Speaker 1: When Native people cast about for an American animal to
Speaker 1: carry their creation stories, the intelligent survivor coyote became Deity. Coyote,
Speaker 1: an avatar for humans who taught them about human nature
Speaker 1: for thousands of years. I'm Dan Flores, and this is
Speaker 1: the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck. Still
Speaker 1: in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time
Speaker 1: for the season that calls us home. A portion of
Speaker 1: every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
Speaker 1: waters and wildlife enjoy responsibly. Old Man America in the
Speaker 1: remotest time of early North America, after he had molded
Speaker 1: mud from the ocean bottom into mountains, plains, and forests
Speaker 1: to create the essential topography of the continent, Coyote was
Speaker 1: going along. He had placed stars in the sky, some
Speaker 1: as pictures, some as a latticed road across the night.
Speaker 1: Some tossed willy nilly into the inky black. He had
Speaker 1: arranged the year into four seasons, and he had populated
Speaker 1: the world with humans as the special helper of the Creator,
Speaker 1: who seemed not especially interested in any of this hands
Speaker 1: on creation work himself. Coyote had killed monster after monster
Speaker 1: on behalf of his human charges, who he had then
Speaker 1: located in good monster free spots across America. He had
Speaker 1: released animals like buffalo from underground, and admittedly with a
Speaker 1: few unlucky mistakes, had placed salmon and other fish and
Speaker 1: many of the rivers. He had invented penises and z
Speaker 1: giinas and taught humans what to do with them, and
Speaker 1: he created a sexual division of labor among men and women.
Speaker 1: The first technology in the form of fire, came from Coyote. Then,
Speaker 1: not without some remorse, he had introduced death to the world. Now,
Speaker 1: with all these fundamental creations in place, Coyote had no
Speaker 1: intention of stepping into the background or hiding himself. He
Speaker 1: wanted to enjoy how much humans appreciated his creativity. One morning,
Speaker 1: Coyote was going along and spotted a handsome young warrior
Speaker 1: who told Coyote he was embarking on a journey of
Speaker 1: war against his enemies. Although Coyote was actually a peaceful
Speaker 1: sword who thought war and battles to the death were
Speaker 1: very bad ideas, he told his new companion that he
Speaker 1: was a famous warrior and would be indispensable on the quest.
Speaker 1: That first night, the warrior said they would camp at
Speaker 1: a place called scalped Man by the fire. Coyote did
Speaker 1: not like the sound of that. At the camp, Kyote
Speaker 1: relaxed while the warrior cooked and did all the chores.
Speaker 1: Then Coyote took the best pieces of the meal for himself,
Speaker 1: even laying extra meat over his chest and legs in
Speaker 1: case he woke hungry in the night. Sometime in the night,
Speaker 1: Coyote heard a sound, and when he looked, there was
Speaker 1: scalp man standing over him. Quick as he could, he
Speaker 1: swung his club, but somehow what he hit was his knee,
Speaker 1: which caused him to yowl in pain, waking the warrior.
Speaker 1: I have taken care of Scalpman, Coyote told him, and
Speaker 1: they went back to sleep. Having clubbed his own knee,
Speaker 1: Coyote leapt through much of the next day, but made
Speaker 1: it okay to a camp called cooked meat flying all around.
Speaker 1: But when Coyote heard the warrior described the next night's
Speaker 1: camp where the the arrows fly around, his knee suddenly
Speaker 1: took a turn for the worse. Coyote lagged far behind
Speaker 1: that next day, hoping for a camp somewhere else, but
Speaker 1: the warrior led them on that night. Arrows began to
Speaker 1: fly from every direction. The warrior stood and caught one
Speaker 1: after another, while Coyote twisted and twirled and crawled on
Speaker 1: the ground, trying to avoid them, until one arrow grazed
Speaker 1: his arm. I've been killed, Coyote shouted, But when the
Speaker 1: warrior pulled him to his feet and he found himself
Speaker 1: still alive, Coyote asserted that actually his hurt knee had
Speaker 1: caused him to fall asleep, and he had been dreaming.
Speaker 1: The next night, their camp was at a place called
Speaker 1: where the women visit the men. This place sounded like
Speaker 1: an excellent camp to Coyote. His knee improved so remarkably
Speaker 1: that day that he got far ahead on their march.
Speaker 1: That night, a woman did come to Coyote, but in
Speaker 1: the darkness he believed her to be old. Hoping much
Speaker 1: younger women would arrive, he sent her away, only to
Speaker 1: see in the firelight as she turned away that in
Speaker 1: fact she was young and very beautiful. Coyote cried out
Speaker 1: for her to return, telling her it had been some
Speaker 1: spirit who had told her to leave, but she vanished
Speaker 1: into the night. The camp following this one was called
Speaker 1: war Clubs. Flying around all that day Coyote's knee hurt
Speaker 1: so much that he was barely able to arrive at
Speaker 1: the spot sure enough that night, clubs twirled at them
Speaker 1: from every direction. The warrior caught to one for each
Speaker 1: of them, but Coyote dodged and weaved so much that
Speaker 1: a club finally beamed him. When he came to, Coyote
Speaker 1: told the warrior that in his boredom, he had actually
Speaker 1: just fallen asleep. That's why he had been lying so
Speaker 1: flat and still. Then the warrior told Coyote that their
Speaker 1: next camp was to be at a place called Vagina's
Speaker 1: Flying around, Coyote's knee at once felt into entirely well,
Speaker 1: and he was ready to depart then and there. He
Speaker 1: pleaded for more details, but the warrior fell asleep. Coyote
Speaker 1: sat by the fire all night, thinking of vaginas and
Speaker 1: how many he might be able to carry with it.
Speaker 1: His knee now stronger than had ever been in his life,
Speaker 1: Coyote left early and ranged far ahead the next day.
