Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 04: Old Man America | The American West About this episode Thousands of years ago Native people in the West chose, among all the possibilities, the coyote as the deity animal in their various stories of North America’s creation. Then they proceeded to fashion thousands of stories around “Old Man America,” the oldest literary figure in America. Long described as a Trickster, the deity Coyote actually was a human avatar whose stories richly conveyed human nature in both its admirable and not-so-admirable forms. As part coyote and part human, deity Coyote stands in a progression of human gods, one whose insights into human nature have allowed him to survive into the modern age.
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1:03 Speaker 02 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.
1:54 Speaker 02 Old Man America.
2:00 Speaker 02 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,
2:45 Speaker 02 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 in many of the rivers. He had invented penises and vaginas and taught humans what to do with them, and had 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.
3:27 Speaker 02 He wanted to enjoy how much humans appreciated his creativity.
3:42 Speaker 02 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 in case he woke hungry in the night.
4:27 Speaker 02 Sometime in the night Coyote heard a sound, and when he looked, there was Scalped 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 Scalped 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
5:12 Speaker 02 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.
5:56 Speaker 02 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, but Coyote dodged and weaved so much that a
6:41 Speaker 02 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 had ever been in his life, Coyote left early and ranged far ahead the next day.
7:23 Speaker 02 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 collapse. Finally, near dawn, Coyote caught one, but exhausted as he was, when he finally penned 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's knee began to throb, and all day long, he hung back on the trail, crying piteously.
8:07 Speaker 02 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 warrior 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.
8:47 Speaker 02 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,
9:32 Speaker 02 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 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.
10:15 Speaker 02 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 peoples’ 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.
11:00 Speaker 02 The story here about Coyote and his knee, although written in my own voice, in its original form was collected from the Wichita's 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 Carac and Wasco in California, the Menominee of the Great Lakes, the Colville and Klamath of the Pacific Northwest, and the 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.
11:41 Speaker 02 Originally, he was a Paleolithic god, but he survived the millennia to appear among agricultural peoples like the Wichita's. Ultimately, his fame reached as far south as the Aztecs, who knew him as "Wayway Coyotl." Old Man Coyote truly is Old Man America.
12:11 Speaker 02 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. 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 as hunters or hunter-gatherers. What we might call coyotism is certainly a Paleolithic religion.
12:55 Speaker 02 The famed psychologist Carl Jung is only one of hundreds, from scientist to poet, 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.
13:35 Speaker 02 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 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 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.
14:18 Speaker 02 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-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 mammoths, or dire wolves, or saber-toothed cats might seem to
15:01 Speaker 02 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.
15:45 Speaker 02 There probably was also an easy identification with the social lives of predatory wild coyotes that made them feel familiar to human hunters.
15:57 Speaker 02 In his book Pueblo Gods and Myths, anthropologist 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 up on 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
16:39 Speaker 02 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 threw at them lay in a remarkable intelligence." The kind of trickster figures that Hyde mentions
17:21 Speaker 02 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. Having a smart god, after all, was crucial to survival, also to our understanding of human nature and the animal within.
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19:28 Speaker 02 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 Nespurs, 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 tail and a sharp muzzle and erect ears, but he stands and walks upright,
20:12 Speaker 02 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 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
20:54 Speaker 02 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, energetic, a whirlwind biophysical force
21:35 Speaker 02 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.
22:25 Speaker 02 Coyote is almost universally referred to as a trickster, but after reading many scores of native coyote stories, I've begun to think we've been missing the point. While there are certainly stories that feature tricks, the foolie 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 they're such penetrating exposes of the human condition. Coyote was at his best when he taught lessons, almost always uncomfortable or funny ones,
23:06 Speaker 02 about human behavior and motives. As North America's oldest surviving deity, Coyote has bequeathed us a continental world of imagination, creation, artistry, also hubris and trouble. It's difficult not to see the Coyote impulse writ large in humanity. Indeed, to my mind, therein lies a test for stories about old man America. Given what we now know about ourselves, using the modern tools of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, looking at these ancient stories with 21st century insight, what can we say about how accurately they show
23:51 Speaker 02 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.
24:14 Speaker 02 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 late into the night with the many astounding adventures of coyote and romanticized 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.
24:55 Speaker 02 The story's arc then holds up such behavior in 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.
25:34 Speaker 02 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.
26:13 Speaker 02 These ancient stories from across Western America lay death for all of us directly on Coyote's doorstep.
26:22 Speaker 02 In 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 reasoned, 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.
27:03 Speaker 02 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 is a Ness 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 Eurydice.
27:45 Speaker 02 I tell it here, rewritten in my own voice, from the original ethnographic account.
27:56 Speaker 02 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. "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 guide was very difficult to see and follow. He looked more like a shadow than anything real.
28:38 Speaker 02 When he pointed out herds of horses in the plain over which they traveled, or 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 Coyote 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
29:22 Speaker 02 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 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 dawn 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 dawn came, Coyote found himself sitting in the open prairie.
30:03 Speaker 02 As instructed, he remained 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 dawn came, and Coyote 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.
30:47 Speaker 02 Then the spirit admonished Coyote, "You Coyote, must guard against your inclination to do foolish things."
30:58 Speaker 02 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. Coyote 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.
31:44 Speaker 02 "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."
32:14 Speaker 02 At this, Coyote hung his head and wept, but then he had an idea. Drawing himself up, he retraced the journey he and Death's Spirit had made. He tried with all his might to see the horses, taste the service berries. He found the spot where the long lodge had stood, even where he had sat with his wife beside him, and when night fell, he strained to hear voices and see fires. When dawn came, Coyote found himself sitting in an open, empty plain.
