00:00:01 Speaker 1: When Native people cast about for an American animal to carry their creation stories, the intelligent survivor coyote became Deity. Coyote, an avatar for humans who taught them about human nature for thousands of years. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and wildlife enjoy responsibly. Old Man America in the remotest time of early North America, after he had molded mud from the ocean bottom into mountains, plains, and forests to create the essential topography of the continent, Coyote was going along. He had placed stars in the sky, some as pictures, some as a latticed road across the night. Some tossed willy nilly into the inky black. He had arranged the year into four seasons, and he had populated the world with humans as the special helper of the Creator, who seemed not especially interested in any of this hands on creation work himself. Coyote had killed monster after monster on behalf of his human charges, who he had then located in good monster free spots across America. He had released animals like buffalo from underground, and admittedly with a few unlucky mistakes, had placed salmon and other fish and many of the rivers. He had invented penises and z giinas and taught humans what to do with them, and he created a sexual division of labor among men and women. 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 sword 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, Kyote 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 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 Scalpman, Coyote told him, and they went back to sleep. Having clubbed his own knee, Coyote leapt 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 described the next night's camp where the 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 to one for each of them, 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 Vagina's Flying around, Coyote's knee at once felt into 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 it. His knee now stronger than had 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 panning until he was near collapsed. Finally, near dawn, Coyote caught one, but exhausted as he was when he finally pinned 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 this one was called where the enemy attacks without delay. Coyote his 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 scouted. 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 warriors 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 Cannon. Stories about old Woman coyote are the oldest preserved human stories from North America. Both is that coyote spelled with upper case a capital see 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 boting down the coastlines are 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 whose wild ancestors in those times were recent. But by the time of the Clovis people at least, who spread to America more than thirteen thousand 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 Contina. 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 nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographers and folklores, 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 Coote 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 distilled from several groups from all over the West, the Navajos in the southwest, the Crows on the northern plains, the Kurrak, and wasco in California, the Monomonee of the Great Lakes, the Coalville and Klamath of the Pacific Northwest, and the Salish in Blackfeet from the northern Rockies. For almost all of the past ten thousand 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 Wayway Coyotal. 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 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. In so far 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 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, Islam, and Christianity sprang from later periods of human history, following our domestication of plants and animals, what anthropologists called the Neolithic Revolution. Early religions could feature animals, particularly the sacred bull, as deities, but over time, hurting and agricultural cultures gradually replaced animal gods along with gods of 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 Demater, who evolved into a human form 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? Ten thousand years and more in the past, the first Americans would have had many scores of animal candidates for their deity figures. Charismatic creatures like mammos 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 I says, 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 coyotes 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 that made them feel familiar to human hunters. In his book Pueblo Gods and Myths, anthropologists Hamilton Tyler 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 pray relationships for the birth of cunning. How it 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 shifting 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 through at them lay in a remarkable intelligence, the kind of trickster figures that hide mentions make up a very old human religious figure found in many animistic religions around the world in the form of many creatures hairs, 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. Having a smart god, after all, was crucial to survival also to our understanding of human nature in the animal within. In early American mythology, coyote is almost never the ultimate cause God. More often, as in the coyote stories from people like the Salish and the Nespers, he's an immortal helper deity, semi divine and present and engaged in earthly life. Most often in the stories, coyote inhabits the world before humankind. Sometimes his initial form is