Speaker 1: That night, as promised, vaginas began to sail into camp,
Speaker 1: and Coyote could tell they were just the kind he liked,
Speaker 1: Young and plump. For most of the night, juicy vaginas
Speaker 1: whizzed maddeningly out of reach, with Coyote flailing and chasing
Speaker 1: and panning until he was near collapsed. Finally, near dawn,
Speaker 1: Coyote caught one, but exhausted as he was when he
Speaker 1: finally pinned it and mounted it, Coyote's organ resolutely refused
Speaker 1: to rise to the occasion. The next night was their
Speaker 1: final camp, and the warrior told Coyote this one was
Speaker 1: called where the enemy attacks without delay. Coyote his knee
Speaker 1: began to throb, and all day long he hung back
Speaker 1: on the trail, crying piteously, and sure enough, when the
Speaker 1: next morning came, enemies attacked from all sides. Coyote at
Speaker 1: once ran for far horizons, but was overtaken, clubbed, and scouted. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the warriors subdued all his enemies, then looked for Coyote.
Speaker 1: When he knew all was clear, Coyote stood and announced
Speaker 1: that he was going along now, but the warriors should
Speaker 1: consider himself lucky that he had happened upon Coyote, otherwise
Speaker 1: he would have had to engage in this adventure with
Speaker 1: no help at all. From a famous warrior. Stories about Coyote,
Speaker 1: often called Old Man coyote and rarely, although they are
Speaker 1: present in the Cannon. Stories about old Woman coyote are
Speaker 1: the oldest preserved human stories from North America. Both is
Speaker 1: that coyote spelled with upper case a capital see to
Speaker 1: distinguish the deity version from the ordinary coyote trotting by
Speaker 1: while you read is America's oldest surviving literary figure. He
Speaker 1: is also the most ancient god figure of which we
Speaker 1: have record from the continent. When Siberian hunters first started
Speaker 1: boting down the coastlines are crossing Beringia, at some point
Speaker 1: in their entry of northwestern America, they began to encounter coyotes.
Speaker 1: Wolves they knew from Asia and well enough that at
Speaker 1: some point in their migration, these first Americans arrived with
Speaker 1: domesticated ones, wolf like dogs whose wild ancestors in those
Speaker 1: times were recent. But by the time of the Clovis
Speaker 1: people at least, who spread to America more than thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, continental coyotes were familiar creatures. Intriguingly, something
Speaker 1: about coyotes captured the imaginations of these first Americans. Religious
Speaker 1: explanations for the world and how it works are untold, thousands,
Speaker 1: maybe millions of years old, so these former Siberians arrived
Speaker 1: with intact religions and deities. But as these first human
Speaker 1: residents settled in from California to the Mississippi River, from
Speaker 1: the Pacific northwest to future New Mexico and Arizona, Coyote
Speaker 1: emerged as the deity of the ancient Contina. No one
Speaker 1: knows when this happened or exactly how coyote came to
Speaker 1: embody so many different people's creation stories and ruminations on
Speaker 1: human nature. All we know now, based on the oral
Speaker 1: coyote stories collected among American Indians and set down by
Speaker 1: nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographers and folklores, is that there
Speaker 1: were thousands of coyote tales. No other native deity in
Speaker 1: America came anywhere close to producing a body of oral
Speaker 1: literature to rival them. The story here about Coote and
Speaker 1: his knee, although written in my own voice, in its
Speaker 1: original form, was collected from the Wichitas of the southern plains,
Speaker 1: But the opening paragraph of this episode I distilled from
Speaker 1: several groups from all over the West, the Navajos in
Speaker 1: the southwest, the Crows on the northern plains, the Kurrak,
Speaker 1: and wasco in California, the Monomonee of the Great Lakes,
Speaker 1: the Coalville and Klamath of the Pacific Northwest, and the
Speaker 1: Salish in Blackfeet from the northern Rockies. For almost all
Speaker 1: of the past ten thousand years west of the Mississippi River,
Speaker 1: coyote has been America's universal deity. Originally, he was a
Speaker 1: Paleolithic god, but he survived the millennia to appear among
Speaker 1: agricultural peoples like the Wichitas. Ultimately, his fame reached as
Speaker 1: far south as the Aztecs, who knew him as Wayway Coyotal.
Speaker 1: Old Man Coyote truly is Old Man America. The history
Speaker 1: of coyotes and the history of humans has many parallels,
Speaker 1: but one difference between us is that across our own
Speaker 1: evolutionary history, we humans have created thousands of philosophies of
Speaker 1: meaning we call religions, while coyotes, so far as we
Speaker 1: can tell, embrace no religious tradition beyond life the sacredness
Speaker 1: of existence. In so far as we go, our oldest
Speaker 1: forms of religious explanations featured animals as deities, a type
Speaker 1: of religion called animism that was fashioned by humans living
Speaker 1: their lives as hunters or hunter gatherers, what we might
Speaker 1: call Coyotism is certainly a paleolithic religion. The famed psychologist
Speaker 1: Carl Jung is only one of hundreds, from scientists to
Speaker 1: poets who have found coyote enduringly fascinating, in part because
Speaker 1: of how fundamental he is in human thought. In Jung's view,
Speaker 1: the character of coyote is a faithful copy of an
Speaker 1: absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, a forerunner of the Savior, and
Speaker 1: like him god, man and animal at once, he is
Speaker 1: both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being. The
Speaker 1: Western religious traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity sprang from
Speaker 1: later periods of human history, following our domestication of plants
Speaker 1: and animals, what anthropologists called the Neolithic Revolution. Early religions
Speaker 1: could feature animals, particularly the sacred bull, as deities, but
Speaker 1: over time, hurting and agricultural cultures gradually replaced animal gods
Speaker 1: along with gods of special places on the landscape, another
Speaker 1: feature of animism with deities that assumed human form. The
Speaker 1: Greek gods, who are so foundational in Western cultures, are
Speaker 1: classical examples of this evolution. Four thousand years ago, the
Speaker 1: Greeks replaced animal and plant deities with gods and goddesses
Speaker 1: in human form, Artemis, who became a mistress of the
Speaker 1: animals as a goddess of the hunt, and Demater, who
Speaker 1: evolved into a human form goddess of wheat and crops.
