Unknown (3:41)
The first technology in the form of fire came from Coyote. Then, not without some remorse, he had introduced death to the world. Now, with all these fundamental creations in place, Coyote had no intention of stepping into the background or hiding himself. He wanted to enjoy how much humans appreciated his creativity. One morning, Coyote was going along and spotted a handsome young warrior who told Coyote he was embarking on a journey of war against his enemies. Although Coyote was actually a peaceful sort who thought war and battles to the death were very bad ideas, he told his new companion that he was a famous warrior and would be indispensable on the quest. That first night, the warrior said they would camp at a place called Scalped man by the Fire. Coyote did not like the sound of that. At the camp, Coyote relaxed while the warrior cooked and did all the chores. Then Coyote took the best pieces of the meal for himself, even laying extra meat over his chest and legs and in case he woke hungry in the night. Sometime in the night, Coyote heard a sound, and when he looked, there was Scalp man standing over him. Quick as he could, he swung his club, but somehow what he hit was his knee, which caused him to yowl in pain, waking the warrior. I have taken care of Scout man, coyote told him, and they went back to sleep. Having clubbed his own knee, Coyote limped through much of the next day, but made it okay to a camp called Cooked Meat flying all around. But when Coyote heard the warrior describe the next night's camp, where the arrows fly around his knee suddenly took a turn for the worse. Coyote lagged far behind that next day, hoping for a camp somewhere else, but the warrior led them on. That night, arrows began to fly from every direction. The warrior stood and caught one after another, while Coyote twisted and twirled and crawled on the ground, trying to avoid them until one arrow grazed his arm. I've been killed. Coyote shouted. But when the warrior pulled him to his feet and he found himself still alive, Coyote asserted that actually his hurt knee had caused him to fall asleep and he had been dreaming. The next night, their camp was at a place called where the women visit the men. This place sounded like an excellent camp to coyote. His knee improved so remarkably that day that he got far ahead on their march. That night, a woman did come to coyote, but in the darkness he believed her to be old. Hoping much younger women would arrive, he sent her away, only to see in the firelight as she turned away that in fact, she was young and very beautiful. Coyote cried out for her to return, telling her it had been some spirit who had told her to leave. But she vanished into the night. The camp following this one was called war clubs. Flying around all that day, Coyote's knee hurt so much that he was barely able to arrive at the spot. Sure enough, that night, clubs twirled at them from every direction. The warrior caught two, one for each of them and. But coyote dodged and weaved so much that a club finally beamed him. When he came to, Coyote told the warrior that in his boredom, he had actually just fallen asleep. That's why he had been lying so flat and still. Then the warrior told coyote that their next camp was to be at a place called vaginas. Flying around, coyote's knee at once felt entirely well, and he was ready to depart. Then and there, he pleaded for more details, but the warrior fell asleep. Coyote sat by the fire all night, thinking of vaginas and how many he might be able to carry with him. His knee now stronger than it ever been in his life, Coyote left early and ranged far ahead the next day. That night, as promised, vaginas began to sail into camp, and coyote could tell they were just the kind he liked. Young and plump for most of the night, juicy vaginas whizzed maddeningly out of reach, with coyote flailing and chasing and panting until he was near collapse. Finally, near dawn, Coyote caught one. But exhausted as he was when he finally panned it and mounted it, Coyote's organ resolutely refused to rise to the occasion. The next night was their final camp, and the warrior told coyote the this one was called where the enemy attacks without delay, Coyote's knee began to throb, and all day long he hung back on the trail, crying piteously. And sure enough, when the next morning came, enemies attacked from all sides. Coyote at once ran for far horizons, but was overtaken, clubbed, and scalped. Meanwhile, the warriors subdued all his enemies, then looked for coyote. When he knew all was clear, Coyote stood and announced that he was going along now. But the warrior should consider himself lucky that he had happened upon coyote. Otherwise he would have had to engage in this Adventure with no help at all from a famous warrior. Stories about Coyote Often called Old Man Coyote and rarely although they are present in the canon, stories about Old Woman Coyote are the oldest preserved human stories from North America. The truth is that Coyote, spelled with uppercase A capital C to distinguish the deity version from the ordinary coyote trotting by while you read, is America's oldest surviving literary figure. He is also the most ancient God figure of which we have record from the continent. When Siberian hunters first started boating down the coastlines or crossing Beringia, at some point in their entry of northwestern America, they began to encounter coyotes, wolves they knew from Asia, and well enough that at some point in their migration, these first Americans arrived with domesticated ones, wolf like dogs who. Whose wild ancestors in those times were recent. But by the time of the Clovis people, at least, who spread to america More than 13,000 years ago, continental coyotes were familiar creatures. Intriguingly, something about coyotes captured the imaginations of these first Americans. Religious explanations for the world and how it works are untold thousands, maybe millions of years old. So these former Siberians arrived with intact religions and deities. But as these first