolent manitou animated by greed, selfishness, and insatiable starvation. What occurs when the Indian Act is considered as Wendigo? By framing the Indian Act as Wendigo, we will illuminate its predatory dynamics in ways in which typical settler analyses of the Act can not seize, and we will draw on Indigenous epistemologies of easy methods to treatment Wendigo.
The Indian Act is a federal Canadian statute, first enacted in 1876, that consolidated colonial insurance policies regulating Indigenous identification, governance, land, and authorized standing beneath settler authority. Extra simply mentioned, “the Indian Act homes the authorized framework of settler colonialism in Canada,” and it has functioned since its passage as a central mechanism by means of which the Canadian state administers and constrains Indigenous self-determination.[1] Scholarship on the Indian Act has lengthy centred its authorized constructions, political results, and function in introducing colonial governance constructions to Indigenous communities. Within the early 2000s, historic and coverage analyses emphasised the Act’s legislative evolution and its operate as an instrument of assimilation and management, whereas subsequent authorized scholarship documented its function in reinforcing bureaucratic dependency and circumscribing Indigenous authorized company.[2]
Indigenous students and theorists have pushed past these framings to articulate the Indian Act as a locus of colonial violence embedded in broader regimes of dispossession. Glen Coulthard exposes recognition politics as a mechanism by means of which the state reproduces colonial authority by subsuming Indigenous lifeworlds inside settler frameworks of legitimacy;[3] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson counters colonial logics and hegemony by foregrounding the on a regular basis rebuilding of Indigenous resurgence as a mode of self-determined Indigenous life;[4] Gerald Robert Vizenor advances “survivance” as an anticolonial refusal of Western metaphors for understanding Indigenous modernity.[5] Collectively, these students situate the Indian Act not simply as a authorized framework however as a mechanism by means of which colonial energy is reproduced and contested, demonstrating how Indigenous thought strikes towards resurgence, survivance, and relational modes of governance that refuse settler-state authority.
Whereas this literature powerfully critiques the Act’s political and authorized operations, it leaves open a deeper moral query: what if we learn the Indian Act not solely as a colonial instrument, however as a Wendigo textual content—one which embodies insatiable consumption and the breakdown of Indigenous relational worlds.
Wendigo is a malevolent manitou inside Anishinaabe and Cree storytelling and tradition. It’s a non-human spirit that manifests as a human consumed by insatiable starvation, changing into large in top with ash-grey pores and skin, skeletal and gaunt, and tattered, bloodied lips from fixed chewing.[6] Although they’re a spirit, Wendigo can connect itself to people and alter them into Wendigos. Wendigo features as an moral warning towards the ethical collapse and relational violations that emanate from techniques organized by greed, consumption, and the destruction of kinship. They emerge when stability is damaged, when the ethics of relationality are changed by the logic of possession and selfishness, normally in occasions of nice stress, akin to winter, when shortage and the specter of hunger intensify.
Indigenous scholar Basil Johnston claims that Wendigo has been “reincarnated as firms, conglomerates, and multinationals,”[7] positing Wendigo as a determine of colonial and capitalist consumption that causes relational breakdown.[8] This studying emphasizes Wendigo’s operate as a warning towards extractive logics that devour land, our bodies, and kin, and foregrounds the existential impacts of colonial governance and management.[9]
Anishinaabe thought understands Wendigos as beings that maintain themselves by consuming “the lives of others with out reciprocity, care, consent, or regard, within the pursuit of non-public achieve or revenue.”[10] Likewise, the Indian Act as Wendigo consumes Indigenous self-determination to outlive and might “[expend] all its power on this one goal.”[11] In any case, new-to-this-land settlers created the Indian Act to indulge their self-interests. Any laws created in such an imbalance carries instability in each its literal provisions and its metaphorical spirit. This appears like Wendigo to me.
Framing the Indian Act as Wendigo refashions it right into a residing laws that—animated by starvation for land, assets, and management—feeds endlessly on Indigenous life, land-based relations, governance constructions and authorized authority with a view to reproduce settler sovereignty. In reframing it on this means, Indigenous peoples can apprehend it not as mere regulation or a impartial authorized instrument. It makes seen the Indian Act’s predatory logic, facilities Indigenous epistemologies, and opens area for methods of refusal, resistance, and resurgence that settler understandings of the Act typically overlook.
The Indian Act as Wendigo can be insatiable for Indigenous relationality, the interconnected net of social, political, and religious relationships that maintain Indigenous communities, together with ties to land, kinship, governance, and cultural practices. By design, the Indian Act strives to sever Indigenous peoples from their relationality—evidenced by the Indian Residential Faculty system, the cross system proscribing motion, bans on cultural and religious practices, amongst many different bureaucratic failures of the Canadian state—after which sustains itself by managing the harm it creates. That is additional evidenced by the continuing Lacking and Murdered Indigenous Ladies and Women disaster, underfunded baby welfare companies that systemically fail and discriminate towards First Nations kids, persistent suicide crises in First Nations communities, the ingesting water advisories on many First Nations reserves (some lasting a long time), and the listing goes on. Our tales inform of “villages being destroyed by Windigo,” with “entire villages in damage and inhabitants gone.”[12] Our communities haven’t been destroyed by chance or neglect, however by means of a sustained colonial system that consumes relationships, produces disaster, after which feeds its personal ongoing interventions. The Indian Act continues to operate as a Wendigo: a construction that devours Indigenous life whereas presenting itself as essential for survival.