Speaker 1: One of the most intriguing questions about coyote is simply this,
Speaker 1: Why did the ancient settlers of North America pick this
Speaker 1: particular animal as their deity? Ten thousand years and more
Speaker 1: in the past, the first Americans would have had many
Speaker 1: scores of animal candidates for their deity figures. Charismatic creatures
Speaker 1: like mammos or dire wolves or saber toothed cats might
Speaker 1: seem to us more likely choices, and in the early
Speaker 1: stages of human settlement, perhaps they had been gods. My
Speaker 1: own speculation is that as the Wisconsin I says, gave
Speaker 1: way to a rapidly warming world, joined at the same
Speaker 1: time by the great simplification event known as the Pleistocene extinctions,
Speaker 1: which took all three of my suggested species and many others.
Speaker 1: The wild coyotes around Indian peoples of the time fascinated
Speaker 1: them as creatures endowed with special abilities. I suspect that
Speaker 1: it was the coyotes self evident ability to survive those
Speaker 1: profound changes when the big charismatic species could not that
Speaker 1: attracted human attention. There probably was also an easy identification
Speaker 1: with the social lives of predatory wild coyotes that made
Speaker 1: them feel familiar to human hunters. In his book Pueblo
Speaker 1: Gods and Myths, anthropologists Hamilton Tyler writes that the ability
Speaker 1: of an animal to become a god is in part
Speaker 1: due to his symbolic potential, which is to say, the
Speaker 1: number of ideas he can stand. For a god, even
Speaker 1: the simplest god, is based upon a certain amount of
Speaker 1: abstraction in the human mind. Another anthropologist, Lewis Hyde, believes
Speaker 1: that coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind.
Speaker 1: The stories themselves look to predator pray relationships for the
Speaker 1: birth of cunning. How it goes on, One reason native
Speaker 1: observers may have chosen coyote is that the former in
Speaker 1: fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is
Speaker 1: therefore a consummate survivor in a shifting world, especially before
Speaker 1: our lives in cities which obscured our deep dependency on
Speaker 1: nature and diverted our powers of observation. We humans were
Speaker 1: profound observers of the natural world. These early Americans would
Speaker 1: not have failed to notice one other characteristic of wild
Speaker 1: coyotes in a dangerous and changing world, that the secret
Speaker 1: of their uncanny ability to survive everything nature through at
Speaker 1: them lay in a remarkable intelligence, the kind of trickster
Speaker 1: figures that hide mentions make up a very old human
Speaker 1: religious figure found in many animistic religions around the world
Speaker 1: in the form of many creatures hairs, spiders, blue jays, ravens,
Speaker 1: even human figures like the Norse trickster Loki. But here
Speaker 1: in America, the coyote took up the mantle of a
Speaker 1: god who lived by his wits. Having a smart god,
Speaker 1: after all, was crucial to survival also to our understanding
Speaker 1: of human nature in the animal within. In early American mythology,
Speaker 1: coyote is almost never the ultimate cause God. More often,
Speaker 1: as in the coyote stories from people like the Salish
Speaker 1: and the Nespers, he's an immortal helper deity, semi divine
Speaker 1: and present and engaged in earthly life. Most often in
Speaker 1: the stories, coyote inhabits the world before humankind. Sometimes his
Speaker 1: initial form is human, which he gives up for his
Speaker 1: coyote body once humans are present. In stories that are
Speaker 1: set following the creation, however, coyote is commonly a kind
Speaker 1: of an anthropomorphic animal, a coyote man. He preserves a
Speaker 1: tale and a sharp muzzle and erect ears, but he
Speaker 1: stands and walks upright, has a wife and a family,
Speaker 1: and is capable of shape shifting into a form so
Speaker 1: human like that often the other characters in a story
Speaker 1: only suspect by his behavior that they are dealing with
Speaker 1: Coyote himself. It does not take very much time or
Speaker 1: analytical effort with the coyote s tales to draw a
Speaker 1: conclusion about who Coyote really is, and that realization is
Speaker 1: what makes him so intriguing. As a god. Coyote is
Speaker 1: the god within his mythical function in the beginning is creation.
Speaker 1: Coyote takes the basic structure of the world as set
Speaker 1: in motion by the Creator, then improves on it and
Speaker 1: gives it the natural laws that make it work that done.
Speaker 1: His larger purpose in the many oral stories about him
Speaker 1: is to reveal human nature more clearly and rather than
Speaker 1: a perfect deity, Jung's savior figure a Jesus who teaches
Speaker 1: a codified morality and is set up as a role
Speaker 1: model for humans. Coyote personifies the full suite of humanity's traits,
Speaker 1: good and bad. As a character, Coyote is the full Monty.
Speaker 1: He's at once admirable, inspirational, imaginative, inner, energetic, a whirlwind
Speaker 1: biophysical force with a large capacity for taking sensuous pleasure
Speaker 1: in life. But he's also selfish, vain, deceitful, and quite
Speaker 1: often envious, lustful, and ridiculous, possessed of an overconfidence that
Speaker 1: gets him into endless fixes. Coyote's major flaw, resulting from
Speaker 1: a combination of all of his human traits, is that
Speaker 1: he finds cause, sometimes admirably, sometimes laughably, never to be
Speaker 1: quite satisfied with the world, And because he is invariably
Speaker 1: unable to predict consequences with any accuracy, his tinkering with
Speaker 1: the world can produce disaster, especially and this is a
Speaker 1: major theme in so many of the stories for Coyote himself.
Speaker 1: Coyote is almost universally referred to as a trickster. But
Speaker 1: after reading many scores of Native Coyote stories, I've begun
Speaker 1: to think think we've been missing the point. While there
Speaker 1: are certainly stories that feature tricks, the foolly is actually
Speaker 1: just a means to an end. Again and again, the
Speaker 1: point is not the trick. The point is why the
Speaker 1: trick works, and invariably the reason is a result of
Speaker 1: the foibles of human nature. These stories survive for thousands
Speaker 1: of years because there's such penetrating exposees of the human condition.
