It’s ironic to be releasing this song now, when a fire ban is in effect in our area of the Northeast and ponds are drying up. When I wrote “Windigo Knocking,” it seemed it would never stop raining. The summer had been so wet that a lot of the sugar maples that are emblematic of the area didn’t display any fall colors, collapsing instead into a sickening green-black. Drought or flood, it comes to the same thing: the season is sick.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer evokes the Anishinaabe legend Windigo, a hunger-wracked monster that haunts the margins of winter encampments in lean times, frozen-hearted and insatiable. “Born of our fears and our failings,” Kimmerer writes, “Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than anything else.” Windigo represents a system out of balance—its hunger only begets more hunger; its isolation from the group only deepens as it tries to interact with it forcibly and destructively.