Who Is Coyote in Native American Stories? The Trickster Who Cannot Be Killed
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He steals fire and gives it to people. He arranges the stars, and then scatters the rest of them in a fit of impatience, which is why the sky is a mess. He is greedy, boastful, lecherous and easily fooled, he dies in a great many stories, and he is always back in the next one. The trickster of the western and southwestern traditions of North America is not a god to be worshipped or a devil to be resisted, and the difficulty European listeners have always had with him comes from expecting a story to sort its characters into those two boxes.
Not one figure
The first thing to be clear about is that there is no single tradition here. The peoples of North America speak hundreds of languages in dozens of unrelated families, and their stories are as distinct from each other as Greek myth is from Norse. The trickster appears in a great many of them under different names and often in a different animal form: coyote across the Plains, the Great Basin, California and the Southwest, where the animal actually lives; raven among the Tlingit, Haida and other peoples of the Northwest Coast; hare or rabbit in parts of the Southeast, a figure that fed into the Br'er Rabbit tales; spider, in the form of Iktomi, among the Lakota; and mink, blue jay and others elsewhere. Treating these as versions of one character is a convenience of outsiders. What they share is a role in the story rather than an identity, and that role is remarkably consistent.
Creator and fool at once
The trickster's defining feature is that he does not fit the categories a listener brings. In the same body of stories he is:
- •A creator or transformer who shapes the world, brings fire, water or daylight to people, and puts things where they belong
- •A thief and a liar whose schemes depend on deceiving those who trust him
- •A fool whose greed and impatience wreck his own plans, so that the audience laughs at him rather than with him
- •The explanation for why the world is imperfect, since death, hard work and the difficulty of salmon fishing are frequently his fault
- •A teacher by negative example, demonstrating exactly what a person in that society must not do, often in obscene detail
- •Effectively immortal, dying repeatedly by his own stupidity and reappearing without comment in the next story
What the stories actually do
The stories are not simply entertainment, though they are extremely funny and were told for enjoyment on winter nights, in many traditions only in winter and only after dark. They carry law by showing its breach: a story in which the trickster is punished for taking a relative's wife, or for refusing to share meat, teaches the rules of kinship and distribution more memorably than a statement of them would. They explain landscape, since a particular rock is where he fell and a particular bend in a river is where he was chased. They model a kind of intelligence, because he sometimes wins by wit against stronger opponents, which matters to people who are not the strongest animal in the country. And they permit the discussion of what cannot otherwise be discussed, since the trickster's appetite and indecency allow an audience to laugh at desires everyone has and nobody may act on. A figure who breaks every rule while remaining inside the community is a safety valve as well as a lesson.
Why he unsettled the collectors
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century ethnographers who recorded these stories frequently could not place the figure. Missionaries tried to read him as a devil, which fails immediately because he creates and helps, or as a debased creator god, which fails because the humour is deliberate rather than a decline. Paul Radin's study of the Winnebago cycle in 1956 treated him as a psychological stage, an undifferentiated appetite gradually acquiring a moral sense, an interpretation Jung took up and which says more about mid-century European thought than about the stories. Much of what was published was also bowdlerised, with the obscene episodes omitted or printed in Latin, which removed a substantial part of the point. More recent scholarship, much of it by Native writers, has argued for reading the figure on the terms of the tradition it comes from, where the contradiction is not a puzzle to be resolved but the whole content of the character: the world is made by something that is also ridiculous, and that is a claim about the world rather than a confusion about the storyteller.
Still in circulation
These are living traditions, not folklore recovered from manuscripts. The stories are still told, in some communities still restricted to the proper season, and they have moved into contemporary Native writing, where the trickster is a recurring presence in the work of Gerald Vizenor, Thomas King, Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko, often as a way of writing about survival, adaptation and the absurdity of colonial rule. The animal itself makes the same point. Coyotes were trapped, shot and poisoned across North America through the twentieth century in one of the largest eradication campaigns ever mounted against a predator, and rather than declining they expanded their range from the west into every part of the continent, including Alaska, Central America and the middle of Chicago and New York, responding to persecution by breeding earlier and in larger litters. The character who cannot be killed turns out to have been well cast.
The takeaway
The trickster of many North American traditions, appearing as coyote, raven, hare, spider or mink depending on the people and the place, is creator and fool at once, bringing fire and daylight to humans while wrecking his own schemes through greed and dying repeatedly without consequence. The stories carry kinship law, explain landscape and licence laughter at appetites that cannot be acted on. Early collectors tried to sort him into devil or god and censored the obscene parts, losing the point, and the figure remains current in Native writing today.