Coyote is the great trickster of the Navajo and the peoples of the American Southwest — and, in countless forms, of an enormous swathe of Native North America: the cunning, greedy, lustful, foolish, and irrepressibly creative being who helps to shape the world and bring the things of life, yet blunders, schemes, and is humiliated through a vast cycle of comic, bawdy, and sacred tales. At once a culture-hero and a buffoon, a creator and a fool, Coyote is one of the most widespread, beloved, and profound figures of Native American tradition, treated here with respect for the living cultures to which he belongs.
The Trickster Who Shapes the World
Coyote (Navajo Má’ii) appears across an immense range of Native peoples — the Navajo, the Pueblo, and the peoples of the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Plains, the Plateau, and beyond — each with their own rich Coyote-lore, yet everywhere recognizably the same figure. He is a being of the creation-time, and in many traditions he has a hand in shaping the world: scattering the stars across the sky (flinging them up in his impatience, so that they lie in disorder rather than the neat pattern intended), bringing fire to the people, helping to arrange the order of the seasons and the world — and, in a famous and solemn role, bringing death into the world (often by his own meddling or foolishness, decreeing or causing that the dead should not return, and so — tragically — losing his own child to the very law he made). He is a culture-bringer and a world-shaper, but always in his own crooked, unpredictable way.
The Cunning Fool
Above all, Coyote is the archetypal trickster — clever and stupid, powerful and ridiculous, the deceiver who is forever deceived. The Coyote tales are a vast, beloved, and endlessly entertaining body of story: Coyote’s greedy schemes for food, his outrageous and bawdy lusts, his vain attempts to copy the powers of others (always ending in disaster), his lies and tricks and the constant reversals by which the trickster is tricked, his deaths and comic resurrections. These tales are at once hilarious and instructive — entertainment, and also teaching: through Coyote’s endless follies and their consequences, the proper way to live is shown by its opposite, the dangers of greed, pride, and foolishness made plain, and the order and the boundaries of the world affirmed. Coyote is the embodiment of the trickster paradox: the being who is both the origin of order and the spirit of disorder, both the maker and the fool.
The Beloved Trickster of Native North America
Coyote is one of the most important and widespread figures in all of Native North American tradition — the great trickster of the western and southwestern peoples, kin to the Raven of the north and the northwest, the Hare and the Spider of other regions, and the trickster-figures of the whole world. He is woven into the sacred stories, the humour, the teaching, and the worldview of countless peoples; among the Navajo he appears both in the solemn creation-and-emergence accounts and in the great cycle of comic tales. Treated here with respect for the living cultures in which he endures, Coyote remains among the most beloved, vivid, and profound of all the beings of Native North America: the cunning fool who shaped the world, brought fire and death, and never stops making mischief.
Legacy
Coyote endures as the great trickster of the Navajo and the peoples of the American Southwest and far beyond — the cunning, greedy, foolish, and creative being who scattered the stars, brought fire, and (to his own sorrow) brought death into the world, and who blunders through a vast cycle of comic and sacred tales. At once culture-hero and buffoon, creator and fool, teacher and warning, he is one of the most widespread and beloved figures of Native North American tradition. As the cunning fool who shaped the world and never stops making mischief, Coyote remains among the most profound and cherished of all the trickster-beings of the world.