IN PREPARING THIS COLLECTION I researched material primarily in four publications: the Journal of American Folklore, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, and Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. I also examined stories in the series of Bulletins and Annual Reports issued by the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the series of monographs published by the American Ethnological Society. Other important sources included publications of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the Carnegie Institution, Columbia University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of California at Berkeley. (Permission to use these derived sources for adaption was obtained from publishers as a matter of courtesy.)
In addition to these collections, I made use of a number of general works on native Americans for background, among them The Lost Universe by Gene Weltfish, Indians of the Plains by Robert Lowie, Blackfoot Lodge Tales by George Bird Grinnell, Cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Philip Drucker, The Sacred Pipe by Joseph Epes Brown, The Navajo by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton, and Seeing With a Native Eye, edited by Walter Capps.
The reader interested in pursuing a study of the hero-trickster figure in American Indian mythology should examine Paul Radin’s The Trickster (the 1972 Schocken paperback edition of which includes the material by Diamond and Jung mentioned in my Introduction) and Stith Thompson’s Tales of the North American Indians for its comparative notes and bibliography. Franz Boas discusses trickster and transformer motifs in an essay in the Thirty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and Archie Phinney provides a short but interesting essay on the effect of outside influence on trickster stories in his introduction to Nez Perce Texts. The way in which a storyteller communicates a Coyote story to his audience is the subject of an article by J. Barre Toelken, “The ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman: Genre, Mode and Texture in Navajo Coyote Narratives” in Genre, vol. 2, no. 3 (University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, September, 1969). “Coyote Tales: A Paiute Commentary” by Judy Trejo in the Journal of American Folklore, vol. 87, no. 343, is also recommended, as is an article by Dell Hymes, “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth,” in the Journal of American Folklore, vol. 88, no. 350, for what it has to say about the special problems of translating native American oral literature. In “The Incredible Survival of Coyote” (in The Old Ways, City Lights Books, 1977), Gary Snyder examines Coyote’s influence on modern poetry.
Readers interested in more peripheral materials might want to examine J. Frank Dobie’s extensive, annotated references in The Voice of the Coyote and Lillian Barclay’s wide-ranging bibliography on coyotes, some of which pertains to Coyote, in Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, no. 14.
Finding any single Coyote story in various extant collections remains difficult. Few attempts have been made to codify North American Indian narratives, or to cross-reference them so a reader could, if he wanted, locate ninety or so versions of “The Eye-juggler” incident, or compare the creation myths of tribes living in different parts of the country. Remedios Wycoco’s “The Types of North American Indian Tales” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 1951), was developed specifically as an aid to classifying native American tales but it has a limited circulation. Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature has some application. The most useful, widely available cross-index for locating trickster stories is the comparative notes section of Thompson’s Tales of the North American Indians. Boas cross-indexed about two hundred incidents in the trickster cycle, primarily in Pacific Northwest Coast stories, in Thirty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. The special problems of classifying these narratives is the subject of Alan Dundes’s “The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales” in Folklore Fellows Communications, vol. 81, no. 195. Dundes discusses the peculiar prejudice of folklorists historically to dismiss as one Englishman put it, Indian narratives as “formless and void, bearing the same relationship to good European fairy tales as the invertebrates do to the vertebrate kingdom in the animal world.”
This note would not be complete without mention of some other Coyote collections. Old Man Coyote by Frank Linderman, Coyote Stories by Mourning Dove, Old Man Coyote by Clara Kern Bayliss, Coyote Tales by Hildegard Thompson, and Old Indian Legends, a collection of Sioux trickster stories by Gertrude Bonnin, are all, I believe, out of print. Alice Marriott’s Saynday’s People, originally published as Winter-Telling Stories, Newell Lion’s Penobscot Transformer Tales, Nu Mee Poom Tit Wah Tit (Nez Perce legends by the Nez Perce Tribe), and Coyote Stories by Robert A. Roessel and Dillon Platero, a Navajo publication, are in print. Jarold Ramsey’s Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country is new. Although not a collection strictly speaking, Barry Gifford’s Coyote Tantras, a series of poems on the nature of the character, is worthy of mention.
I wish to express a debt of gratitude to the following people in particular: Alfred Kroeber, James Mooney, James W. Schultz, Robert Lowie, George Bird Grinnell, Mari Sandoz, William Wildschut, Morris Edward Opler, George Dorsey, Clark Wissler, Frank Boas, James Tiet, Frank Linderman, Stephan Powers, Frank Hamilton Cushing, John Ewers, Elsie Clews Parsons, Archie Phinney and Melville Jacobs. It is through their efforts that much of this source material and its cultural context has been preserved, and it is to them that this book is in part a tribute.