A friend of mine recently shared with me an interesting and enlightening article about the misuse and appropriation of the Wendigo, a figure from North American Indigenous mythology, in Western media. Something tickled my recollections as we talked about it, until I remembered that there was a monster in my game's "Creature Codex" called the Wihtikow - an alternative spelling of Wendigo I found in the online Cree Dictionary when I compiled the codex years ago. This led me to critically consider, for the first time, the effects of my early intentions developing this collection of creatures, and in light of the abovementioned article and an ensuing discussion between my friend and myself, my new critical lens could only reveal that something was wrong.

Knowing exactly my initial intentions, I look with understanding and kindness upon my younger self even as I recognize his ignorant naivety. I had looked at popular fantasy tropes and had seen creatures boiled down and rendered almost unrecognizable from roots in strictly European myth. My own fantasy realm was taking inspiration from cultures all over the globe, and my early feminist motivation was driving me to create diverse realms full of flavour beyond the familiar! So I went to Google and Wikipedia, and thence to other sources, to find mythical creatures from Cree, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Roman, Swahili, and Welsh legends (and beyond) to diversify my Creature Codex. I thought, "This is a great way to deepen players' experiences! Maybe it will even introduce them to cultural mores beyond their own!" What I didn't think was that some of these myths still carried significance to the cultures whence they came. I didn't think about what it might mean to reduce a sacred or meaningful figure down to a name, two sentences of shallow description, a few mechanical statistics, and an ultimately mundane role in a tabletop RPG.

The research I conducted to include these figures in my codex was shallow at best - I found one or two sources to get a quick gist of the creature's appearance and flavour, pared it down to fit my format, then moved on. This was irresponsible of me, and I was grateful to my friend and the article for asking me to consider my product critically.

Discussion of the Wendigo led me to consider where the lines lie of appropriation, interpretation, and even ubiquity. The golem and the mummy were brought up in the discussion; these creatures, too, come from particular non-Western roots - the golem from Jewish tradition and the mummy from Egyptian. Yet they are unquestionably ubiquitous, spread across story and make-believe in all media and even genre. Do we have a responsibility to think about this more critically? Perhaps, but these creatures as we use them today are less specific than the Wendigo, less particular in makeup, and numberless cultures around the globe have individually conceived versions of automatons and the undead. Consider that these concepts may have amalgamated, become archetypes of a more diverse body, taken up the names "golem" and "mummy" while representing neither golem nor mummy in particularity. The Wendigo, meanwhile, can hardly be considered anything but a single figure, a very particular creature of specific significance to specific people groups.

Ultimately I recognize that I am nothing near an authority and seek only to correct myself and be corrected, not to express my own opinions to shape others'. I am addressing the appropriation, as I understand it to exist, in my Creature Codex, and I wonder if you, reader, might have thoughts on this. I'm very interested to know them if you do; thanks for reading and engaging!