human, which he gives up for his coyote body once humans are present. In stories that are set following the creation, however, coyote is commonly a kind of an anthropomorphic animal, a coyote man. He preserves a tale and a sharp muzzle and erect ears, but he stands and walks upright, has a wife and a family, and is capable of shape shifting into a form so human like that often the other characters in a story only suspect by his behavior that they are dealing with Coyote himself. It does not take very much time or analytical effort with the coyote s tales to draw a conclusion about who Coyote really is, and that realization is what makes him so intriguing. As a god. Coyote is the god within his mythical function in the beginning is creation. Coyote takes the basic structure of the world as set in motion by the Creator, then improves on it and gives it the natural laws that make it work that done. His larger purpose in the many oral stories about him is to reveal human nature more clearly and rather than a perfect deity, Jung's savior figure a Jesus who teaches a codified morality and is set up as a role model for humans. Coyote personifies the full suite of humanity's traits, good and bad. As a character, Coyote is the full Monty. He's at once admirable, inspirational, imaginative, inner, energetic, a whirlwind biophysical force with a large capacity for taking sensuous pleasure in life. But he's also selfish, vain, deceitful, and quite often envious, lustful, and ridiculous, possessed of an overconfidence that gets him into endless fixes. Coyote's major flaw, resulting from a combination of all of his human traits, is that he finds cause, sometimes admirably, sometimes laughably, never to be quite satisfied with the world, And because he is invariably unable to predict consequences with any accuracy, his tinkering with the world can produce disaster, especially and this is a major theme in so many of the stories for Coyote himself. Coyote is almost universally referred to as a trickster. But after reading many scores of Native Coyote stories, I've begun to think think we've been missing the point. While there are certainly stories that feature tricks, the foolly is actually just a means to an end. Again and again, the point is not the trick. The point is why the trick works, and invariably the reason is a result of the foibles of human nature. These stories survive for thousands of years because there's such penetrating exposees of the human condition. Coyote was at his best when he taught lessons, almost always uncomfortable or funny, ones about human behavior and motives. As North America's oldest surviving deity, Coyote has bequeathed us a continental world of imagination, creation, artistry, also hubrious and trouble, it's difficult not to see the Coyote impulse writ large in humanity. In deed, to my mind, therein lies a test for stories about old men America, given what we now know about ourselves using the modern tools of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. Looking at these ancient stories with twenty first century insight, what can we say about how accurately they show that people living thousands of years ago understood as well as we do today exactly who we humans are. The acquisition of status in games of romance and love, experiential jolts to enhance neurochemistry and mood states a mind conflicted over sin and virtue. For the long ago Americans who selected wild coyotes as a suitable avatar for their earthly deity, then worked out so many stories about him. What better subjects for the adventures of their coyote god than these, No doubt, Over the centuries, storytellers of Mark Twain like Brilliance dazzled audiences laid into the night with the many astounding adventures of Coyote, and romanticize their people's trajectory through time. Coyote often operates as the very god of Richard Dawkins's selfish gene, in which form his character is usually that of a self absorbed buffoon. The stories are that holds up such behavior and plain view. For comic ridicule, Coyote stories were wildly entertaining. It was still is perversely pleasurable to observe a character who so blithely ignores rules and restrictions, usually with predictable results. Although benefits from rule breaking happen often enough with Coyote to keep things interesting, but a moral code it's rarely there, nor are there promises of eternal life salvation from death, that ancient and oppressive burden of our self awareness. What Old Man America teaches us instead is delight in being alive in a world of wondrous possibilities. 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. These ancient stories from across Western America lay death for all of us directly on Coyote's doorstep, and story after story, it is Coyote who decreed, for two admittedly rather admirable reasons, that all human beings would have to die if humans never died. Coyote reason this explanation is a part of stories from both the Yanas of California and the Navajos of the Southwest. Overpopulation and the destruction of the earth would be the result. Hence, the initial reason Coyote invented death was actually an environmental one. The Yanas said it was Coyote, who made it law that humans would have to die to create space for the generations down the timeline. Coyote also rationalized death for a second reason, this time as a great teacher about life. Well, you know, if you die, then you really have to take life seriously. You have to think about things more. Coyote himself was immortal, but when death visited him directly, he had some serious second thoughts about what a good idea. Death was one of the most poignant of all Coyote stories. He's a nest purse account called Coyote and the Shadow People. It's something close to a North American version of the Greek myth of Orpheus and his wife Eurydus. I tell it here rewritten in my own voice from the original ethnographic account. 