In Cree, Anishinabek and other Algonquian societies, the wetiko (alternately spelled windigo or wendigo) were most commonly understood as cannibals. While some ancient stories portray Wetikos as giants or monsters, others speak of ordinary human beings transformed by a spiritual sickness, who then become dangerous to others in terrible ways.
As Hadley Friedland explains in her new book The Wetiko (Windigo) Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization, the wetiko can be understood as a complex legal concept, that serves as a useful framework for addressing societal ills - and holds promise as a legal foothold in the struggle to humanely and effectively address intimate violence in Indigenous communities and beyond today.
"The wetiko stories offer a Cree and Anishinabek legal framework for speaking about otherwise unspeakable subjects," said Friedland.
"The question I ask in this book is: how do we protect those we love from those we love? As the result of the ravages of colonialism, there are unacceptably high rates of intimate violence and child victimization within many Indigenous communities. In such instances the concept of the wetiko may provide a useful way in which people can address monstrous actions without rejecting the actor as a monster, with a focus on corrective action rather than meting out retribution."
In her book, Friedland argues that the wetiko concept has done a great deal of heavy lifting within Cree and Anishinabek societies for centuries, either as a legal category or as a metaphor for human wrongdoing. Using an adapted common-law legal analysis method, Friedland examines people's decision-making processes and principled responses to someone becoming a wetiko, arguing these stories and accounts reveal a broad range of principled and effective responses for keeping the community safe. "There is a dangerously and demonstrably false assumption out there that the only response to a wetiko was death. In fact, the most common, and preferred response was healing. Like the Canadian criminal system, there is a legal process and several response principles that are balanced based on all the facts of a particular case."
Ironically, this very term which helped societies address violence and protect the vulnerable, was effectively stigmatized as a superstitious cultural relic by non-Indigenous authorities as part of their imposition of sovereignty. Respected Indigenous leaders were arrested and even executed for carrying out their legal obligations to maintain safety within their communities. The result, Friedland asserts, has been under-examined as cause of an epidemic of intergenerational violence and profound social suffering. "Imagine the chaos and confusion today if powerful outsiders started arresting police and judges for doing their jobs, and telling everyone our whole criminal justice system was nonsense."
Friedland contends that re-examining Indigenous legal categories like the Wetiko, and recognizing the strengths within Indigenous legal traditions holds promise for empowering Indigenous communities to curb violence and victimization on their own terms and put an end to the cycle of intergenerational trauma wrought by the residential school system and other colonial mechanisms.
"As a metaphor for capturing the current predicament of child victimization within Indigenous communities, I think the wetiko narratives should be taken very seriously," she said.
"This book is a thought experiment in which I engage with Indigenous stories as jurisprudence with a view to create a framework for thinking about the wetiko stories in terms of legal principles, which could be applied to contemporary issues. In the fraught and urgent area of violence and child victimization in Indigenous communities, such possibilities are worth exploring. We need to access every possibility if we hope to end the relentless suffering in this generation."