Another "stand alone" episode of the X-Files, this time from season 1, that gets routinely trashed by hard core X-Files fans, I was happy to see that when I looked it up on IMDb this evening, it had some geniune advocates....otherwise I might have been tempted to brand said hard core fans with a "Shawn Spencer label" of "hatin' on the Indians." This is one Jimmy Herman's earliest television appearnaces. He's one of those guys that looked really old when he was pretty young, so by the first season of "Supernatural" he didn't look any different!!
As far the Native monster realm goes, the term Manitou is used here to describe a werewolf like creature. Within the writing of the episode it is described as coming from the "Algonquins"--which it does, in a BIG way. What is strange about that for me, is that I always associated the "tribe" in this episode with the Blackfeet, themselves an Algonquin group. Well I suppose that they could be taken for Absaroke or Crow peoples (there's the reservation on the Little Big Horn, or the sight of Custer's last stand). Truthfully the various Algonquin languages had closely identifiable variations on the word manitou, and none of them are referred to evil beings that possess or take over people. In a strange kind of way, the creatures in this episode are more associated with Shape Shifters mixed with the dreaded cannibal Wendigo.
Just for the hell of it, I'm including a You Tube clip of a Native boogey man song by one of my favorite Native American musicians Robert Mirabal: Skinwalker's Moon.
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