by Dan Flores
So as a literary character, Coyote is the full monty. He is no simple caricature but rather a complex figure full of nuances of all sorts. Coyote is admirable, inspirational, imaginative, and energetic—a whirlwind biophysical force with a large capacity for taking sensuous pleasure in life. But, as in the opening story, “Coyote and His Knee,” he is also vain, deceitful, and ridiculously self-serving. And I should add that he is quite often envious, lustful to a degree of advanced, creative horniness, and possessed of an overconfidence that gets him into no end of fixes. Coyote’s commonest flaw in the literature is probably a consequence of the way his human traits, both positive and negative, combine. That is to say, he finds reasons—sometimes because he’s admirable; more often because he suffers from various forms of narcissism—never to be quite satisfied with the way things are. And because inevitably he is unable to predict consequences with any accuracy, his tinkering with the world usually produces disaster, especially for Coyote himself. The stories are funny because Coyote is a trickster who is forever falling for the oldest trick in the book.
As North America’s oldest surviving deity, Coyote bequeaths to us down the timeline a continental world of imagination, creation, and artistry but also of self-absorption, hubris, and big trouble. As the stories seem to ask, how can one not see the Coyote impulse writ large in humanity? Indeed, given what we now know about ourselves, compliments of the fields of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, when we look back at a Coyote canon that’s thousands of years old, what does it say about how well Coyote—that is to say, people—grasped human nature long before modern science emerged to help us figure ourselves out?
One of the most ardent modern advocates of our coming to terms with human nature by examining our evolution has been Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. Back in 1978, when Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that “we are biological” and “we have no place to go but Earth,” evolutionists had not really tackled the task of understanding the human condition. But Wilson has been a player in the field ever since. “There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life,” he writes in 2014’s The Meaning of Human Existence. “Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world.”
As an early founder of evolutionary psychology, Wilson (and now many others) believes that much of the basis of human nature derives from our evolution as a social species, one that happens also to be omnivorous but for whom meat eating became an important cultural driver. Human evolutionary behaviors are often the most generalized and least rationalized of all our actions. And a universal example is our genetic instinct for self-absorbed, selfish personal behavior, as described in Richard Dawkins’s famous “selfish gene” hypothesis. Another is a usually unquestioned bias toward youth and signals about health, cues to sexual fitness in a Darwinian world. These characteristics are so inherent that they are often invisible to us, yet direct much of how we act in the world.
Wilson and the evolutionary psychologists are not always optimists about what our evolution did for us. Our evolutionary adaptations allowed us to spread across and dominate the world, but unless we understand their effect on us, the same behaviors that made us so wildly successful can augment our inclination to engage in wars of tribal aggression over resources or to degrade the environment of the planet.
One of those adaptations, namely the fission-fusion trait we share with coyotes, may have also bequeathed to us one of the grand dilemmas of being human. According to a recent (and fascinating) idea in evolutionary psychology, natural selection among humans operates on two levels: that of individuals within social groups and that between competing groups. The intriguing strategy for survival we acquired early in our evolution effectively instilled in us directly contrary behaviors: both selfish and individualistic impulses and altruistic and cooperative ones. If mythic tales like the Coyote stories were perceptive enough to shine an ancient light on human verities, this grand conflict—the struggle inside the human mind as we attempt to sort out survival-dependent impulses to be both ignoble and noble—should be a common theme. Naturally, it is.
Modern neuroscience is another field that is offering up epiphany-like insights into how our brain’s evolution and our internal chemistry have shaped us. An unusual historian of science whose work certainly intrigues me is Daniel Lord Smail. Smail has tried to illuminate how evolutionary neuroscience might be working on human behaviors we have all observed but been unable to explain. His book on the subject was 2008’s On Deep History and the Brain. Old Man Coyote does not appear in it, at least not by name. But he is there, inhabiting the motives behind scientific terms that did not yet exist when he was serving as a Coyote Man avatar for ancient North America.
Smail is onto a phenomenon others might associate with the evolution of novelty-seeking genes. He avers that human evolution was never just about equipping us for survival in nature; we also evolved in response to our social lives in primate groups. A stimulating social life full of emotional highs and lows helped produce our neurochemistry of transmitters like dopamine and serotonin, chemical “washes” triggered by our experiences and sensations. Sometimes these washes became addictive enough that we deliberately sought experiences to induce them. Smail contends that the emotions of our evolutionary social lives quite literally set us up to seek out other neurotransmitter catalysts as we colonized around the world—psychotropics like coffee, sugar, tobacco, chocolate, opium, alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. He rather mind-blowingly concludes that goosing our neurochemistry makes all kinds of spectacles, along with drugs, shopping, recreational sex, and pornography, pretty much predictable, given our evolutionary history as a social species.
A mind conflicted about “sin” and “virtue”; self-interest versus cooperation; games of love and status; new experiences to jolt neurochemistry and emotional states: for the long-ago Americans who selected a part man, part coyote as a suitable avatar for understanding themselves, what better subjects for the adventures of their Coyote god than these?