Wendigo is rarely glad; it survives by changing into one thing new every time its starvation dangers publicity. The Indian Act mirrors this logic. Its capability to devour Indigenous relationality rests exactly on its potential to alter form, showing reformist whereas remaining predatory. The Indian Act is a authorized doc of Canadian governance—an instrument to be amended, modernized, or reconciled with modern settler-colonial norms. Such approaches, nonetheless, underestimate the Act’s political vitality and colonial liberalism’s tendency to masks domination by means of care; what appears to be like like regulation is an ingestion of Indigenous self-determination. Going again to our tales, “the larger [Windigo] grew, the hungrier he grew to become.”[13] The extra the Indian Act managed, the extra it needed to manage. The Indian Act as Wendigo defines, measures, and consumes Indigenous self-determination to justify its personal existence. Like Wendigo, the Indian Act is rarely glad and by no means completed. From assimilationist amendments and reforms—starting with the 1969 White Paper—to the imposition of necessary legal guidelines that apply to all First Nations until explicitly exempted, the Act regularly reasserts its attain. Even so-called voluntary or “opt-in” regimes operate as coercive diversifications, requiring First Nations to provoke participation whereas encouraging the self-standardization of land, taxation, and regulatory techniques in alignment with provincial frameworks somewhat than Indigenous ones. Alongside these authorized shifts, the persistent but largely hole discourse of reconciliation additional masks the Act’s operations. Via these mutations, the Indian Act adapts to altering political climates, enabling its endurance and permitting Wendigo to persist throughout centuries. Every new settler reform guarantees restraint, but Wendigo stays intact, nonetheless hungry, even when it’s for little bites.
Crucially, Indigenous tales and knowledges are about recognition. Naming the Indian Act as Wendigo exposes its dependence on Indigenous life for survival. With out Indigenous peoples to control, classify, and constrain, the Indian Act has no physique, actually and figuratively. It’s simple to neglect that the Indian Act was designed to assimilate. It aimed, over generations, to eradicate Indigenous identification utilizing mechanisms akin to enfranchisement and strict management over standing.[14] The Act’s objective was to finally get rid of Indigenous individuals in Canada, leaving solely the settlers to manage the land. But when we acknowledge the Indian Act as Wendigo, it destabilizes the colonial narrative that casts the Act as everlasting or pure, revealing it as contingent, fragile, and traditionally produced. On this sense, studying the Indian Act as Wendigo isn’t just a critique or theorizing—it’s a strategic transfer.
If the Indian Act as Wendigo feeds on Indigenous self-determination, then resurgence, nation-to-nation governance, and practices grounded in Indigenous regulation (together with land-based and culture-based practices and language revitalization) operate as types of hunger somewhat than reform. They don’t tame Wendigo; they withdraw nourishment from it. By framing the Indian Act as Wendigo, this text shifts the analytic focus away from reformist questions of easy methods to repair the Act and towards extra pressing questions of refusal and understanding by means of our tales of easy methods to destroy Wendigo. What turns into attainable when Indigenous self-determination is not supplied as sustenance to Wendigo? What occurs when the query shifts from how will we repair it? to how will we refuse and let it starve?
Jenni Makahnouk, Anishinaabe from Obishikokaang (Lac Seul First Nation), Loon Clan. She is finishing her Grasp of Arts – Training and Society at McGill College and will probably be occurring to do her PhD in Wendigo research. She is an avid beader, and her artistic endeavours embody a number of beading tasks, akin to the continuing Woodlands Creatures collection. Her beaded works have been exhibited in and round Montreal.
This collection was produced throughout the venture Historicizing Our Instances: Histories of Migration and Local weather within the Digital House, which is supported partly by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Analysis Council.
[1] Susan Collis, “W(h)Ither the Indian Act? How Statutory Legislation Is Rewriting Canada’s Settler Colonial Formation,” Annals of the American Affiliation of Geographers 112 no. 1 (2022): 167
[2] J. R. Miller, Skyscrapers Disguise the Heavens: A Historical past of Indian–White Relations in Canada, third ed. (Toronto: College of Toronto Press, 2000); John Borrows, Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Legislation (Toronto: College of Toronto Press, 2002).
[3] Glen Sean Coulthard and Taiaiake Alfred, Crimson Pores and skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: College of Minnesota Press, 2014).
[4] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have At all times Accomplished: Indigenous Freedom by means of Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: College of Minnesota Press, 2017).
[5] Gerald Robert Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan College Press, 1994).
[6] Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Religious World of the Ojibway (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995), 221.
[7] Johnston, The Manitous, 235.
[8] Winona LaDuke and David Cowen, “Past Wiindigo Infrastructure,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 2 (2020): 243–68.
[9] Jonnelle Walker, “Wendigocene: A Story of Starvation,” Turtle Island Journal of Indigenous Well being 1, no. 3 (2023).
[10] Walker, “Wendigocene: A Story of Starvation,” 54.
[11] Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Religious World of the Ojibway (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995), 224.
[12] Herbert T. Schwarz, Windigo, and Different Tales of the Ojibways (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 11.
[13] Schwarz, Windigo, 11.
[14] Miller, Skyscrapers Disguise the Heavens.
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