Speaker 1: Coyote was at his best when he taught lessons, almost
Speaker 1: always uncomfortable or funny, ones about human behavior and motives.
Speaker 1: As North America's oldest surviving deity, Coyote has bequeathed us
Speaker 1: a continental world of imagination, creation, artistry, also hubrious and trouble,
Speaker 1: it's difficult not to see the Coyote impulse writ large
Speaker 1: in humanity. In deed, to my mind, therein lies a
Speaker 1: test for stories about old men America, given what we
Speaker 1: now know about ourselves using the modern tools of evolutionary
Speaker 1: psychology and neuroscience. Looking at these ancient stories with twenty
Speaker 1: first century insight, what can we say about how accurately
Speaker 1: they show that people living thousands of years ago understood
Speaker 1: as well as we do today exactly who we humans are.
Speaker 1: The acquisition of status in games of romance and love,
Speaker 1: experiential jolts to enhance neurochemistry and mood states a mind
Speaker 1: conflicted over sin and virtue. For the long ago Americans
Speaker 1: who selected wild coyotes as a suitable avatar for their
Speaker 1: earthly deity, then worked out so many stories about him.
Speaker 1: What better subjects for the adventures of their coyote god
Speaker 1: than these, No doubt, Over the centuries, storytellers of Mark
Speaker 1: Twain like Brilliance dazzled audiences laid into the night with
Speaker 1: the many astounding adventures of Coyote, and romanticize their people's
Speaker 1: trajectory through time. Coyote often operates as the very god
Speaker 1: of Richard Dawkins's selfish gene, in which form his character
Speaker 1: is usually that of a self absorbed buffoon. The stories
Speaker 1: are that holds up such behavior and plain view. For
Speaker 1: comic ridicule, Coyote stories were wildly entertaining. It was still
Speaker 1: is perversely pleasurable to observe a character who so blithely
Speaker 1: ignores rules and restrictions, usually with predictable results. Although benefits
Speaker 1: from rule breaking happen often enough with Coyote to keep
Speaker 1: things interesting, but a moral code it's rarely there, nor
Speaker 1: are there promises of eternal life salvation from death, that
Speaker 1: ancient and oppressive burden of our self awareness. What Old
Speaker 1: Man America teaches us instead is delight in being alive
Speaker 1: in a world of wondrous possibilities. Coyotism is a philosophy
Speaker 1: for the realists among us, those who can do a
Speaker 1: Cormac McCarthy like appraisal of human motives but find a
Speaker 1: kind of chagrined humor in the act, who may think
Speaker 1: of the human story as cyclical, even predictable, because human
Speaker 1: nature never seems to change. These ancient stories from across
Speaker 1: Western America lay death for all of us directly on
Speaker 1: Coyote's doorstep, and story after story, it is Coyote who decreed,
Speaker 1: for two admittedly rather admirable reasons, that all human beings
Speaker 1: would have to die if humans never died. Coyote reason
Speaker 1: this explanation is a part of stories from both the
Speaker 1: Yanas of California and the Navajos of the Southwest. Overpopulation
Speaker 1: and the destruction of the earth would be the result. Hence,
Speaker 1: the initial reason Coyote invented death was actually an environmental one.
Speaker 1: The Yanas said it was Coyote, who made it law
Speaker 1: that humans would have to die to create space for
Speaker 1: the generations down the timeline. Coyote also rationalized death for
Speaker 1: a second reason, this time as a great teacher about life. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, if you die, then you really have to
Speaker 1: take life seriously. You have to think about things more.
Speaker 1: Coyote himself was immortal, but when death visited him directly,
Speaker 1: he had some serious second thoughts about what a good idea.
Speaker 1: Death was one of the most poignant of all Coyote stories.
Speaker 1: He's a nest purse account called Coyote and the Shadow People.
Speaker 1: It's something close to a North American version of the
Speaker 1: Greek myth of Orpheus and his wife Eurydus. I tell
Speaker 1: it here rewritten in my own voice from the original
Speaker 1: ethnographic account. Coyote and his wife were living happily when
Speaker 1: she became sick. When she died, Coyote was overcome with
Speaker 1: grief and loneliness. Others had died, but this was different.
Speaker 1: So when death spirit came to him and offered to
Speaker 1: take him to the place where his wife had gone, Coyote,
Speaker 1: who was filled with hope, What I tell you, said,
Speaker 1: Death Spirit, you must do everything exactly as I say.
Speaker 1: Not once are you to disregard my commands and do
Speaker 1: something else. So Coyote traveled with Death Spirit, thinking of
Speaker 1: his wife, but noticing that his god was very difficult
Speaker 1: to see and follow. He looked more like a shadow
Speaker 1: than anything real. When he pointed out herds of horses
Speaker 1: in the plane over which they traveled our bushes covered
Speaker 1: in service berries, Coyote saw nothing, but he exclaimed over
Speaker 1: the horses and pretended to eat the berries. Soon enough,
Speaker 1: the guide announced that they had arrived and led Kyote
Speaker 1: to where his wife was said to be sitting with
Speaker 1: many others inside a very very long lodge. Again, the
Speaker 1: spirit cautioned Coyote to do exactly as he said. Coyote
Speaker 1: made every effort to do so, but while he felt
Speaker 1: the spirit's presence, as far as he could see, they
Speaker 1: were sitting in an open prairie. But Death Spirit told
Speaker 1: him that conditions were different here, that when night fell
Speaker 1: in the living world, it would be dawn in this place.
Speaker 1: Sure enough, when night fell, Coyote began to hear people whispering.
