Rob Appleford
Meat Dreams: The ‘Windigo Complex’ of
Trauma/Desire in Moses’ Brébeuf’s Ghost
and Ruffo’s A Windigo Tale
This paper will discuss a repellent
mythological figure in Aboriginal writing known as the Windigo, a
cannibal
winter spirit. Two plays by Aboriginal playwrights, Brébeuf’s
Ghost by Daniel David Moses (1998) and A Windigo Tale
by Armand Ruffo (2000),
use the Windigo to represent the
complex intersections of colonial desire and Aboriginal subjectivity. Moses’ play dramatizes the unstable alliances
in 19th c. Canada, while Ruffo’s
play
dramatizes the repercussions of the residential school system. Each play uses the Windigo as a metonym of
trauma and desire, both historical and personal. I will discuss the
ways in
which the cannibal spirit is redeployed in these post-colonial
contexts, but
also how the Windigo is an always-already site of contested desire
throughout
colonial histories. By examining the
‘Windigo complex’
as a dangerously unstable sign-system of desire in Moses’ and Ruffo’s
plays, I
will illustrate how the plays make use of the Windigo complex in their
breaching of
the thin membrane between what can and cannot be known, between
phantasmal and
material ontologies, and between subjective awareness and its
unrepresentable limits.
At its icy heart, the Windigo represents the hunger that blurs
necessary
divisions between truth and rumour, individualism and community, and
self and
Other: the Windigo forces us to recognize that subjectivity will eat
itself.