Indigenous Stories Reveal the Fragility of Precontact Life
The threats of famine and starvation were ever present
Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.
By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)
It is not fashionable these days to talk about just how challenging life was for Canadian Indigenous people in the pre-contact era. Rather, students are taught that indigenous people used to live comfortably, in peace, with a reverence for the natural world, with which they lived in perfect balance. This is contrasted with modern living which is characterized as an unsustainable orgy of feckless overconsumption.
While the challenges facing the modern world are many, it is nevertheless a fact, based on any kind of objective metric, that life for people on planet earth is far better now than it has ever been. Whether you look at life expectancy, infant mortality, rates of violence, human rights, or anything else related to quality of life, everything has been distinctly trending for the better, as psychologist and prolific writer Steven Pinker explains in this Ted Talk, since the industrial revolution. Nevertheless, we are pounded daily with a range of supposedly existential threats to life as we know it by legacy and social media alike. It is deeply ironic that the very technology that has brought us these incredible advances is the thing that is battering us with all this doom and gloom.
In such an environment, it is easy to imagine that things must have been better somehow in the preindustrial era. Sure, life was materially harder, we suppose, but at least the world was clean and the natural environment, free from the forces of 21st century technological stresses brought on by modern overconsumption and greed, was thriving, wasn’t it? But it is hard to know, because prehistoric people were illiterate, so accurate records of exactly how they lived are hard to come by. One way to get a glimpse into the lives of these long dead people is by listening to their stories. One such illuminating story told by Canadian Indigenous people is that of the Windigo:
“The most terrifying of the legendary figures was the Windigo, a supernatural giant with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. He haunted the forests during the dark and cold months of winter, retreating to the north when warmer weather arrived. His size and supernatural strength made him a dreaded foe who could not be killed by ordinary weapons. Only a powerful shaman could destroy a Windigo. Any unexplained disappearance, such as a hunter’s failure to return from the forest, was taken to mean that he had fallen prey to the Windigo. This monster was particularly feared, as conditions of near starvation (which were not uncommon during the later months of winter), could transform an ordinary human into a Windigo. Hunger might become a craving for human flesh, causing an individual to commit real or imagined acts of cannibalism, and then to metamorphose into the derided monster. Anyone suspected of becoming a Windigo could be put to death immediately, and those who, in extremes of hunger, began to lust for human flesh, might request their own execution.”
-First Peoples in Canada (McMillan/Yellowhorn 2004)
While we today reassure our children that their fear of monsters is unwarranted, for Indigenous kids living in the precontact era it was all very real. The story of the Windigo is a sobering reminder that for Indigenous people living centuries ago, life was a matter of day to day survival. Warfare, murder, slavery, and even cannibalism were features of this challenging way of life, not to mention threats from predatory animals and natural disasters. The fact that people in desperate situations will resort to cannibalism is well documented throughout all human history, from the distant past right up to the present so it should come as no surprise that Indigenous people here in Canada sometimes engaged in the practice.
Of course, there were also certainly many moments of joy and contentment- life was not constant misery. And peoples’ ability to survive in a challenging environment with nothing more than rudimentary stone and bone tools is something to admire and their diverse cultures are clearly worthy of study, but what is needed is an understanding based on the full complex nature of these societies, not some dumbed down Disney version which supposes they lived morally perfect lives and possessed some kind of exceptional wisdom which is absent from the modern world.
The truth, left unspoken in Canadian classrooms today, is that prehistoric people were like us modern humans in that they sought to exploit resources as much as possible, often having a negative impact on other creatures with which they coexisted and used hunting methods that were effective without regard to whether those methods were inhumane or resulted in more animals being killed than they could possibly use, such as buffalo jumps. Indigenous people even devastated whole ecosystems when they arrived in areas previously unoccupied by humans, such as New Zealand, resulting in extinctions and the introduction of invasive species. The arrival of humans on the North American continent coincided with the extinction of most of the megafauna that had been living there for millions of years and is thought by many to be a factor in the disappearance of these great beasts, which had lived here for millions of years prior to the arrival of the first humans.
Indigenous people today understandably lament the fact that so many of their ancestors suffered and died, mostly from European diseases, in the centuries that followed first contact with Europeans, but if they are being honest, they will have to admit that life today has the potential to be much better than it was centuries ago- the age of the Windigo- for them and everyone else.
The litany of social problems plaguing so many Indigenous people today is not the consequence of forgotten or underappreciated exceptional traditional Indigenous knowledge or “ways of knowing”, but rather the fact that Indigenous leaders have chosen to reject social and economic assimilation into the modern world for their people, even as they themselves enjoy the riches of their full assimilation.
That is the lesson kids in Canadian schools should be learning if we are ever to move forward towards “Truth and Reconciliation”.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Ford Government to Audit School Boards
Follow Woke Watch Canada on X - @WokeWatchCanada
Support Woke Watch Canada by upgrading to a paid membership:
Or, by contributing to our Donor Box:
While working in Alert Bay BC. in about 1989 I was flown in to Hopetown on the mainland coast to level some houses which had sunk on the soft soil . It was a small settlement of about 15 indigenous peoples which included 2 early teen boys. After work one evening they received permission from their parents to take out their punt and show me their Island where they placed their deceased and generally show me around the coast. We approached the low lying island and temporarily fastened onto the massive iron ring at the landing spot and observed the small cedar houses in which the coffins where placed. We did not go ashore on the craggy igneous shore or stay for any length of time. In due course we left and returned back to the village along the coast. While doing so the steersman recounted how he had heard wild sounds coming from the shore one evening and he surmised it was a Buckwoss or wild man. He was afraid but felt reasonably safe while in the punt at sea. On our return we pulled the punt onto the shelving shore and made it fast. While doing so I commented that on this shore in Precontact time his ancestors would have made cedar canoes. I further said if we looked around we would find evidence of this. I looked down at my feet and there was a broken stone adze made from fine grained igneous rock. He was amazed and I was a little surprised at how quickly I had shown my point. I found further evidence of stones with the conchoidal fracture associated with being worked by man. These two teenagers had a live in teacher on the island whose only job was to educate these boys. I was surprised how little they knew about their environment and their history. The community was well off and I wonder whether the wild man would be the same as the Wendigo in the above article. I do not think the coast environment can be related directly to the interior plains and Barren lands for there was always plenty of fish which were easy to process and keep in time of need.
Indigenous have indeed chosen to reject economic and social integration for their people. The irony is that the leaders themselves have fully integrated. In fact, they have used all of the gifts “colonization” has given them to become leaders. But instead of counselling the indigenous underclass that remains behind to do the same the leaders tell them to reject integration and follow a dead end “separateness” path that leaves them poor and the “leaders” rich