Speaker 1: He began to see many fires in the lot, and
Speaker 1: to recognize old friends, whom he greeted and was able
Speaker 1: to walk about with and reminisce, and he was overjoyed
Speaker 1: to find his wife at his side. Late in the day,
Speaker 1: the people began to grow faint and hard to see.
Speaker 1: Then the spirit came to him and told him that
Speaker 1: as Don came in the living world, night came for them,
Speaker 1: but that Coyote should remain where he sat and not move,
Speaker 1: and Coyote said he would. When Don came, Coyote found
Speaker 1: himself sitting in the open prairie. As instructed, He remain
Speaker 1: there all day, broiling in the heat, but sitting as
Speaker 1: he had been told. This went on for several dawns
Speaker 1: and several nights, with Coyote's friends and his wife returning
Speaker 1: and making merry, then fading as Don came, and kyoteing
Speaker 1: waiting patiently in the heat of the day. Finally, after
Speaker 1: too long, the death spirit came to him and said,
Speaker 1: tomorrow you will go home. You will take your wife
Speaker 1: with you. He told Coyote they would travel for five
Speaker 1: days and pass five mountains, and that while he could
Speaker 1: talk with his wife no matter what, he should not
Speaker 1: touch her. That he should never lay a hand on
Speaker 1: her until they had passed the last of the five mountains.
Speaker 1: Then the spirit admonished Coyote, You, Coyote, must guard against
Speaker 1: your inclination to do foolish things. At dawn, Coyote and
Speaker 1: his wife started out, although Coyote could barely discern her,
Speaker 1: but when they crossed the first mountain, Coyote could feel
Speaker 1: her presence more strongly. When they camped on the homeward
Speaker 1: side of the second mountain, she became clearer to him,
Speaker 1: and in the next camp, beyond the third mountain, clearer still.
Speaker 1: Now they were making their fourth camp, with only the
Speaker 1: final mountain to cross the next day, and Coyote could
Speaker 1: at last see his wife's face and her young body.
Speaker 1: She was almost a living person again, Kayo. He had
Speaker 1: dared not reach out to her before, but now looking
Speaker 1: at her right there with him, he was overcome with
Speaker 1: joy at having her again, and so impulsively ran to
Speaker 1: embrace her. Stop Stop, Coyote, she cried, but it was
Speaker 1: too late. At the very instant he touched her body,
Speaker 1: she vanished. On learning of Coyote's folly, death spirit was
Speaker 1: furious and he did not hesitate You, Coyote were about
Speaker 1: to establish the practice of returning from death. Only a
Speaker 1: short time away the human race is coming, but you
Speaker 1: have spoiled everything and established for them death as it is.
Speaker 1: At this Coyote hung his head and wept. But then
Speaker 1: he had an idea. Drawing himself up, he retraced the
Speaker 1: journey he and death spirit had made. He tried with
Speaker 1: all his might to see the horses taste the service berries.
Speaker 1: He found the spot where the long law which had stood,
Speaker 1: even where he had sat with his wife beside him,
Speaker 1: And when night fell he strained to hear voices and seafires.
Speaker 1: When down came, Coyote found himself sitting in an open
Speaker 1: empty plane. God's come and go, But old Man America
Speaker 1: was too useful a deity to abandon them. One example
Speaker 1: of the native sense of coyote power famously occurred among
Speaker 1: the Navajos during the greatest misfortune that ever befell them hunters, herders,
Speaker 1: and raiders from the North who had arrived in four
Speaker 1: corners of the Southwest some six hundred years ago. The
Speaker 1: Navajos found themselves at war with US troops during most
Speaker 1: of the eighteen fifties and early eighteen sixties, distracted by
Speaker 1: the Civil War. In a fit of exasperation at the
Speaker 1: success of Navajo raids. The Army sent Taos mountain man
Speaker 1: and scout Kit Carson, in command of a contingent of troops,
Speaker 1: into Navajo country in eighteen sixty three, where Carson's men
Speaker 1: conducted a horrific scorched earth campaign against them. By eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty four, some eight thousand Navajos had surrendered to the
Speaker 1: Frontier Army, only to find themselves condemned to an incarceration
Speaker 1: in eastern New Mexico, three hundred miles from home. Their
Speaker 1: long walk to the Bosca Redondo prison camp and four
Speaker 1: years of being held there under constant guard is one
Speaker 1: of the most painful memories of Navajo history. But Navajos
Speaker 1: also remember how this episode ended. After years of pleading
Speaker 1: to return home and frequent breakouts of small groups that
Speaker 1: fled westward across New Mexico, in eighteen sixty eight, the
Speaker 1: US finally agreed to allow the Navajos to return to
Speaker 1: their homeland. In Navajo oral tradition, the act that accomplished
Speaker 1: this long for release was not negotiation or pleading, but
Speaker 1: their ritual performance of a coyote way ceremony, which infused
Speaker 1: Navajo leaders with enough coyote power finally to affect their release.
Speaker 1: Coyote power, surviving by one's intelligence and wits when others cannot,
Speaker 1: embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of
Speaker 1: pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates, exultation and
Speaker 1: sheer aliveness, rueful chagrin at our shortcomings. These are the
Speaker 1: lessons Old Man America has been granting for thousands of years.
Speaker 1: Through those flashing canines. Coyote spoke truth, and he spoke
Speaker 1: it across an unfathomable expanse of time.
Speaker 2: In your in your podcast, you talked about, uh, this
Speaker 2: idea that some that someone was the first, some person
Speaker 2: was the first to be like, hey look a coyote. Yeah,
Speaker 2: or coyote right. Uh. That's the thing I never thought
Speaker 2: about with that animal. That's the thing I've wondered about
Speaker 2: a lot, is if you if you accept this that
Speaker 2: this leading theory that that the humans that came to
Speaker 2: North American and South America passed through this kind of
Speaker 2: arctic follow track, right, and they were Arctic people that
Speaker 2: were living north of snakes. Okay, for instance, for generations.
