Quote:
"In Wakening, the Weetigo appears as a great horned elk with the power to recreate the forest, embodying the simultaneously creative and destructive potentialities of non-human agency. The 'occupiers' here are not only a metaphor for colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada, but they also stand in more generally for human-made systems (such as capitalism) that are responsible for the ongoing destruction of the planet. The expression on Wesakechak's face in the final shot represents the ambivalent possibility that out of catastrophe might come renewal. A kind of affective counter-intuition, the feeling that the viewer is left with is that the end of the world (or at least the end of the world as we know it) might actually be welcomed."
-- Allison Mackey

Source:
Mackey, Allison. "Guilty Speculations: The Affective Climate of Global Anthropocene Fictions." Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (2018). (p. 533)