The Indian Act as Wendigo

By Jenni Makahnouk

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series

The Indian Act is commonly treated as a governance structure: an object to be interpreted, amended, or dismantled through policy reform. This framing assumes neutrality where there is appetite. This article argues that the Indian Act functions less as a static legal instrument and more as a consuming force—one that survives through the ongoing ingestion of Indigenous self-determination. Read through Indigenous epistemologies, the Indian Act emerges as Wendigo, if you will, an Indigenous malevolent manitou animated by greed, selfishness, and insatiable hunger. What happens when the Indian Act is viewed as Wendigo? By framing the Indian Act as Wendigo, we can illuminate its predatory dynamics in ways that conventional settler analyses of the Act cannot capture, and we can draw on Indigenous epistemologies of how to cure Wendigo.

The Indian Act is a federal Canadian statute, first enacted in 1876, that consolidated colonial policies regulating Indigenous identity, governance, land, and legal status under settler authority. More easily said, “the Indian Act houses the legal framework of settler colonialism in Canada,” and it has functioned since its passage as a central mechanism through which the Canadian state administers and constrains Indigenous self-determination.^[1] Scholarship on the Indian Act has long centred its legal structures, political effects, and role in introducing colonial governance structures to Indigenous communities. In the early 2000s, historical and policy analyses emphasized the Act’s legislative evolution and its function as an instrument of assimilation and control, while subsequent legal scholarship documented its role in reinforcing bureaucratic dependency and circumscribing Indigenous legal agency.^[2]

Indigenous scholars and theorists have pushed beyond these framings to articulate the Indian Act as a locus of colonial violence embedded in broader regimes of dispossession. Glen Coulthard exposes recognition politics as a mechanism through which the state reproduces colonial authority by subsuming Indigenous lifeworlds within settler frameworks of legitimacy;^[3] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson counters colonial logics and hegemony by foregrounding the everyday rebuilding of Indigenous resurgence as a mode of self-determined Indigenous life;^[4] Gerald Robert Vizenor advances “survivance” as an anticolonial refusal of Western metaphors for understanding Indigenous modernity.^[5] Together, these scholars situate the Indian Act not just as a legal framework but as a mechanism through which colonial power is reproduced and contested, demonstrating how Indigenous thought moves toward resurgence, survivance, and relational modes of governance that refuse settler-state authority.

While this literature powerfully critiques the Act’s political and legal operations, it leaves open a deeper ethical question: what if we read the Indian Act not only as a colonial instrument, but as a Wendigo text—one that embodies insatiable consumption and the breakdown of Indigenous relational worlds.

Wendigo is a malevolent manitou within Anishinaabe and Cree storytelling and culture. It is a non-human spirit that manifests as a human consumed by insatiable hunger, becoming giant in height with ash-grey skin, skeletal and gaunt, and tattered, bloodied lips from constant chewing.^[6] Though they are a spirit, Wendigo can attach itself to humans and change them into Wendigos. Wendigo functions as an ethical warning against the moral collapse and relational violations that emanate from systems organized by greed, consumption, and the destruction of kinship. They emerge when balance is broken, when the ethics of relationality are replaced by the logic of possession and selfishness, usually in times of great stress, such as winter, when scarcity and the threat of starvation intensify.

Indigenous scholar Basil Johnston claims that Wendigo has been “reincarnated as corporations, conglomerates, and multinationals,”^[7] positing Wendigo as a figure of colonial and capitalist consumption that causes relational breakdown.^[8] This reading emphasizes Wendigo’s function as a warning against extractive logics that devour land, bodies, and kin, and foregrounds the existential impacts of colonial governance and control.^[9]

Anishinaabe thought understands Wendigos as beings that sustain themselves by consuming “the lives of others without reciprocity, care, consent, or regard, in the pursuit of personal gain or profit.”^[10] Likewise, the Indian Act as Wendigo consumes Indigenous self-determination to survive and can “[expend] all its energy on this one purpose.”^[11] After all, new-to-this-land settlers created the Indian Act to indulge their self-interests. Any legislation created in such an imbalance carries instability in both its literal provisions and its metaphorical spirit. This sounds like Wendigo to me.

Framing the Indian Act as Wendigo refashions it into a living legislation that—animated by hunger for land, resources, and control—feeds endlessly on Indigenous life, land-based relations, governance structures and legal authority in order to reproduce settler sovereignty. In reframing it in this way, Indigenous peoples can apprehend it not as mere law or a neutral legal instrument. It makes visible the Indian Act’s predatory logic, centers Indigenous epistemologies, and opens space for strategies of refusal, resistance, and resurgence that settler understandings of the Act often overlook.