Speaker 2: I mean, all idea of snakes probably was going you know,
Speaker 2: I mean it was like probably race, maybe there was
Speaker 2: some narrative or story that still had it in mythology,
Speaker 2: like probably like buy and large, it was not a
Speaker 2: part of discussions. And then people start picking their way
Speaker 2: down the continent, and there was the first not like
Speaker 2: oh people like if you got into it, there would
Speaker 2: be like a person. A person was the first to say,
Speaker 2: look at that, Yeah, what is that? Do you know
Speaker 2: what I mean? Like picture it? Right? You don't think
Speaker 2: about the fact that someone that they were going like, look,
Speaker 2: never seen one of those before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: It's just so hard. It happened so much much, right,
Speaker 2: it happened hundreds of times over again, but it's so
Speaker 2: hard to picture what that would have been, like, I.
Speaker 1: Know, and it's a fascinating thing to imagine, you know.
Speaker 1: I will say I've read an account one time by
Speaker 1: it was an anthropologist who was arguing that we as humans,
Speaker 1: because you know, most primates do have an aversion to snakes,
Speaker 1: that we may even coming down through an arctic filter
Speaker 1: like that, and having been not around snakes for who
Speaker 1: knows fifteen thousand years or twenty thousand or whatever, that
Speaker 1: we would have had a genetic memory of a snake
Speaker 1: being alarming and hit. One of his arguments about that
Speaker 1: was that he said, notice how easy it is to
Speaker 1: teach a child not to reach out and touch a
Speaker 1: snake or a spider. But it's hard to teach them
Speaker 1: not to walk across the street in front of traffic
Speaker 1: or not stick their hands in an outlet. But if
Speaker 1: they get the whole spider and sake thing really fast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's a great point. And that's why it
Speaker 2: would be so good to have footage of this first
Speaker 2: snake encounter. That's the thing to see if he just
Speaker 2: tried to jump on it and grab it to bring
Speaker 2: it home to show everybody, or if he thought, like, eah, yeah,
Speaker 2: something about that thing. I don't know what it is,
Speaker 2: but I like it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that may be the reaction something about it. Huh,
Speaker 1: you want to get a slithering thing.
Speaker 2: You don't need to get too many pages into the Bible,
Speaker 2: and there's a snake. He's not a good guy.
Speaker 1: No, that's that's true. But yeah, so somebody did see
Speaker 1: as you have set us up for. Somebody did see
Speaker 1: a coyote for the first time. And you know, the
Speaker 1: thing that I was fascinated by when I sat down
Speaker 1: to work on this podcast, and this one comes out
Speaker 1: of my book Coyote America. When I was working on
Speaker 1: that book, I was confronted with writing this chapter about
Speaker 1: this animal that was a knew was one of the
Speaker 1: most significant deities in North American history. The oldest deity
Speaker 1: of which we have, the oldest literary figure actually of
Speaker 1: which we have any kind of knowledge, is Coyote with
Speaker 1: a capital C, this little canid that so many Native
Speaker 1: people made into a kind of a deity, or a
Speaker 1: semidity at least. And what I was confronted with was
Speaker 1: about one hundred and twenty five years or so ago,
Speaker 1: ethnographers interviewing Native people and collecting their stories, their creation stories,
Speaker 1: and whatever stories they could, and then followed by a
Speaker 1: whole group of folk lories who came along one hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, and we're doing the same thing with Native people.
Speaker 1: They collected thousands of coyote stories. Every group you talk
Speaker 1: to seem to have twenty or fifty or seventy or
Speaker 1: one hundred coyote stories. And so I was trying to
Speaker 1: make sense of all of that and once again kind
Speaker 1: of realizing, all right, a chapter in a book, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: it can be maybe twenty five pages long here, and
Speaker 1: I've got hundreds of these things, so I can't do,
Speaker 1: you know, just kind of a listing of every one
Speaker 1: of them in some kind of summary. I have to
Speaker 1: try to figure out what they were all about, what
Speaker 1: they meant. And the ready example that seemed to be
Speaker 1: out there in the existing literature was that Coyote was
Speaker 1: one of these trickster figures that we have around the world,
Speaker 1: low key among the Norse, for example. I mean, most
Speaker 1: cultures have some record of a trickster figure. But as
Speaker 1: I kept reading these things, I kind of decided, you know,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if anybody else believes me on this,
Speaker 1: but what I decided about this was that we had
Speaker 1: actually kind of missed the point in talking about Coyote
Speaker 1: as a trickster, because him being a trickster was not
Speaker 1: really the point of what these stories were all about.
Speaker 1: What these stories are all about is why the trick works,
Speaker 1: on whoever it is who's being tricked, and the reason
Speaker 1: the trick works. And this is what kind of gave
Speaker 1: me the insight into the sort of stories I ended
Speaker 1: up telling in that chapter, is that the reason the
Speaker 1: trick works is because of human nature, because of our
Speaker 1: own foibles and our ability to fall for things because
Speaker 1: we are glutton us or where jealous are you know,
Speaker 1: we're narcissistic or whatever. It's like the Seven Deadly Sins.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what many of the coyotes stories are about.
Speaker 1: And so they're actually instruction in human nature and how
Speaker 1: easy it is to fool somebody or trick somebody because
Speaker 1: of who human beings are. To me, that seemed to
Speaker 1: be a more interesting thing about these stories than that
Speaker 1: just coyote was a trickster.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: Obviously, this is a story of people projecting ideas and
Speaker 3: values and thoughts on this animal. But there's a reason.
Speaker 3: There's also a biological basis for it. Right, There's a
Speaker 3: reason it's not rock stories or snake stories or you know,
Speaker 3: turkey stories.
Speaker 1: Right. I wonder if you.
