Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Monday we looked at the origin story, Wednesday we explored the byzantine rules that come along with the curse.

We’ve heard almost too many stories of white colonists co-opting and literalizing indigenous folklore. Starting with Lake Champlain’s Champ and moving westward, plenty of the classic American lake monster tales started when some eager fishermen heard about, or saw a native drawing of, a serpentine lake spirit and took it as a warning of tangible aquatic horror. Aboriginal bunyip legends found British interlopers tramping through the Australian brush, rifles raised and taxidermists on call. More recently, American Indian Skinwalker legends were dumped into the boiling, paranoid slurry of UFOs, portals, cryptoeverythingology and government conspiracy theories. So it’s kinda nice to know that the Rougarou legend cross-pollinated in the opposite direction.
The Rugaru of Chippewa and Ojibwa legend isn’t the wolf-headed antagonist that bullied the French, nor does it adhere to that monster’s seasonal schedule or incomprehensible 101-day statute of limitations. So what is it? That, my buddies, is a source of some contention. While scholars know for a fact that the word “Rugaru” isn’t derived from any Native American language – meaning it’s almost certainly a bastardized version of either the Cajun term “Rougarou” or the French “Loup Garou” – it’s not entirely clear as to how various tribes and groups applied the word to their established mythologies.

It’s clear that the native Rugaru was a mysterious hairy humanoid who lived out in the forest. Some researchers suggest that tribes began using the term “Rugaru” in relation to their already-extant Sasquatch equivalents (not actually Sasquatch, but rather a physically similar entity with the same Type B personality). And that makes sense. If you aren’t Catholic, haven’t been raised in constant aural proximity to European werewolf stories and can already account for your own packed pantheon of culturally loaded monstrosities, it jibes that, when French traders start going off about some sort of animal guy hiding out in the wilderness, your mind turns immediately to the one animal guy hiding out in the wilderness that you’re already hip to. In this way, this native Rugaru is loosely comparable to our modern Bigfoot – a lumbering mascot for the enduring connection between nature and man, and an animal that couldn’t give two bunyips whether or not you eat a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

(Interestingly, the only other version of the Rougarou legend that portrays the monster in a positive light is that of the uber-devout Catholics, who saw him as a wolf-headed murderer, but regarded the murders as a form of holy cleansing. To them, the Rougarou was protecting the salvation of mankind by eviscerating those who undermined the divine word.)

The other native re-contextualization of the Rougarou isn’t as favorable. Remember the Wendigo? It was that voraciously hungry human-eating monster that the snowed-in Algonquian chapter of Cannibals Anonymous used to deter their people from eating their people, claiming that a man who eats the flesh of another man becomes a wandering, insatiable beast? Well, most tribes had a Wendigo figure, but, as not all tribes faced the harsh meteorological conditions that had occasionally found the Algonquians seeing each other as giant, storytelling turkey legs, not all Wendigo transformation stories hinged on an act of cannibalism. The Wendigo itself was always eatin’ folks and snarfing down children like so many mini-quiches, but the mechanism for transformation differed. Many groups in the Dakota Territory – the area where the Ojibwa and Chippewa tribes most likely picked up the Rougarou story from French traders and missionaries – for example, believed that a man who so much as looked upon a Wendigo subsequently became one. It’s these rules and conventions that were sometimes synonymously applied to the Ruguru.

This understanding of the French bogeyman not only takes into account the hairy, forest-dwelling monster, but also that monster’s former identity as a human who was cruelly transfigured. The Indians most likely heard the tale and, ignoring the leaden complexities of the French version, immediately related it to their own Wendigo story. (I’d be curious to know if the Rugaru legend served to strengthen tribal belief in the Wendigo, as it seems to provide corroborating evidence of the creature’s existence, or if the existence of said creature was already taken as a given and the French tale merely resulted in a minor, if striking, lexicographical addition to the oral tradition.)

Interestingly, it was a variation of this second version that appeared on the CW’s “Supernatural” – in the fourth-season episode “metamorphosis, the brawny, homophobic Winchester boys go up against a Rougarou, which, according to the show’s mythology, is a person who turns into a voracious cannibalistic monstrosity due to a rare genetic disorder.

So the Europeans took indigenous tales of sacred beings and phantasmagoric threats and recontextualized them to fit the demon-haunted landscape of the Western theology; the Native Americans took the evil grotesqueries of the guilt-stricken Christian world and built them into broader figures that prowled outside the boundaries of culture, working their teeth into the most basic, elemental foundations of both nature and humanity. “Supernatural” demonstrates that, even today, we continue to borrow from borrowed legends, copying copies of copies. The Rougarou was born of the Loup Garou and the Rugaru was born of the Rougarou. And all of them want nothing more than to remind us of the hungry, lonely animal inside us all.

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