Wendigocene:

Abstract

My mother once told me that if you speak about Wendigos out loud, they will come. They are cannibals, flesh eaters, spirit eaters. Wendigos survive by consuming the life of others without reciprocity, care, consent, or regard in the name of personal gain or profit. Growing up, I was taught that the Wendigo condition was something that you caught like a disease or that grew within yourself like a cancer. They were monsters, they were the closest thing we had to “human.” Afterall, according to the ideological lineages of Marxism, liberal Enlightenment, and settler colonialism, to be “human” is to be a monster, a capitalist, a cannibal. Each of these ideological lineages root the definition of the “human” in transcendence, defined by property, exhibited through man-made aesthetics rooted in capital, white supremacy, anti-Black racism, anti-Indigeneity, and a false human/nature divide. In this paper, I argue that the term “Anthropocene”, much like the “human” it centers, requires an ontological limiting that fails to encapsulate the fullness of Anishinaabe worlds, but most importantly Anishinaabe responsibility to each other. I offer a reframing from my positioning, where the last 500 years of apocalypses can be theorized through an analysis of the rise of the Wendigos. In conversation with other critiques of the well-problematized “Anthropocene,” this contribution offers a theoretical exploration of Wendigo theory to further support that the term “Anthropocene” is reflective of itself (Davis & Todd, 2017, p. 761-780). I suggest the term “Wendigocene” as an alternative to “Anthropocene” within the context of Anishinaabe communities for Indigenous theorists, as this reframing invokes a responsibility to care for our relations and exercise abolitionist legal praxes which are central to our sovereignty.