Weetigo: The cannibal spirit

1. Weetigo: The cannibal spirit

2. “The most powerful kind of art is that which is inseparable from religion” (Tomson Highway, 1990)

3. The Weetigo (a.k.a. Wendigo etc.) • Appears in the traditions of many North American aboriginal cultures • Feeds on human flesh, a warning to children • Has a long history among the Cree of northern Manitoba as a spirit figure, • Also thought of as a kind of “bogeyman”

4. The Weetigo is Featured Prominently in Kiss of the Fur Queen • Typically featured as the gaping, all-consuming mouth . . . • of Father LaFleur as he rapes Gabriel • When Gabriel opened his eyes, ever so slightly, the face of the principal loomed inches from his own. The man was wheezing, his breath emitting, at regular intervals, spouts of hot air that made Gabriel think of raw meat hung to age but forgotten. (77-78)

5. The scene is witnessed and interpreted by Jeremiah as a manifestation of the Weetigo: A dark, hulking figure over him [Gabriel], like a crow. Visible only in silhouette, for all Jeremiah knew it might have been a bear devouring a honeycomb, or the Weetigo feasting on human flesh. . . . When the beast reared its head, it came face to face, not four feet away, with that of Jeremiah Okimasis. The whites of the beast’s eyes grew large, blinked once. (79)

6. Later, this cannibalism is linked to Catholic communion ritual, where the consumption of the body of Christ is metonymically linked with the contact with Gabriel’s mouth on 78: • The subtly throbbing motion of the priest’s upper body made the naked Jesus Christ---this sliver of beautiful light, this fleshly Son of God so achingly beautiful—rub his body against the child’s lips, over and over again. . . . He about to open his mouth and swallow whole the living flesh . . .

7. This prefigures Gabriel’s emergence as strange Christ-figure • The lashings at the hand of Lafleur linked to his sufferings as “Jesus” in school performance (84-85). • As “redeemer” of his people, whose death results in a new covenant with the creator.

8. Winnipeg/Weetigo • The bars: • The sidewalk began to writhe. Strands of country music—tinny, tawdry, emaciated---oozed—through the cracks under filthy doorways. The doors opened and closed, opened and closed. From their dark maws stumbled men and women, all dark of skin, of hair, of eye . . . (105) • Compared to hell by Jeremiah

9. Mall/ Weetigo • 116 ff. • “entrails of the beast” (entering the Weetigo) • 117 • The socks (Argyle) • Named after “a Scottish earl who drank his enemies’ blood on the battlefield and then went home to eat their children.” (117)

10. Mall/ Weetigo cont’d • Become disoriented (118) • The story of Weetigo and the weasel • The furry creature who must burrow inside to destroy the evil creature. • Moral of the story?

11. Mall/ Weetigo cont’d • And, of course, the food court, here portrayed as Rabelasian excess: • . . . they came to the belly of the beast—one hundred restaurants in monstrous, seething clump. Never before had Gabriel seen so much food. Or so many people shovelling food in and chewing and swallowing and burping and shovelling and chewing and swallowing burping, as at some apocalyptic communion. The world was one great, gaping mouth. (120)

12. . . . The roar of mastication drowned out all other sound, so potent that, before the clock struck two, the brothers were gnawing away with the mob. (120)

13. “Why did Weesageechak kill the Weetigo,” asked Gabriel . . . “All I remember is that the Weetigo had to be killed because he ate people . . . Weesageechak cheweed the Weetigo’s entrails to smithereens from the inside out.” (120)

14. Broad Parallels • Church/Western Religion as devouring figures preying on the children of the First Nations of Canada • Mall/Consumer culture similarly devouring people’s souls (“. . . Television was the Weetigo finally arrived to devour, digest, and shit out the soul of Eemanapiteepitat?” (187)

15. The story of the son of Ayash makes the link between Church and the Weetigo explicit . . . • As Abraham receives his last rites from Father Bouchard, the two narratives are intertwined. The version of Job is interpreted by the boys: • “This I know . . . That my Avenger liveth, and he, at the Last, will take his stand upon the earth.” “Evil upon evil, continued the hunter, the most fearsome among them the man who hate human flesh,” the Cree descant whirring, light as foam, over the English dirge.” (227)

16. Here’s the original from the King James version of the Bible • [25] For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:[26] And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:

17. Jeremiah later encounters the Weetigo himself, as a metaphoric figure of the soul’s own dark, devouring aspect . . • “Our hero, the Son of Ayash, has to be careful, for he is entering the dark place of the human soul where he will meet evil creatures like... the Weetigo” (271). • Responding to a small boy’s inquiry, Jeremiah continues: “A Weetigo is a monster who eats little boys... like you” As the child returns to hug his teacher, “the hot face buried in his groin. . . . ‘A Weetigo ate me,’ the child mumbled into the faded blue denim. And then bit. (271)

18. Do you find Highway’s parallel convincing? That is, is Gabriel an effective analog of Ayash/Christ/Weesageechak? What, if any, salvation does he offer his people in the novel?