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, who was filled with hope, What 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 god 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 plane over which they traveled our bushes covered in service berries, 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 Kyote to where his wife was said to be sitting with many others inside a very very long lodge. Again, the 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 lot, and to recognize old friends, whom he greeted and was able to walk about with and reminisce, and he was overjoyed to find his wife at his side. Late in the day, the people began to grow faint and hard to see. Then the spirit came to him and told him that as Don came in the living world, night came for them, but that Coyote should remain where he sat and not move, and Coyote said he would. When Don came, Coyote found himself sitting in the open prairie. As instructed, He remain there all day, broiling in the heat, but sitting as he had been told. This went on for several dawns and several nights, with Coyote's friends and his wife returning and making merry, then fading as Don came, and kyoteing waiting patiently in the heat of the day. Finally, after too long, the death spirit came to him and said, tomorrow you will go home. You will take your wife with you. He told Coyote they would travel for five days and pass five mountains, and that while he could talk with his wife no matter what, he should not touch her. That he should never lay a hand on her until they had passed the last of the five mountains. Then the spirit admonished Coyote, You, Coyote, must guard against your inclination to do foolish things. At dawn, Coyote and his wife started out, although Coyote could barely discern her, but when they crossed the first mountain, Coyote could feel her presence more strongly. When they camped on the homeward side of the second mountain, she became clearer to him, and in the next camp, beyond the third mountain, clearer still. Now they were making their fourth camp, with only the final mountain to cross the next day, and Coyote could at last see his wife's face and her young body. She was almost a living person again, Kayo. He had dared not reach out to her before, but now looking at her right there with him, he was overcome with joy at having her again, and so impulsively ran to embrace her. Stop Stop, Coyote, she cried, but it was too late. At the very instant he touched her body, she vanished. On learning of Coyote's folly, death spirit was furious and he did not hesitate You, Coyote were about to establish the practice of returning from death. Only a short time away the human race is coming, but you have spoiled everything and established for them death as it is. At this Coyote hung his head and wept. But then he had an idea. Drawing himself up, he retraced the journey he and death spirit had made. He tried with all his might to see the horses taste the service berries. He found the spot where the long law which had stood, even where he had sat with his wife beside him, And when night fell he strained to hear voices and seafires. When down came, Coyote found himself sitting in an open empty plane. God's come and go, But old Man America was too useful a deity to abandon them. One example of the native sense of coyote power famously occurred among the Navajos during the greatest misfortune that ever befell them hunters, herders, and raiders from the North who had arrived in four corners of the Southwest some six hundred years ago. The Navajos found themselves at war with US troops during most of the eighteen fifties and early eighteen sixties, distracted by the Civil War. In a fit of exasperation at the success of Navajo raids. The Army sent Taos mountain man and scout Kit Carson, in command of a contingent of troops, into Navajo country in eighteen sixty three, where Carson's men conducted a horrific scorched earth campaign against them. By eighteen sixty four, some eight thousand Navajos had surrendered to the Frontier Army, only to find themselves condemned to an incarceration in eastern New Mexico, three hundred miles from home. Their long walk to the Bosca Redondo prison camp and four years of being held there under constant guard is one of the most painful memories of Navajo history. But Navajos also remember how this episode ended. After years of pleading to return home and frequent breakouts of small groups that fled westward across New Mexico, in eighteen sixty eight, the US finally agreed to allow the Navajos to return to their homeland. In Navajo oral tradition, the act that accomplished this long for release was not negotiation or pleading, but their ritual performance of a coyote way ceremony, which infused Navajo leaders with enough coyote power finally to affect their release. Coyote power, surviving by one's intelligence and wits when others cannot, embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates, exultation and sheer aliveness, rueful chagrin at our shortcomings. These are the lessons Old Man America has been granting for thousands of years. Through those flashing canines. Coyote spoke truth, and he spoke it across an unfathomable expanse of time. 00:33:25 Speaker 2: In your in your podcast, you talked about, uh, this idea that some that someone was the first, some person was the first to be like, hey look a coyote. Yeah, or coyote right. Uh. That's the thing I never thought about with that animal. That's the thing I've wondered about a lot, is if you if you accept this that this leading theory that that the humans that came to North American and South America passed through this kind of arctic follow track, right, and they were Arctic people that were living north of snakes. Okay, for instance, for generations. I mean, all idea of snakes probably was going you know, I mean it was like probably race, maybe there was some narrative or story that still had it in mythology, like probably like buy and large, it was not a part of discussions. And then people start picking their way down the continent, and there was the first not like oh people like if you got into it, there would be like a person. A person was the first to say, look at that, Yeah, what is that? Do you know what I mean? Like picture it? Right? You don't think about the fact that someone that they were going like, look, never seen one of those before. 