Better Luck Next Time.

It's a frightening lack of respect for a group to go "hey this is our culture/religion/mythology? Please don't use that word" and apparently all the white people are like "but what if I did anyway to make my unity horror game 0.01% scarier?"

Just use a different word! Call it a deerman, deer god, forest spirit, whatever. Try to care at least a little when someone says not to use their culture for entertainment.

This is like the third or fourth time I've reblogged this but I'm doing it on my other account because I don't wanna keep spamming my poor followers with the same post.

If you are not indigenous you have NO RIGHT to tell people how we feel about our stories and myths. You do not KNOW what our sincerely held cultural beliefs are. And as a matter of fact, you are painting us all as the 'noble savage' trope by assuming that we are all so cripplingly superstitious and we so deeply believe in our monsters that saying the name of one is offensive to us.

The Wendigo is a myth. It is a story. It is a legend. You can say the word Wendigo. Stop going after random strangers you don't know for saying a word you don't even understand. Stop it. Please. It has never been a forbidden word. It isn't even part of the legend that 'saying its name will summon it', you summon the Wendigo by engaging in cannibalism.

The legend itself has an important message about greed and destruction, about selfishness in the face of death and survival. It has been used to describe many variations of greed and selfishness, both in the form of other natives and from invaders. But we don't all believe in a literal evil spirit/monster that will come get us if YOU say the word Wendigo, that's infantilizing.

The language of my tribe is nearly extinct. Our stories have been suppressed for centuries by racist non-Natives. We don't care if non-Natives tell our stories as long as they get the story RIGHT by at least taking it from an original source, because it keeps them alive.

By the way the Wendigo is totally unrelated to deer and does not have antlers, that shit is just made up by non-natives, which also pisses me off to no end. Wendigo is a spirit that possess a human, so it looks like a human, it could be anyone you know, that is part of the message and moral of the story.

THANK YOU

Look I know people mean well, I DO. I'm not saying these things to make anyone feel bad or to be angry, but if you DO want to help elevate Native voices, please understand the difference between uplifting our voices and speaking OVER US. If you want to uplift our voices then find things written by actual natives and reblog it, and ask actual natives and reblog that, interviews, native american websites and books written by natives, etc. And also don't ask one tribe to speak for another because we are not all the same. But by taking one thing you heard somewhere and spreading that around from your own mouth, you're speaking OVER us.

Even if one native told you not to say it, that's one native. I promise the majority of us are NOT overly supersitious. If one native you spoke to is so superstitious that it freaks them out if you say the word Wendigo, then don't say it around them. If you want to protect the virgin ears of everyone with a closely held belief then don't say the name of ANY mythological beast, don't say 'God', 'Jesus', or 'Satan'. (If you think only white/European/colonists believe that saying 'Satan' will summon him, I would like to point to a swath of very traditional Christian native Americans including my own grandfather)

I saw one person say like 'respect the culture and the people who are SCARED of that shit' in the tags and like, once again, that is SO infantalizing. I know you don't mean it to be, but you really think all natives are so SCARED of a story that we get genuinely distressed by you TYPING it on the internet??? And you don't see how stereotypical that is?

Again, I'm not saying this to make anyone feel bad for trying to help, but if you want to help then you will understand this.

To people reblogging posts written by actual natives (not just mine, anyone), thank you for setting an example, it's the only thing tempering my frustration, to see some people out there spread my words without speaking for me, and learning from it. <3

But the truth is that's just more emotional abuse and gaslighting.