Their visitations speak to the inseparability of human experience... National identity is irrelevant to this borderless horror." Lockhards ideas explain that wendigos are an expression of a dark aspect of human nature: the drive toward greed, consumption, and disregard for other life in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Romantic scholar and documentarian Emily Zarka, also a professor at Arizona State University, observes that two commonalities among the indigenous cultures of Algonquian language family speakers are that they are situated in climes where harsh winters are frequent and may be accompanied by starvation. She states that the wendigo symbolically represents three major concepts: it is the incarnation of winter, the embodiment of hunger, and the personification of selfishness. In popular culture
Although distinct from how it appears in the traditional lore, one of the first appearances of a character inspired by, or named after, a wendigo in non-Indigenous literature is Algernon Blackwoods 1910 novella The Wendigo. Joe Nazare wrote that Blackwoods "subtly-demonizing rhetoric transforms the Wendigo from a native myth into a descriptive template for the Indian savage. "Blackwoods work has influenced many of the subsequent portrayals in mainstream horror fiction, such as August Derleths "The Thing that Walked on the Wind" and "Ithaqua" (1933 and 1941), which in turn inspired the character in Stephen Kings novel Pet Sematary, where it is a personification of evil, an ugly grinning creature with yellow-grey eyes, ears replaced by rams horns, white vapor coming from its nostrils, and a pointed, decaying yellow tongue.
Windigo psychosis may well be the most perfect example of the construction of an Aboriginal mental disorder by the scholarly professions, and its persistence dramatically underscores how constructions of the Aboriginal by these professions have, like Frankensteins monster, taken on a life of their own. The 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) classifies "Windigo" as a culture-specific disorder, describing it as "Rare, historic accounts of cannibalistic obsession... Symptoms included depression, homicidal or suicidal thoughts, and a delusional, compulsive wish to eat human flesh... Some controversial new studies question the syndromes legitimacy, claiming cases were actually a product of hostile accusations invented to justify the victims ostracism or execution." As a concept or metaphor
In addition to denoting a cannibalistic monster from certain traditional folklore, some Native Americans also understand the wendigo conceptually. As a concept, the wendigo can apply to any person, idea, or movement infected by a corrosive drive toward self-aggrandizing greed and excessive consumption, traits that sow disharmony and destruction if left unchecked. Ojibwe scholar Brady DeSanti asserts that the wendigo "can be understood as a marker indicating... a person... imbalanced both internally and toward the larger community of human and spiritual beings around them." Out of equilibrium and estranged by their communities, individuals thought to be afflicted by the wendigo spirit unravel and destroy the ecological balance around them. Chippewa author Louise Erdrichs novel The Round House, winner of the National Book Award, depicts a situation where an individual person becomes a wendigo.