00:34:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. 00:34:57 Speaker 2: It's just so hard. It happened so much much, right, it happened hundreds of times over again, but it's so hard to picture what that would have been, like, I. 00:35:05 Speaker 1: Know, and it's a fascinating thing to imagine, you know. I will say I've read an account one time by it was an anthropologist who was arguing that we as humans, because you know, most primates do have an aversion to snakes, that we may even coming down through an arctic filter like that, and having been not around snakes for who knows fifteen thousand years or twenty thousand or whatever, that we would have had a genetic memory of a snake being alarming and hit. One of his arguments about that was that he said, notice how easy it is to teach a child not to reach out and touch a snake or a spider. But it's hard to teach them not to walk across the street in front of traffic or not stick their hands in an outlet. But if they get the whole spider and sake thing really fast. 00:36:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's a great point. And that's why it would be so good to have footage of this first snake encounter. That's the thing to see if he just tried to jump on it and grab it to bring it home to show everybody, or if he thought, like, eah, yeah, something about that thing. I don't know what it is, but I like it. 00:36:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that may be the reaction something about it. Huh, you want to get a slithering thing. 00:36:31 Speaker 2: You don't need to get too many pages into the Bible, and there's a snake. He's not a good guy. 00:36:38 Speaker 1: No, that's that's true. But yeah, so somebody did see as you have set us up for. Somebody did see a coyote for the first time. And you know, the thing that I was fascinated by when I sat down to work on this podcast, and this one comes out of my book Coyote America. When I was working on that book, I was confronted with writing this chapter about this animal that was a knew was one of the most significant deities in North American history. The oldest deity of which we have, the oldest literary figure actually of which we have any kind of knowledge, is Coyote with a capital C, this little canid that so many Native people made into a kind of a deity, or a semidity at least. And what I was confronted with was about one hundred and twenty five years or so ago, ethnographers interviewing Native people and collecting their stories, their creation stories, and whatever stories they could, and then followed by a whole group of folk lories who came along one hundred years ago, and we're doing the same thing with Native people. They collected thousands of coyote stories. Every group you talk to seem to have twenty or fifty or seventy or one hundred coyote stories. And so I was trying to make sense of all of that and once again kind of realizing, all right, a chapter in a book, you know, Okay, it can be maybe twenty five pages long here, and I've got hundreds of these things, so I can't do, you know, just kind of a listing of every one of them in some kind of summary. I have to try to figure out what they were all about, what they meant. And the ready example that seemed to be out there in the existing literature was that Coyote was one of these trickster figures that we have around the world, low key among the Norse, for example. I mean, most cultures have some record of a trickster figure. But as I kept reading these things, I kind of decided, you know, and I don't know if anybody else believes me on this, but what I decided about this was that we had actually kind of missed the point in talking about Coyote as a trickster, because him being a trickster was not really the point of what these stories were all about. What these stories are all about is why the trick works, on whoever it is who's being tricked, and the reason the trick works. And this is what kind of gave me the insight into the sort of stories I ended up telling in that chapter, is that the reason the trick works is because of human nature, because of our own foibles and our ability to fall for things because we are glutton us or where jealous are you know, we're narcissistic or whatever. It's like the Seven Deadly Sins. That's kind of what many of the coyotes stories are about. And so they're actually instruction in human nature and how easy it is to fool somebody or trick somebody because of who human beings are. To me, that seemed to be a more interesting thing about these stories than that just coyote was a trickster. 00:40:10 Speaker 2: I think. 00:40:12 Speaker 3: Obviously, this is a story of people projecting ideas and values and thoughts on this animal. But there's a reason. There's also a biological basis for it. Right, There's a reason it's not rock stories or snake stories or you know, turkey stories. 00:40:35 Speaker 1: Right. I wonder if you. 00:40:37 Speaker 3: Can kind of you obviously covered it in the podcast, but distilled down what it is about the coyote. It makes it such a natural foil for people. 