#Resource The Windigo Settle close to the fire. The forest is dark tonight, and what I have to tell you is old. Older than any of us. Long ago, in the deep winter of the northern forests, there was a man called Makwa. He was not a bad man. He loved his children. He was a decent hunter. But one winter, the animals were scarce and the cold was vicious, and Makwa’s family began to starve. One night, in desperation, he did the thing that must never be done. He took flesh that was not his to take. He crossed the line that the community had always held as sacred — the line that separates a person from the hunger inside them. And something happened to Makwa after that. At first it was small. A coldness behind the eyes. A restlessness that sleep wouldn’t cure. He would wake in the night and feel the hunger — not in his stomach but somewhere deeper, somewhere beneath the ribs, somewhere that food couldn’t reach. He ate and ate and nothing was enough. He grew thin even as he consumed more. His heart, the elders said, had turned to ice. His family noticed. His wife saw his eyes in the firelight one evening and recognised something in them that was no longer her husband. She wept quietly and said nothing. His children moved to the far side of the lodge. By spring, Makwa had become something the Ojibwe called the Windigo. He walked the forest now on legs like stripped birch trees, enormous, skeletal, his mouth always open, his belly always empty. He had grown vast — impossibly large — and yet he could not feel full. The more he devoured, the more ravenous he became. He did not consume in order to live. He consumed because consuming was all that was left of him. The eating had replaced the person. The strange thing — the thing the elders always paused on when they told this story — was that the Windigo could not see what he had become. He still believed he was hungry in the ordinary way. He still believed, in some frozen corner of his ice-heart, that the next thing he devoured would finally be enough. It never was. The hunters of the village tracked him. Not with anger — with sorrow. Because they knew Makwa. They had eaten with him, laughed with him, grieved with him. But they also knew that a Windigo left to roam would consume the entire forest, every creature in it, and then itself. There was no reasoning with insatiable hunger. There was only stopping it. They brought him down at the edge of the tree line, at first light, and they burned what remained. And that winter, the village survived — not because they had more food, but because they shared what little they had. Because they held the line between need and greed. Because they remembered that to consume beyond your share is not strength. It is the beginning of a transformation. A slow one. A cold one. The ice grows in the heart long before anyone else can see it. The elders told this story every winter. Not to frighten the children — though it did frighten them. But to remind everyone, sitting close together in the dark, what the community was for. It was for this: making sure no one ever got that hungry. Making sure no one ever had to make the choice Makwa made. Making sure the ice never found its way in. Sharing was not generosity. It was medicine. The Windigo Today Jeremy Lent asks us to look at our civilisation and ask — is this not the Windigo writ large? The Windigo is the name given by the Ojibwe to a cannibalistic monster driven by insatiable hunger. The more it consumes, the more ravenous it becomes. It can never be satisfied, because its appetite is not directed toward nourishment but toward devouring for its own sake. For the Ojibwe, the European invaders who arrived on their lands seemed animated by just such a force.  A corporation that prioritises its workers’ wellbeing over quarterly returns will find itself outcompeted and eliminated by rivals that don’t. An investor who chooses ecological stewardship over maximum profit will lose out to one who doesn’t. The individuals change; the behaviour persists. That is the hallmark of a systemic pathology — not aberrant actors, but a structure that produces the same destructive outcomes regardless of who occupies its roles.  The Windigo is not a villain. It was a person once. In the course of the transformation from human to Windigo, the person exhibits increasing selfishness, violence, hunger, and greed. This is a story shared not merely for entertainment but to reinforce the communal values that allow communities to live well with one another and within their environments.  The question the story leaves with us, sitting by the fire, is the same one it always left: at what point does need become greed? At what point does hunger become the Windigo’s hunger — the kind that can never be satisfied, that grows larger with every meal, that mistakes consumption for living? And what is our version of the hunters — the ones who loved Makwa, and stopped him anyway? The fire is low now. The forest is very quiet. Take only what you need. Share the rest. Keep the ice out of your heart. That is all the story ever asked.