I think of America’s Coyote stories as universal. Because they are in large measure commentaries on human nature, Coyote stories belong to all of us for the same reasons that Shakespeare’s plays or Dostoyevsky’s novels do. But of course they did emerge out of a cultural context—or contexts, more accurately, for different Coyote stories sprang from different peoples and take place in all manner of geographic settings. Many scores of generations of Indian peoples passed down the oldest, and the method of passage, until professional and amateur ethnologists and folklorists began to transcribe the tales a century ago, was always oral. For several thousands of years in America, Coyote stories came down the generations via spoken delivery, usually to mixed audiences of men, women, and children gathered in winter lodges lit and warmed by open fires. No doubt over the centuries storytellers of Mark Twain–like brilliance dazzled audiences late into the night with the many astounding adventures of Coyote, thereby romanticizing their peoples’ trajectory through time.
Take the measure of this large literature, and it is evident that Coyote stories packed a cultural punch no media form today can really match. If we could somehow invent a modern art form that combined the religious/philosophical explanations of holy texts with the spectacle of modern movies, the entertainment value of video games, and the magic realism of Latin American novels, maybe it would rival the impact Coyote’s adventures once had on audiences.
The stories’ original functions were roughly sixfold. They provided explanations for why the world is the way it is: why a particular mountain range exists, why salmon are here and not there, why no one can return from death. All those things that seem unalterable about the world were Coyote’s domain. Another function was educational. Coyote stories don’t just offer up trenchant observations about human nature, pointing out our innate selfishness, our helpless striving for status, or our longing for sensations that trigger our feel-good ne
urochemistry. They tend to look at human foibles ironically or to make jokes about them while also showcasing proper behavior for a social species. Coyote stories also issued implicit warnings about threats to human survival. And they were wildly entertaining: it was (and still is) perversely pleasurable to observe a character who so blithely ignores rules and restrictions, usually with the predictable outcome, although Coyote benefits from rule breaking often enough to keep things interesting.
But what, no moral code in these stories? No promise of eternal life, no salvation from death, knowledge of which forms the ancient and oppressive burden of our self-awareness? Coyote stories offer up none of these things. They do proffer a firm nod to the “religion” of the wild coyote. Old Man America teaches delight in being alive in a world of wondrous possibilities.
It ought to be said, finally, that Coyote stories are not really for visionary dreamers who expect to change the world. Coyotism is a philosophy for the realists among us, those who can do a Cormac McCarthy–like appraisal of human motives but find a kind of chagrined humor in the act, who may think of the human story as cyclical, even predictable, because human nature never seems to change and is such a powerful presence in history. With modern scientific help in understanding why we are who we are and why certain aspects of life tempt us the way they do, it is fascinating to look at North America’s Coyote stories to see how deeply into human time our observations about our foibles extend. Coyotism tells us that while we may long have misunderstood the motives for our behavior, we’ve also long known how human nature expresses itself. And who better to illustrate that than self-centered, gluttonous, carnal Coyote?
Coyote had spotted a most beautiful girl, a chief’s daughter, and had decided she was the one for him. As beautiful chief’s daughters do, she ignored him. Coyote, however, had heard that there were White Men along the eastern seashore who had many wonderful things. With magic, Coyote went there, and when he returned he brought with him four things no one had seen before. Then he set up a lodge right beside that of the beautiful young girl and commenced to work and pound away the night, making such a noise that the girl could not sleep.
The next day she sent a relative to find out why Coyote was making such a commotion. The emissary returned with the news that Coyote was making things, wonderful things. When she heard this, the chief’s daughter was curious. So she and her relative met with Coyote, and the chief’s daughter asked him what he was making. Coyote proudly showed her a bead choker made from colorful glass beads he had acquired from the Whites. The necklace was strange and novel. She wanted it badly.
“What do you want for this?” she asked.
“Nothing much, just a kiss,” Coyote replied. The two women discussed this request, agreed there was little harm in it, and the first of their bargains was consummated.
That night Coyote set up a tremendous racket in his lodge, and again the beautiful girl wondered what he could be making. So the next day she asked, and he showed her a wonderful iron kettle, new and shiny and far better for cooking in than anything her people owned.
“What do you want for this?” she asked him.
“Oh, well, nothing much. I just want to fondle one of your breasts.” It seemed such a small request, the two girls decided, so the deal was struck.
Throughout the third night Coyote thrashed and howled and set up a din in his lodge, and the next morning, when the question came, he showed the beautiful young girl a red wool blanket with stripes in several colors. It was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen, and this time, anticipating him, she offered him the chance to fondle her other breast in trade.
“No,” Coyote said, “what I want for this blanket is to feel one of your buttocks.” The girls consulted, and to possess this astonishing blanket, she permitted it.
That night Coyote outdid himself. The noise was deafening, more than all the rest of the nights combined. The next morning the chief’s daughter was at his lodge very early, and Coyote showed her the night’s result. It was a mirror, the first she had ever seen. She gazed for a long time at herself in its reflection, knowing in her heart she must have this new creation for her own, and then she asked the question Coyote was betting on.