Speaker 3: Can kind of you obviously covered it in the podcast,
Speaker 3: but distilled down what it is about the coyote. It
Speaker 3: makes it such a natural foil for people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question, because obviously it's like ten
Speaker 1: thousand years ago or you know, further back in time
Speaker 1: when people are first here, and we don't know how
Speaker 1: far back the coyote stories go whether they were present
Speaker 1: during the actual Padiolyithic where there were pleciscene stories, or
Speaker 1: they occurred after that. But they're obviously old. There doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to be anything any older. And so what you
Speaker 1: have to then kind of come up with an explanation
Speaker 1: for us why pick that animal? I mean, if indeed
Speaker 1: the stories go back into the Pleistocene. I mean, you've
Speaker 1: got mammoths around, you've got saber toothed cats. If you're
Speaker 1: looking for a deity, you know, what better deity can
Speaker 1: you come up with than a step lion or something.
Speaker 1: And yet the animal that's come down to us in
Speaker 1: North American history as the animal they pick is this little, small,
Speaker 1: thirty five pound, you know, junior wolf. And so there
Speaker 1: had to be an explanation for that. And as I
Speaker 1: cast about for explanations to try to figure it out,
Speaker 1: I thought, well, okay, so one of the things is
Speaker 1: clearly coyotes are survivors of the extinctions in a way
Speaker 1: that sabertoothed cats or ground slaws or step lions aren't
Speaker 1: those all disappear. Coyotes survive, so they're still around. And
Speaker 1: therefore you've come up with a deity figure that is
Speaker 1: still present in your world that you get to see
Speaker 1: or at least see some examples of. But the other
Speaker 1: thing I decided that probably played a role in it,
Speaker 1: and this is a result of reading a lot of
Speaker 1: those coyote tales from the various native groups. Coyote, the
Speaker 1: animal out there in nature, is a supremely intelligent creature.
Speaker 1: That's why they have survived down to the present day.
Speaker 1: No matter what we've been able to throw at them,
Speaker 1: whatever poison, whatever trapping, whatever helicopter shooting, they are still
Speaker 1: here and they're not going anywhere. In fact, they've spread
Speaker 1: across all of North America and are becoming one of
Speaker 1: the first animals since the places seen us the Isthmus
Speaker 1: of Panama into South America. So there's something about them.
Speaker 1: They're obviously extremely successful. That success is based on I
Speaker 1: think an observable intelligence, and I think native people thought
Speaker 1: of them, And that's what I argue in Coyte America
Speaker 1: is they thought of them as avatars, as stand ins
Speaker 1: for humans in the world, where you could watch the
Speaker 1: coyote as it went through the world and watch what
Speaker 1: it did and how it survived, and think this is
Speaker 1: boint that's a good example of how you do that.
Speaker 1: And so as an avatar for humans, as a stand
Speaker 1: in for humans in the world, I think you start
Speaker 1: to get some recognition of you know, this is the
Speaker 1: kind of deity figure they came up with it. And
Speaker 1: we can talk about this if you guys want to.
Speaker 1: But one of the interesting things about coyote to me
Speaker 1: is this is a very different deity figure than say
Speaker 1: a Jesus or something or or Mohammed. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is not a god figure who lives the perfect life
Speaker 1: and offers himself up as an example for everybody else
Speaker 1: because of his perfection. In fact, he's kind of a
Speaker 1: deity figure that you laugh at because he exhibits so
Speaker 1: many of the obvious characteristics of human beings.
Speaker 2: Something I can't help but wonder about with coyotes is
Speaker 2: what was their initial behavior like around people? And when
Speaker 2: I say that, what I'm referring to is it's really
Speaker 2: well documented that animals gradually learn how to deal with people.
Speaker 2: And we have some like pretty recent scenarios right of
Speaker 2: like whalers out in the Pacific or elsewhere coming across
Speaker 2: islands that hadn't been previously alanized by humans and like
Speaker 2: you can just walk up and pick things up. Birds
Speaker 2: are landing on you. They have no idea what you are, right,
Speaker 2: that's exactly right, Yeah, iological first contact. Yeah, it helps
Speaker 2: you kind of explain, well, how we're clovist hunters. How
Speaker 2: are they able to kill a man with a spear?
Speaker 2: And it maybe it might have been that they would
Speaker 2: walk up and jab it in the heart like it might.
Speaker 1: Have been while it stood and looked at them. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so picture too, if you picture like is
Speaker 2: kind of sly and opportunistic as that animal is, picture
Speaker 2: it being from his perspective seeing a human or a
Speaker 2: group of humans who got a camp and they got
Speaker 2: stuff they killed, and you know, they got dogs running around,
Speaker 2: Like what is his attitude toward them? And it might
Speaker 2: have been that they might have been just one of
Speaker 2: the most fast. They could have been one of the
Speaker 2: more fascinating things to engage with as they kind of
Speaker 2: tried to figure out what this new thing is.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think you're probably right in every bit of that, Stephen,
Speaker 1: because I think, for one thing, I think coyotes would
Speaker 1: have regarded the arrival of humans as this is a
Speaker 1: whole new opportunity. I mean, I mean we could hardly
Speaker 1: have imagined how great this might be. And that, of
Speaker 1: course was true for coyotes up until about one hundred
Speaker 1: years ago or so. But I think one of the
Speaker 1: reasons that that coyotes have always hung around humans. And
Speaker 1: I mean, when I was doing the work on this book,
Speaker 1: I was looking at archaeological investigations of say Chaco in
Speaker 1: places like that, and there's evidence of coyotes in the
Speaker 1: in the city itself, so that made me think. And
Speaker 1: of course in Mexico City, where the name comes from,
Speaker 1: coyote is from the original no Wat language of the Aztecs.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, it comes from from the no Wat language.
Speaker 2: And I forgot.
Speaker 1: Coyotl is how it's spelled in the language. But the
Speaker 1: L is silent, and so it would be pronounced coyote
Speaker 1: serve of the way you know, many of us you
Speaker 1: obviously pronounced it with just two syllables. I'm sort of
Speaker 1: more out of the you know, the cartoon phase of
Speaker 1: rod and coyote, yeah, Wiley, so I do three syllables.
