Coyote

Coyote is the trickster and transformer of many Native American traditions, who shapes the world and brings gifts to people in the same motion by which he disgraces himself through appetite and vanity.

Coyote appears across an enormous range of Native American traditions — Plains, Plateau, Great Basin, California, Southwest — and it is important not to treat these as one figure. The tellings differ profoundly in what he is, how seriously he is taken, and what he does; a Coyote who arranges the stars and fixes the length of the seasons in one tradition may be a purely comic glutton in another. Reference works that flatten this into a single character are compressing many distinct bodies of story.

What recurs often enough to name is a pairing. Coyote is a transformer who does real world-making — bringing fire, releasing water or game, establishing how death works, arranging features of the landscape — and he is also foolish, greedy, lecherous and vain, frequently undone by exactly the appetite that drove the useful act. The two are not separate registers: the tradition repeatedly makes his blunder the mechanism by which something permanent gets established, so that the world ends up shaped by his errors as much as by his intentions.

He is also durable in a specific way. Many cycles have him killed and restored, sometimes repeatedly, which places him outside ordinary consequence and lets a teller run him through humiliations that would end another figure. Story cycles about him were and are told in particular seasons and settings, and they carry instruction alongside the comedy — often about precisely the behaviour the audience is laughing at.

[Generated Content] Read as a personality, Coyote comes across as impulsive, inventive and incapable of leaving anything alone — a being whose curiosity and appetite are the same faculty, producing both his gifts and his disasters. He reads as socially engaged but unreliable, quick to imitate what he sees others do and quick to overreach at it, and entirely without the capacity to learn from a humiliation, since the next cycle finds him doing something similar. What he lacks is not intelligence but restraint.