Coyote

Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A trickster and demiurge who shaped the early world, secured fire and daylight for humankind, and seeded it with chaos in the same breath.
Role in Mythos: Across the Plains, California, the Plateau, and the Southwest he is the chief animal of the age before people, by turns creator, benefactor, fool, and the one who made death stay.
Relation to Humans: He is humanity’s clumsy patron, the reason people have fire and arts and the reason they also have lies, witchcraft, and a grave to fill. The peoples who told his stories did not worship him so much as study him, learning the limits of order by watching him cross every one.

A shape trots along the ridge at dusk, low to the ground, ears up, nose working the wind off the camp below. It looks like nothing much, a rangy desert dog the color of dry grass and old dust, ribs faintly showing, tail carried level. Then it stops, sits, and watches the cookfires with an attention that is not quite animal. Wood smoke drifts up the slope. Somewhere a child laughs. The creature on the ridge tilts its head, and anyone who knew the old stories would feel the back of the neck prickle, because this is the moment in a hundred tales when everything is about to change, usually for the worse, occasionally for the better, and always in a way no one saw coming.

He goes by many names across a continent. Among the Crow he is Old Man Coyote, Akba Atatdia, a true creator who scooped up the earth, raised the mountains, and made the first people, then started making mistakes almost at once. Among the Navajo he is Ma’ii, the one called First Angry, tangled up with the origins of witchcraft and with every disorder that worked its way into a careful world. The Maidu of California set him beside the Earth Maker at the dawn of things, arguing. Each people kept its own version, and they agreed on the look of him and on little else, because he is a creator and a clown at the same time, a giver of gifts who cannot stop himself from spoiling them.

In the wild he is simply a coyote, sand-colored and quick, built for distance, with eyes that miss nothing. The stories give him a second shape. He can rise onto two legs and walk into a village as a sly, persuasive person, a man or a woman, talking his way to a meal or a wife or a secret, and slip back into fur when the talking runs out. The form is the message. He belongs to both the animal world and the human one and is fully trusted by neither.

His usefulness is real, and it came at a cost to someone. Fire, in the oldest pattern of the tale, belonged to beings who would not share it and kept it hidden up a mountain or behind a guarded fire. Coyote went and got it, sometimes by flattery, sometimes by setting up a relay of swift animals to carry a smoldering brand hand to hand down the slopes while the owners gave chase. Humans have warmth and cooked food because a trickster decided that hoarding was wrong, or perhaps just that stealing was fun. In Navajo telling he is also a slayer of monsters and the bringer of daylight, and elsewhere he is credited with the first tools and crafts. The benefactor and the thief are the same character, and no one who told these stories pretended otherwise.

There is a night in the Navajo accounts that fixes him forever. Black God sat with a buckskin pouch of stars, placing each one in the sky with great care, building the constellations point by deliberate point. The work was slow. Coyote grew bored, and boredom in Coyote is dangerous. He seized the pouch and flung the rest of the stars across the dark in one careless arc, and that scatter became the Milky Way. The ones he threw were never set alight properly, which is why some stars burn faint while others blaze. The cold beauty overhead is half design and half a tantrum, and the people who looked up at it knew exactly whose tantrum it was.

The hardest of his gifts was death, and it broke him. In the Maidu story the world was new and the question was whether the dead should return. Coyote argued against it. Let death be permanent, he said, or the land will fill past holding. The creator gave way. Then Coyote’s own son was bitten by a rattlesnake and died, the first to go under the new rule, and Coyote begged to have him back. He was refused, on his own terms. He wept. Those were the first tears anyone had ever shed. The one who made death final was the first to grieve it, and the lesson of that has nothing comforting in it.

His powers run deep because they are the powers of the world’s making. He shapes land and people, carries fire and light, changes form, and talks his way past any guard. His cunning is bottomless, his appetite for mischief endless, and his survival nearly absolute. He always comes back for the next story. But the same hunger that drives him is the flaw that ruins him. He is greedy, vain, lustful, and far too impatient to finish anything cleanly, and he is duped as often as he dupes. He dies in tale after tale, gluttonous or careless or outsmarted, and revives by morning no wiser. He cannot undo the death he argued into being, not even for his own child. The trickster who can steal the sun cannot keep his own mouth shut, and that is precisely why his people kept telling stories about him, generation after generation, beside the same kind of fire he once carried down the mountain for them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Coyote in Native American mythology?

Coyote is a trickster and creator figure found across many Native American traditions of the Plains, California, the Plateau, and the Southwest. He is both a benefactor who gave humans fire, daylight, and the arts, and a foolish, greedy schemer who introduces chaos, lies, and death into the world.

Is Coyote good or evil?

Coyote is neither, and that is the point of him. In the same body of stories he creates the world and corrupts it, helps humans and harms them, outwits others and is humiliated himself. The scholar Paul Radin described the trickster type as “at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator.”

What did Coyote do for humans?

Coyote secured many of the things humans need to live. In the most widespread tales he stole fire from beings who refused to share it, often using a relay of animals to carry it down a mountain. He is also credited with bringing daylight, killing monsters, and originating early human arts and tools.

How did Coyote bring death into the world?

In the Maidu tradition, Coyote argued that death should be permanent so the world would not overfill with people. The creator agreed. Coyote’s own son then became the first to die, and when Coyote begged to bring him back he was refused on the very terms he had set, weeping the first tears ever shed.

What does Coyote have to do with the Milky Way?

In Navajo mythology, Black God was carefully placing stars in the sky to form the constellations when an impatient Coyote grabbed the pouch and flung the remaining stars across the dark, creating the Milky Way. Because those stars were never properly lit, some shine brightly while others remain faint.