In Antonia Bird's Ravenous, Colqhoun’s (Robert Carlyle) cannibal story prompts George to recount the Wendigo myth, highlighting Colqhoun’s literal cannibalism as well as the imperial repercussions his journey westward represents. As Danette DiMarco articulates so well in her “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous,” the film “is an appropriative text that invokes the Wendigo myth and evaluates cannibalistic discourse more broadly in order to critique Western cultural crisis” (134).
Through the figure of the Wendigo, the film elucidates a direct relationship between literal cannibalism and figurative consumption of the American frontier Jack D. Forbes calls this figure the wetiko disease, “the disease of exploitation” (xix). According to Forbes, wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, to an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism” (24).
For Forbes, “imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil” (24). Jennifer Brown reinforces this connection between imperialism and cannibalism in Ravenous, asserting “Rather than the colonial use of cannibalism as tag of the savage, it is the white man who is barbaric and the Native American who is calm, intelligent, and reminds us that ‘whites eat the body of Christ.’” (226).
In Ravenous, Colqhoun and Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) of Fort Spencer illustrate conflicting responses to both the frontier myth and Wendigo. To save the land and its people, Wendigo/colonizer must die.
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