In 1661, The Jesuit Relations reported:

Although in many recorded cases of Wendigo psychosis the individual has been killed to prevent cannibalism from resulting, some Cree folklore recommends treatment by ingestion of fatty animal meats or drinking animal grease; those treated may sometimes vomit ice as part of the curing process.One of the more famous cases of Wendigo psychosis reported involved a Plains Cree trapper from Alberta, named Swift Runner. During the winter of 1878, Swift Runner and his family were starving, and his eldest son died. Twenty-five miles away from emergency food supplies at a Hudsons Bay Company post, Swift Runner butchered and ate his wife and five remaining children. Given that he resorted to cannibalism so near to food supplies, and that he killed and consumed the remains of all those present, it was revealed that Swift Runners was not a case of pure cannibalism as a last resort to avoid starvation, but rather of a man with Wendigo psychosis. He eventually confessed and was executed by authorities at Fort Saskatchewan.Another well-known case involving Wendigo psychosis was that of Jack Fiddler, an Oji-Cree chief and medicine man known for his powers at defeating wendigos. In some cases, this entailed killing people with Wendigo psychosis. As a result, in 1907, Fiddler and his brother Joseph were arrested by the Canadian authorities for homicide. Jack committed suicide, but Joseph was tried and sentenced to life in prison.
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.