The Indian Act as Wendigo is also insatiable for Indigenous relationality, the interconnected web of social, political, and spiritual relationships that sustain Indigenous communities, including ties to land, kinship, governance, and cultural practices. By design, the Indian Act strives to sever Indigenous peoples from their relationality—evidenced by the Indian Residential School system, the pass system restricting movement, bans on cultural and spiritual practices, amongst many other bureaucratic failures of the Canadian state—and then sustains itself by managing the damage it creates. This is further evidenced by the ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis, underfunded child welfare services that systemically fail and discriminate against First Nations children, persistent suicide crises in First Nations communities, the drinking water advisories on many First Nations reserves (some lasting decades), and the list goes on. Our stories tell of “villages being destroyed by Windigo,” with “whole villages in ruin and inhabitants gone.”^[12] Our communities have not been destroyed by accident or neglect, but through a sustained colonial system that consumes relationships, produces crisis, and then feeds its own ongoing interventions. The Indian Act continues to function as a Wendigo: a structure that devours Indigenous life while presenting itself as necessary for survival.

Wendigo is never satisfied; it survives by becoming something new each time its hunger risks exposure. The Indian Act mirrors this logic. Its capacity to consume Indigenous relationality rests precisely on its ability to change shape, appearing reformist while remaining predatory. The Indian Act is a legal document of Canadian governance—an instrument to be amended, modernized, or reconciled with contemporary settler-colonial norms. Such approaches, however, underestimate the Act’s political vitality and colonial liberalism’s tendency to mask domination through care; what looks like regulation is an ingestion of Indigenous self-determination. Going back to our stories, “the bigger [Windigo] grew, the hungrier he became.”^[13] The more the Indian Act controlled, the more it wanted to control. The Indian Act as Wendigo defines, measures, and consumes Indigenous self-determination to justify its own existence. Like Wendigo, the Indian Act is never satisfied and never finished. From assimilationist amendments and reforms—beginning with the 1969 White Paper—to the imposition of mandatory laws that apply to all First Nations unless explicitly exempted, the Act continually reasserts its reach. Even so-called voluntary or “opt-in” regimes function as coercive adaptations, requiring First Nations to initiate participation while encouraging the self-standardization of land, taxation, and regulatory systems in alignment with provincial frameworks rather than Indigenous ones. Alongside these legal shifts, the persistent yet largely hollow discourse of reconciliation further masks the Act’s operations. Through these mutations, the Indian Act adapts to changing political climates, enabling its endurance and allowing Wendigo to persist across centuries. Each new settler reform promises restraint, yet Wendigo remains intact, still hungry, even if it’s for little bites.

Crucially, Indigenous stories and knowledges are about recognition. Naming the Indian Act as Wendigo exposes its dependence on Indigenous life for survival. Without Indigenous peoples to regulate, classify, and constrain, the Indian Act has no body, literally and figuratively. It’s easy to forget that the Indian Act was designed to assimilate. It aimed, over generations, to eradicate Indigenous identity using mechanisms such as enfranchisement and strict control over status.^[14] The Act’s goal was to eventually eliminate Indigenous people in Canada, leaving only the settlers to control the land. But if we recognize the Indian Act as Wendigo, it destabilizes the colonial narrative that casts the Act as permanent or natural, revealing it as contingent, fragile, and historically produced. In this sense, reading the Indian Act as Wendigo is not just a critique or theorizing—it is a strategic move.

If the Indian Act as Wendigo feeds on Indigenous self-determination, then resurgence, nation-to-nation governance, and practices grounded in Indigenous law (including land-based and culture-based practices and language revitalization) function as forms of starvation rather than reform. They do not tame Wendigo; they withdraw nourishment from it. By framing the Indian Act as Wendigo, this article shifts the analytic focus away from reformist questions of how to fix the Act and toward more urgent questions of refusal and understanding through our stories of how to destroy Wendigo. What becomes possible when Indigenous self-determination is no longer offered as sustenance to Wendigo? What happens when the question shifts from how do we fix it? to how do we refuse and let it starve?

Jenni Makahnouk, Anishinaabe from Obishikokaang (Lac Seul First Nation), Loon Clan. She is completing her Master of Arts – Education and Society at McGill University and will be going on to do her PhD in Wendigo studies. She is an avid beader, and her creative endeavours include several beading projects, such as the ongoing Woodlands Creatures series. Her beaded works have been exhibited in and around Montreal.

This series was produced within the project Historicizing Our Times: Histories of Migration and Climate in the Digital Space, which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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^[1] Susan Collis, “W(h)Ither the Indian Act? How Statutory Law Is Rewriting Canada’s Settler Colonial Formation,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112 no. 1 (2022): 167.

^[2] J. R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian–White Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); John Borrows, Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

^[3] Glen Sean Coulthard and Taiaiake Alfred, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

^[4] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

^[5] Gerald Robert Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).

^[6] Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995), 221.

^[7] Johnston, The Manitous, 235.

^[8] Winona LaDuke and David Cowen, “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 2 (2020): 243–68.

^[9] Jonnelle Walker, “Wendigocene: A Story of Hunger,” Turtle Island Journal of Indigenous Health 1, no. 3 (2023).

^[10] Walker, “Wendigocene: A Story of Hunger,” 54.

^[11] Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995), 224.

^[12] Herbert T. Schwarz, Windigo, and Other Tales of the Ojibways (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 11.

^[13] Schwarz, Windigo, 11.

^[14] Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens.