THOSE WHO ARE FAMILIAR with the mythology and folklore of the American Indian know already, perhaps, that Coyote was not necessarily a coyote, nor even a creature of strict physical dimensions. He was known as the Great Hare among many eastern tribes and as Raven in the Pacific Northwest. The Menomini called him Manabozho, the Crow Esahcawata, the Cherokee Tsistu, the Kiowa Sendeh. He was Trickster, Imitator, First Born, Old Man, First Creator, Transformer and Changing Person in the white man’s translations—all names derived from his powers, his habits and his acts.
No other personality is as old, as well known, or as widely distributed among the tribes as Coyote. He was the figure of paleolithic legend among primitive peoples the world over and, though he survives today in Eurasian and African folktales, it is among native Americans, perhaps, that his character achieves its fullest dimension.
In an essay on the psychological roots of the character, Stanley Diamond likened Coyote to a primitive essence of conjoined good and evil; at a time in the history of man when there was no rigid distinction between good and evil, Coyote was. Carl Jung, one of a number of thinkers intrigued with Coyote, wrote that he was “in his earliest manifestations, a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level. He is,” continued Jung, “a forerunner of the savior, and like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being.”
Robert Lowie, an ethnographer who worked among the tribes of the northern plains, wrote that Old Man Coyote was “a greedy, unscrupulous erotomaniac.” James Mooney, who worked among the Cherokee, called him “the incarnation of the eastern dawn.” He wrote that Coyote brought “light and life and drove away the dark shadows which have held the world in chains.” The late folklorist Stith Thompson combined these extremes, calling Coyote “the trickster demi-god, a beneficent being, bringing culture and light to his people, and a creature of greed, lust and stupidity.”
Paul Radin wrote simply that Coyote was “an inchoate being of undetermined proportions.”
As engaging as all these observations are, I think they have served us poorly; they have kept most of Western civilization at too great a distance from the stories themselves. We have come to feel that it is wrong to read without making notes, and our analysis has got us into trouble. We have lost the story in our quest for the character.
Coyote is a creature of oral literature and mutable. There are no sacred texts. You can find other versions of the following stories in the pages of academic publications, in folklore archives, in out-of-print popular collections, and in tribal archives. Indeed, I used all these sources (with permission) in preparing this collection (see my bibliographic essay at the back of the book). I took the liberty of rewriting, translating and adapting in the light of this research for several reasons. First, most academic collections preserve to some extent the turgid prose of exact translation, and transliterated prose can be both obscure and misleading in its pretension to accuracy. It is also deadly to read through.
Secondly, to adapt an oral story to the needs of a modern, literate audience does not seem out of keeping with the primary intent of the original storytellers—to engage the listener.
Coyote stories were told all over North America—in Cheyenne tipis, Mandan earth lodges, Inupiak igloos, Navajo hogans and Sia pueblos—with much laughter and guffawing and with exclamations of surprise and awe. This was supreme entertainment but the storytelling was never simply just a way to pass the time. Coyote stories detailed tribal origins; they emphasized a world view thought to be a correct one; and they dramatized the value of proper behavior. To participate in the stories by listening to them was to renew one’s sense of tribal identity. For youngsters, the stories were a reminder of the right way to do things—so often, of course, not Coyote’s way.
At another level, telling Coyote stories relieved social tensions. Listeners could release their anxieties through laughter, vicariously enjoying Coyote’s proscribed and irreverent behavior. Coyote’s antics thus compare with the deliberately profane behavior of Indian clowns in certain religious ceremonies. In a healthy social order, the irreverence of both clown and Coyote only serve, by contrast, to reinforce the existent moral structure.
A number of things make this collection unique, which the reader should know. First, it includes Coyote’s erotic adventures. Sexual references, as well as stories of cannibalism and bodily functions, were almost invariably expurgated from popular collections in the past, often with a note from the collector indicating he (or she) saw no reason to collect such “off-color” tales for fear of offending the sensitive reader.
Second, just as the deletion of such offensive material projected an unfaithful version of Coyote (one more to the liking of a nonnative American audience) so, too, did inclusion of material restructured for an “and that’s why the beaver has a flat tail!” effect. Coyote story collections were sometimes laced with short, explanatory tales of this sort, perpetuating the notion that native Americans were anxious to explain everything, which they were not. Much misunderstanding, in fact, between whites and native Americans was due to white observers striving to make Coyote stories logical or definitive. The reasoning was that you had to have a purpose in telling the story—and simple enjoyment or tribal identity wasn’t reason enough. Sadly, the juvenile level of some of these popular presentations further encouraged the view that native Americans were shallow people.
A third major difference is the way in which I have treated the hero/trickster dichotomy in Coyote. The dichotomy itself is an artificial one, a creation of the Western mind, but a forceful one. Previous collections have either focused on the heroic aspects of Coyote’s character and ignored his foolishness or vice versa. If both concepts were entertained, there was usually an effort to dramatize them singly and segregate the stories by type, often trying to strike a numerical balance. My conscious intent here has been to include stories which suggest the fullness of Coyote’s character.
Finally, unlike previous collections which included only a handful of stories told by one person in one tribe, this collection includes stories originally told by a number of people from many tribes, an effort to suggest both the universality of the character and the large number of stories in existence.
These stories were usually told at night during the winter months. They were often related in an animated, prescribed way. The storyteller was not necessarily an old man; it might have been a woman or anyone who could tell the stories well. There were great complexes of stories, some that, strung together, could be weeks in the telling. Other stories were told only once in a person’s lifetime.
In the Coyote stories, I think, is more than we, with all our tools of analysis, will ever fathom. We should not feel either embarrassed for it or challenged. To touch them deeply would be like trying to remember the feeling of years of living in the open. We have passed it by, eons ago.
I offer you this Coyote, and I hope something more of the American Indian than we have had until now.
BARRY HOLSTUN LOPEZ