Wetiko is an Algonquian concept — appearing as wîhtikow in Cree, wiindigoo in Ojibwe, and in cognate forms across the Algonquian language family. It names a cannibalistic spirit driven by greed, excess and selfish consumption.
(Our earlier text called this “an Algonquin word”. Algonquin is one people; Algonquian is the language family across which this concept appears. Corrected.)
It deludes its host into believing that cannibalising the life-force of others — in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life — is a logical and morally upright way to live.
Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment, and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes it cannibalism rather than simple murder.
How it reached this conversation
The route by which wetiko entered Western social-change discourse runs through Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renápe and Lenápe), whose Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism (1979; revised edition Seven Stories Press, 2008) reframed colonial extraction as a psychic illness. Paul Levy’s ‘malignant egophrenia’ — the ego unchained from reason and limits, acting with the malevolent logic of the cancer cell — is a later rendering for Western audiences, and the Culture Hack Labs essay we originally sourced draws on that lineage.
Naming the order matters here: the concept is Algonquian, the analysis of colonialism-as-wetiko is Forbes’, and Levy’s contribution is translation. Our previous entry named only the translator.