Speaker 1: But it was an animal that was I mean, there
Speaker 1: are suburbs of Mexico City named after coyotes, so I
Speaker 1: think it was an animal that was very present around
Speaker 1: human camps and villages, and of course one of the
Speaker 1: reasons it's an urban animal. Today, coyotes have entered cities
Speaker 1: all over the United States in large part because everywhere
Speaker 1: humans are, we generate a lot of rats and mice
Speaker 1: and that's one of their favorite prey, and so the
Speaker 1: presence of humans means, wow, we're going to have an
Speaker 1: abundance of the goodies that we like to go for.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think they were probably from from a
Speaker 1: very early on in their relationship, humans and coyotes were interacting,
Speaker 1: and that could be one of the reasons why, of
Speaker 1: course that they decided, Wow, these guys, these guys, they
Speaker 1: can functions as a figure that tells us a lot
Speaker 1: about ourselves.
Speaker 2: Of course, you're writing about and talking about the animals
Speaker 2: that these cultures talked about, because there's there's something there.
Speaker 2: Do you ever wonder take the apostle or anything? Right,
Speaker 2: let's take the apostle. There must have been there has
Speaker 2: to have been like an understanding of it. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's an understanding of it. As it produces an oil, right,
Speaker 2: it's really soft fur. The leather's very poor quality, Like
Speaker 2: there's probably like that function. But you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: like like you have you find all these dozens and
Speaker 2: dozens of stories about myths and creation stories and things
Speaker 2: about coyotes. Then you have all these these these religious
Speaker 2: colts built around bears, right, all the all the imagery
Speaker 2: and religious understanding about buffalo. Were there some things that?
Speaker 2: Does it seem like there was some animals were just
Speaker 2: kind of there, like you know, was the apossum just
Speaker 2: kind of there or did it have a spiritual role?
Speaker 1: Well, I have not actually encountered a spiritual a possum
Speaker 1: in any of I reading.
Speaker 2: I mean neither that they just don't get their due now,
Speaker 2: they don't get there. It's like it's noteworthy. He can
Speaker 2: hang from his tail, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, can his sale. He can certainly do things. And
Speaker 1: you know, Native people were obviously they were really close
Speaker 1: observers of all this kind of natural history, and so
Speaker 1: they had a tremendous amount of information. Oh, I'm sure
Speaker 1: about because it was for one thing. I mean, you
Speaker 1: have generation after generation hand down stories. But it's part
Speaker 1: of the entertainment that you engage in in the world
Speaker 1: when you're living in a natural kind of setting and
Speaker 1: engaging the world as a hunter. Gatherer or a early
Speaker 1: agricultural which or something. You're observing things, probably in a
Speaker 1: way that we don't really do as a result of
Speaker 1: the way we live in the twenty first century. So
Speaker 1: I think they knew a hell of a lot about
Speaker 1: a lot of animals. But I've noted and I talk
Speaker 1: about in one of the chapters I think it was
Speaker 1: or one of the podcasts I think was a last one.
Speaker 1: I talked about Joseph Epps Brown's interviews with Lakota elders
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties, and he had got the interview.
Speaker 1: He was a religious scholar of religion who taught at
Speaker 1: the University of Montana in fact, and he got to
Speaker 1: interview some of the people who had been present still
Speaker 1: alive as young kids on the buffalo hunting planes. By
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, they were in their late eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: but they still remembered a lot, and they knew a
Speaker 1: lot about the you know, the prior to reservation life period.
Speaker 1: And Brown quizzed them about the animals that had power,
Speaker 1: and the animals that they indicated were the ones not
Speaker 1: like possums, but they were animals like so bears had
Speaker 1: particular power over underground, over the underground, because of course
Speaker 1: they hibernate in the winter. Eagles have particular power in
Speaker 1: the air. Bison are associated with the winds. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that josepheps Brown discovered from these interviews
Speaker 1: is that the Lakota idea was that all of these
Speaker 1: all of those creatures, bears, eagles, bison, along with dragonflies,
Speaker 1: shared a special power that they called umi or yume,
Speaker 1: which was whirlwind power. They all had the ability, and
Speaker 1: this was a highly sought after power by native people because,
Speaker 1: for one thing, if you engage whirlwind power, it made
Speaker 1: you difficult to evidently kill in a battle. But it
Speaker 1: also was a kind of a special power that controlled
Speaker 1: the winds, and bison especially were associated with winds because
Speaker 1: they knew that when the wind began to blow from
Speaker 1: the south, bison herds would start to appear. When the
Speaker 1: wind blew from the north, and of course what they
Speaker 1: were describing were the big annual migrations where you start
Speaker 1: getting northers and the bison herds start migrating south onto
Speaker 1: the plains. When the wind blows in the north. The
Speaker 1: bison are absent when it comes from the south, and
Speaker 1: so all those kind of features were associated with animals.
Speaker 1: I think that we would think of as charismatic in
Speaker 1: some way, and probably not. I haven't seen anything that
Speaker 1: he had to say about possums, but.
Speaker 2: I spent uh, I spent a little bit of time
Speaker 2: with Ammerindian group in South America, the Chimane, and I
Speaker 2: was out with them hunting one time and they were
Speaker 2: very eager to get a howler monkey, and they get
Speaker 2: a holler monkey, and they had some handful of other
Speaker 2: things they ate that are just not part of our
Speaker 2: food repertoire. And one night we're out and there's a possum.
Speaker 2: This is in Bolivia. There's a possum on a tree,
Speaker 2: and I'm thinking to myself, Man, that possum is in
Speaker 2: bad shape. If these guys like monkeys, they're gonna love
Speaker 2: that possum.
Speaker 1: And he just just went right.
Speaker 2: It's just I was like, Wow, there is something about
Speaker 2: the possum. Wasn't even worth commenting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well maybe that, Yeah, that was a special power
Speaker 1: that made the possum invisible.
Speaker 2: Well, Dan, thank you man, appreciate you taking time to
Speaker 2: talking and looking forward to the next show as usual.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you Steven