“Oh, not much, really,” said Coyote in response. “Just a look between your legs.”
So the bargain was made. But this time when the deed was done, Coyote shook his head, “Oh my, oh my, too bad, too bad,” he said. “Your winyan-shan is upside-down. It has to be remade. It can’t stay like it is. What a pity!”
The girl went home and thought long about this and then resolved on what to do. If she truly did need remaking between her legs, who else to do it than he who made such wonderful and priceless new things at night?
“Go and fetch Coyote, and do it quickly,” she told her relative.
In the hundreds of stories about him, Coyote is many things. Among peoples like the Pueblos of the Southwest, the Coyote figure is even a fool, the butt of jokes. But no matter what form he assumes, in many of the stories his character turns his pointed canine nose up at the proper social behavior—overcoming self-interest and acting unselfishly on behalf of others—and does exactly the opposite. Coyote, in other words, operates as the god of Dawkins’s selfish gene, and in this form he takes on the character of a self-absorbed, narcissistic buffoon. The story’s arc then holds such behavior up in plain view for comic ridicule.
But sometimes Coyote himself calls out selfishness.
One day, as always, Coyote was going along. This particular morning he happened upon the Frog People, who since the start of time had monopolized all the water. Anytime someone needed a bath or water for cooking or even a drink, he or she had to barter or beg for it from the Frog People. All the water was in their possession. So Coyote offered to pay them with a seashell he’d found so that he could take a deep drink from the water they had impounded behind an immense dam. Coyote drank and drank, and he drank for such a very long time that the Frog People finally grew suspicious. And they should have, for Coyote was not just drinking. He was also digging away intently at the base of the dam, which finally collapsed and released all the water behind it across the world.
The Frog People were furious. They had owned all the water. But Coyote shamed them. It was not proper for one group to hoard what everyone needed, he told them. Now water was available to all.
Coyote did this sort of thing too. He could also act in the interest of the group.
In their settings and perhaps in actual depth of time, Coyote stories about death appear to be an early, critical part of the Coyote genre, and to say that Coyote has a very complicated relationship with death is to state the obvious. As deities he and his friend Fox are immortals. Whenever one of them is killed, typically the other brings him back to life (although in such stories Coyote commonly insists he has “just been sleeping”). But stories from across western America lay death for all the rest of us directly at Coyote’s doorstep. In tale after tale it is Coyote who decreed—for two admittedly admirable reasons—that all human beings must die. If humans never died, Coyote reasoned (in an explanation found in stories from both the Yanas of California and the Navajos of the Southwest), then overpopulation and the destruction of the Earth would result. Hence, the initial reason Coyote invented death was environmental: to save the world.
So it was Coyote who “made it law” (the Yanas said) that humans would have to die to create space for the generations down through time. When the first humans heard this, however, they resented it deeply. According to the Yanas, Coyote then came up with a second rationale for death, this time as the ultimate reason for appreciating being alive: “Well, you know, if you die, then you really have to take life seriously, you have to think about things more.”
But it so happened that Coyote had a son who, running a race with humans, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died. Suddenly the tragedy of death affected not someone else but Coyote himself. Coyote set about wailing and gnashing his teeth, “dancing with gr
ief” and “acting like a crazy man.” But his son did not come back to life. Death was already in the world and could not be recalled merely because it had become personal for an avatar god.
When calamity visits him directly, Coyote has some serious second thoughts about what a good idea death is. A Nez Perce account called “Coyote and the Shadow People” tells one of the most poignant stories of Coyote’s personal reaction to death. Set, in effect, in the days of Genesis, when only animals were on the Earth, it is something close to a North American version of the Greek myth of Orpheus and his slain wife, Eurydice.
Coyote and his wife were living happily when she became sick. When she died, Coyote was overcome with grief and loneliness. Others had died, but this was different. So when Death Spirit came to him and offered to take him to the place where his wife had gone, Coyote was filled with hope. “But, I tell you,” said Death Spirit, “you must do everything exactly as I say; not once are you to disregard my commands and do something else.”
So Coyote traveled with Death Spirit, thinking of his wife but noticing that his guide was very difficult to see and follow. He looked more like a shadow than anything real. When he pointed out herds of horses in the plain over which they traveled or bushes covered in serviceberries, Coyote saw nothing. But he exclaimed over the horses and pretended to eat the berries.
Soon enough the guide announced that they had arrived and led Coyote to where his wife was said to be sitting with many others inside a very, very long lodge. Again the Death Spirit cautioned Coyote to do exactly as he said. Coyote made every effort to do so, but while he felt the Spirit’s presence, as far as he could see they were sitting in an open prairie. But Death Spirit told him that conditions were different here, that when night fell in the living world, it would be dawn in this place. Sure enough, when night fell Coyote began to hear people whispering. He began to see many fires in the lodge and to recognize old friends, whom he greeted and was able to walk about and reminisce with. And he was overjoyed to find his wife at his side.