The wiindigoo (also windigo, wendigo) belongs to Algonquian-speaking peoples of the northern forests, Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Cree, Innu and their neighbours, and is specific to a landscape where winter starvation was a genuine prospect. It is a being of ice and insatiable hunger, gaunt and gigantic, and above all it is associated with the ultimate taboo of cannibalism: a person who eats human flesh to survive, or who gives way to greed and selfishness, may "turn wiindigoo," becoming the thing that consumes without being filled.
In Anishinaabe teaching, as set out by the Ojibwe writer Basil Johnston, the wiindigoo is also a moral figure, an image of unchecked appetite and of a community that devours itself. Twentieth-century psychiatry proposed a culture-bound "windigo psychosis," a supposed compulsion to cannibalism; later scholarship has largely dismantled this as an artefact of outsider report and colonial framing rather than a documented disorder. The recent horror-genre "wendigo", an antlered forest monster of films and games, is a modern invention with little connection to the Algonquian being, and is best kept distinct from it.