00:40:45 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question, because obviously it's like ten thousand years ago or you know, further back in time when people are first here, and we don't know how far back the coyote stories go whether they were present during the actual Padiolyithic where there were pleciscene stories, or they occurred after that. But they're obviously old. There doesn't seem to be anything any older. And so what you have to then kind of come up with an explanation for us why pick that animal? I mean, if indeed the stories go back into the Pleistocene. I mean, you've got mammoths around, you've got saber toothed cats. If you're looking for a deity, you know, what better deity can you come up with than a step lion or something. And yet the animal that's come down to us in North American history as the animal they pick is this little, small, thirty five pound, you know, junior wolf. And so there had to be an explanation for that. And as I cast about for explanations to try to figure it out, I thought, well, okay, so one of the things is clearly coyotes are survivors of the extinctions in a way that sabertoothed cats or ground slaws or step lions aren't those all disappear. Coyotes survive, so they're still around. And therefore you've come up with a deity figure that is still present in your world that you get to see or at least see some examples of. But the other thing I decided that probably played a role in it, and this is a result of reading a lot of those coyote tales from the various native groups. Coyote, the animal out there in nature, is a supremely intelligent creature. That's why they have survived down to the present day. No matter what we've been able to throw at them, whatever poison, whatever trapping, whatever helicopter shooting, they are still here and they're not going anywhere. In fact, they've spread across all of North America and are becoming one of the first animals since the places seen us the Isthmus of Panama into South America. So there's something about them. They're obviously extremely successful. That success is based on I think an observable intelligence, and I think native people thought of them, And that's what I argue in Coyte America is they thought of them as avatars, as stand ins for humans in the world, where you could watch the coyote as it went through the world and watch what it did and how it survived, and think this is boint that's a good example of how you do that. And so as an avatar for humans, as a stand in for humans in the world, I think you start to get some recognition of you know, this is the kind of deity figure they came up with it. And we can talk about this if you guys want to. But one of the interesting things about coyote to me is this is a very different deity figure than say a Jesus or something or or Mohammed. I mean, this is not a god figure who lives the perfect life and offers himself up as an example for everybody else because of his perfection. In fact, he's kind of a deity figure that you laugh at because he exhibits so many of the obvious characteristics of human beings. 00:44:27 Speaker 2: Something I can't help but wonder about with coyotes is what was their initial behavior like around people? And when I say that, what I'm referring to is it's really well documented that animals gradually learn how to deal with people. And we have some like pretty recent scenarios right of like whalers out in the Pacific or elsewhere coming across islands that hadn't been previously alanized by humans and like you can just walk up and pick things up. Birds are landing on you. They have no idea what you are, right, that's exactly right, Yeah, iological first contact. Yeah, it helps you kind of explain, well, how we're clovist hunters. How are they able to kill a man with a spear? And it maybe it might have been that they would walk up and jab it in the heart like it might. 00:45:25 Speaker 1: Have been while it stood and looked at them. Yeah. 00:45:28 Speaker 2: So yeah, so picture too, if you picture like is kind of sly and opportunistic as that animal is, picture it being from his perspective seeing a human or a group of humans who got a camp and they got stuff they killed, and you know, they got dogs running around, Like what is his attitude toward them? And it might have been that they might have been just one of the most fast. They could have been one of the more fascinating things to engage with as they kind of tried to figure out what this new thing is. 00:46:02 Speaker 1: Yeah. I think you're probably right in every bit of that, Stephen, because I think, for one thing, I think coyotes would have regarded the arrival of humans as this is a whole new opportunity. I mean, I mean we could hardly have imagined how great this might be. And that, of course was true for coyotes up until about one hundred years ago or so. But I think one of the reasons that that coyotes have always hung around humans. And I mean, when I was doing the work on this book, I was looking at archaeological investigations of say Chaco in places like that, and there's evidence of coyotes in the in the city itself, so that made me think. And of course in Mexico City, where the name comes from, coyote is from the original no Wat language of the Aztecs. It's yeah, it comes from from the no Wat language. 00:46:57 Speaker 2: And I forgot. 