human residents settled in, from California to the Mississippi river, from the Pacific Northwest to future New Mexico and Arizona, Coyote emerged as the deity of the ancient continent. No one knows when this happened or exactly how Coyote came to embody so many different people's creation stories and ruminations on human nature. All we know now, based on the oral Coyote stories collected among American Indians and set down by 19th and 20th century ethnographers and folklorists, is that there were thousands of Coyote tales. No other native deity in America came anywhere close to producing a body of oral literature to rival them. The story here about Coyote and his knee, although written in my own voice in its original form, was collected from the Wichitas of the Southern Plains. But the opening paragraph of this episode I distill from several groups from all over the West. The Navajos in the Southwest, the Crows on the Northern Plains, the Karak and Wasco in California, the Menominee of the Great Lakes, the Colville and Klamath of the Pacific Northwest, and the Site Salish and Blackfeet from the Northern Rockies. For almost all of the past 10,000 years west of the Mississippi River, Coyote has been America's universal deity. Originally, he was a Paleolithic God, but he survived the millennia to appear among agricultural peoples like the Wichitas. Ultimately, his fame reached as far south as the Aztecs, who knew him as Way Way Coyotel Old Man Coyote truly Is Old man America. The history of coyotes and the history of humans has many parallels. But one difference between us is that across our own evolutionary history, we, we humans have created thousands of philosophies of meaning we call religions, While coyotes, so far as we can tell, embrace no religious tradition beyond life, the sacredness of existence. Insofar as we go. Our oldest forms of religious explanations featured animals as deities, A type of religion called animism that was fashioned by humans living their lives and as hunters or hunter gatherers. What we might call coyotism is certainly a Paleolithic religion. The famed psychologist Carl Jung is only one of hundreds, from scientists to poets, who have found Coyote enduringly fascinating, in part because of how fundamental he is in human thought. In Jung's view, the character of Coyote is a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, A forerunner of the Savior and like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being. The western religious traditions of Judaism is Islam and Christianity sprang from later periods of human history, following our domestication of plants and animals, what anthropologists called the Neolithic Revolution. Early Neolithic religions could feature animals, particularly the sacred bull, as deities. But over time, herding and agricultural cultures gradually replaced animal gods along with gods of spirit special places on the landscape. Another feature of animism with deities that assumed human form. The Greek gods who are so foundational in Western cultures, are classical examples of this evolution. Four thousand years ago, the Greeks replaced animal and plant deities with gods and goddesses in human form. Artemis, who became a mistress of the animals as a goddess of the hunt. And Demeter, who evolved into a human formed goddess of wheat and crops. One of the most intriguing questions about Coyote is simply this. Why did the ancient settlers of North America pick this particular animal as their deity? 10,000 years and more in the past, the first Americans would have had many scores of animal candidates for their deity figures. Charismatic creatures like mammoths or dire wolves or saber toothed cats might seem to us more likely choices. And in the early stages of human settlement, perhaps they had been gods. My own speculation is that as the Wisconsin Ice age gave way to a rapidly warming world, joined at the same time by the great simplification event known as the Pleistocene extinctions, which took all three of my suggested species and many others, the wild coyotes around Indian peoples of the time fascinated them as creatures endowed with special abilities. I suspect that it was the coyote's self evident ability to survive those profound changes. When the big charismatic species could not that attracted human attention. There probably was also an easy identification with the social lives of predatory wild coyotes and that made them feel familiar to human hunters. In his book Pueblo Gods and Myths, anthropologist Hamilton Tylor writes that the ability of an animal to become a God is in part due to his symbolic potential, which is to say the number of ideas he can stand for. A God, even the simplest God, is based upon a certain amount of abstraction in the human mind. Another anthropologist, Lewis Hyde, believes that coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind. The stories themselves look to predator prey relationships for the birth of cunning. Hyde goes on, one reason native observers may have chosen coyote is that the former in fact, does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is therefore a consummate survivor in a sheep world. Especially before our lives in cities, which obscured our deep dependency on nature and diverted our powers of observation, we humans were profound observers of the natural world. These early Americans would not have failed to notice one other characteristic of wild coyotes in a dangerous and changing world that the secret of their uncanny ability to survive everything nature threw at them and lay in a remarkable intelligence. The kind of trickster figures that Hyde mentions make up a very old human religious figure found in many animistic religions around the world in the form of many creatures. Hares, spiders, blue jays, ravens, even human figures like the Norse trickster Loki. But here in America, the coyote took up the mantle of a God who lived by his wits. And having a smart God, after all, was crucial to survival, also to our understanding of human nature and the animal within.