00:47:01 Speaker 1: Coyotl is how it's spelled in the language. But the L is silent, and so it would be pronounced coyote serve of the way you know, many of us you obviously pronounced it with just two syllables. I'm sort of more out of the you know, the cartoon phase of rod and coyote, yeah, Wiley, so I do three syllables. But it was an animal that was I mean, there are suburbs of Mexico City named after coyotes, so I think it was an animal that was very present around human camps and villages, and of course one of the reasons it's an urban animal. Today, coyotes have entered cities all over the United States in large part because everywhere humans are, we generate a lot of rats and mice and that's one of their favorite prey, and so the presence of humans means, wow, we're going to have an abundance of the goodies that we like to go for. So yeah, I think they were probably from from a very early on in their relationship, humans and coyotes were interacting, and that could be one of the reasons why, of course that they decided, Wow, these guys, these guys, they can functions as a figure that tells us a lot about ourselves. 00:48:22 Speaker 2: Of course, you're writing about and talking about the animals that these cultures talked about, because there's there's something there. Do you ever wonder take the apostle or anything? Right, let's take the apostle. There must have been there has to have been like an understanding of it. I mean, there's an understanding of it. As it produces an oil, right, it's really soft fur. The leather's very poor quality, Like there's probably like that function. But you know what I mean, like like you have you find all these dozens and dozens of stories about myths and creation stories and things about coyotes. Then you have all these these these religious colts built around bears, right, all the all the imagery and religious understanding about buffalo. Were there some things that? Does it seem like there was some animals were just kind of there, like you know, was the apossum just kind of there or did it have a spiritual role? 00:49:28 Speaker 1: Well, I have not actually encountered a spiritual a possum in any of I reading. 00:49:36 Speaker 2: I mean neither that they just don't get their due now, they don't get there. It's like it's noteworthy. He can hang from his tail, I. 00:49:41 Speaker 1: Mean, can his sale. He can certainly do things. And you know, Native people were obviously they were really close observers of all this kind of natural history, and so they had a tremendous amount of information. Oh, I'm sure about because it was for one thing. I mean, you have generation after generation hand down stories. But it's part of the entertainment that you engage in in the world when you're living in a natural kind of setting and engaging the world as a hunter. Gatherer or a early agricultural which or something. You're observing things, probably in a way that we don't really do as a result of the way we live in the twenty first century. So I think they knew a hell of a lot about a lot of animals. But I've noted and I talk about in one of the chapters I think it was or one of the podcasts I think was a last one. I talked about Joseph Epps Brown's interviews with Lakota elders in the nineteen thirties, and he had got the interview. He was a religious scholar of religion who taught at the University of Montana in fact, and he got to interview some of the people who had been present still alive as young kids on the buffalo hunting planes. By the nineteen thirties, they were in their late eighties and nineties, but they still remembered a lot, and they knew a lot about the you know, the prior to reservation life period. And Brown quizzed them about the animals that had power, and the animals that they indicated were the ones not like possums, but they were animals like so bears had particular power over underground, over the underground, because of course they hibernate in the winter. Eagles have particular power in the air. Bison are associated with the winds. And one of the things that josepheps Brown discovered from these interviews is that the Lakota idea was that all of these all of those creatures, bears, eagles, bison, along with dragonflies, shared a special power that they called umi or yume, which was whirlwind power. They all had the ability, and this was a highly sought after power by native people because, for one thing, if you engage whirlwind power, it made you difficult to evidently kill in a battle. But it also was a kind of a special power that controlled the winds, and bison especially were associated with winds because they knew that when the wind began to blow from the south, bison herds would start to appear. When the wind blew from the north, and of course what they were describing were the big annual migrations where you start getting northers and the bison herds start migrating south onto the plains. When the wind blows in the north. The bison are absent when it comes from the south, and so all those kind of features were associated with animals. I think that we would think of as charismatic in some way, and probably not. I haven't seen anything that he had to say about possums, but. 00:53:04 Speaker 2: I spent uh, I spent a little bit of time with Ammerindian group in South America, the Chimane, and I was out with them hunting one time and they were very eager to get a howler monkey, and they get a holler monkey, and they had some handful of other things they ate that are just not part of our food repertoire. And one night we're out and there's a possum. This is in Bolivia. There's a possum on a tree, and I'm thinking to myself, Man, that possum is in bad shape. If these guys like monkeys, they're gonna love that possum. 00:53:46 Speaker 1: And he just just went right. 00:53:51 Speaker 2: It's just I was like, Wow, there is something about the possum. Wasn't even worth commenting. 00:54:01 Speaker 1: Yeah, well maybe that, Yeah, that was a special power that made the possum invisible. 00:54:07 Speaker 2: Well, Dan, thank you man, appreciate you taking time to talking and looking forward to the next show as usual. 00:54:12 Speaker 1: All right, thank you Steven