33:08 Speaker 02 Gods come and go, but Old Man America was too useful a deity to abandon. 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 600 years ago, the Navajos found themselves at war with US troops during most of the 1850s and early 1860s. 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
33:51 Speaker 02 Navajo country in 1863, where Carson's men conducted a horrific scorched-earth campaign against them. By 1864, some 8,000 Navajos had surrendered to the frontier army, only to find themselves condemned to an incarceration in eastern New Mexico, 300 miles from home. Their long walk to the Basque Redondo Prison Camp, and four years of being held there under constant guard, is one of the most painful memories of Navajo history.
34:24 Speaker 02 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 1868, the US finally agreed to allow the Navajos to return to their homeland. In Navajo oral tradition, the act that accomplished this long, far 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.
35:06 Speaker 02 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. Ruffled 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.
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37:17 Speaker 01 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life. ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
37:47 Speaker 00 In your, in your podcast, you talked about
37:54 Speaker 00 this idea that some, that someone was the first, some person was the first to be like, hey, look, a coyote.
38:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:01 Speaker 00 Or coyote, right? 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, this leading theory that, that the humans that came to North America and South America passed through this kind of Arctic.
38:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:20 Speaker 00 Bottleneck, right? And they were Arctic people that were living north of snakes. Okay, for instance, for generations. I mean, all idea of snakes.
38:39 Speaker 00 Probably was gone, you know what I mean? It was like probably erased. Maybe there was some narrative or story that still had it in mythology, like probably like by and large, it was not a part of discussions. And then people start picking their way down the continent and there's a first,
38:58 Speaker 00 not like, oh, people, like if you got into it, there would be like a person.
39:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:03 Speaker 00 A person was the first to say, look at that.
39:06 Speaker 02 Yeah. What is that?
39:09 Speaker 00 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, I've never seen one of those before.
39:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's true.
39:19 Speaker 00 It's just so hard. It happened so much, right? It happened hundreds of times over again, but it's so hard to picture what that would have been like.
39:27 Speaker 02 I know. And it's, it's a fascinating thing to imagine, you know? I will say I've, I've read an account one time by, it was an anthropologist who's 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 15,000 years or 20,000 or whatever, that we would have had a genetic memory of a snake being alarming. And he, one of his arguments about that was that he said, notice
40:08 Speaker 02 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 to not stick their hands in an outlet.
40:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
40:22 Speaker 02 But they get the whole spider and snake thing really fast.
40:26 Speaker 00 Yeah. No, it's, it's a great point. And that's why it would be so good to have
40:32 Speaker 00 footage of this first snake encounter.
40:34 Speaker 02 Don't you think?
40:35 Speaker 00 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, nah.
40:44 Speaker 00 Something about that thing, I don't know what it is, but I don't like it.
40:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that may be the reaction, something about it. I don't like that slithering thing.
40:52 Speaker 00 You don't need to get too many pages into the Bible and there's a snake.
40:56 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
40:57 Speaker 00 That's exactly right. And he's not a good guy.
41:00 Speaker 02 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, 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, I knew was one of the, you know, 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.
41:42 Speaker 02 This little canid that so many native people made into a kind of a deity or a semi deity, at least. And what I was confronted with was about 125 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 folklorists who came along 100 years ago and were doing the same thing with native people. They collected thousands of coyote stories. Every group you talked to seemed to have 20 or 50 or 70 or 100 coyote stories. And so I was trying to make sense of all of that.
42:27 Speaker 02 And once again, kind of realizing, all right, a chapter in a book, you know, okay, it can be maybe 25 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 and 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, Loki among the Norse, for example, and 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
43:10 Speaker 02 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
43:53 Speaker 02 because we are gluttonous, or we're jealous, or, you know, we're narcissistic, or whatever. It's like the seven deadly sins. That's kind of what many of the coyote 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. And to me, that seemed to be a more interesting thing about these stories than that just coyote was a trickster.
44:27 Speaker 03 I think, 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, right? I wonder if you can kind of, you obviously covered it in the podcast, but distill down what it is about the coyote that makes it such a natural foil for people?
45:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a great question, because obviously...
45:11 Speaker 02 Say 10,000 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 Paleolithic, where there were Pleistocene 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 is, 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
45:53 Speaker 02 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 picked, is this little, small, 35-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 saber-toothed cats, or ground sloths, or step lions aren't. Those all disappear. Coyotes survive, so they're still around. And therefore, you've
46:34 Speaker 02 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
47:17 Speaker 02 America, and are becoming one of the first animals since the Pleistocene to cross the eastmost of Panama into South America. So there's something about them. They're obviously extremely successful. That success is based on, I think, on observable intelligence.
47:35 Speaker 02 And I think native people thought of them, and that's what I argue in Coyote 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, boy, 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. And it's a, and we can talk about this if you guys want to, but one of the interesting
48:16 Speaker 02 things about coyote to me is this is a very different deity figure than say a Jesus or something, or a 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, of human beings.
48:49 Speaker 00 Something I can't help but wonder about with, with coyotes is what was their initial behavior like around people? And when I say that, what I'm referring to is it's, it's really well documented that animals gradually learn how to deal with people.
49:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:10 Speaker 00 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 colonized 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?
49:29 Speaker 02 That's exactly right. Yep. Um. Biological first contact.
49:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, it helps you kind of explain, well, how were Clovis hunters?
49:40 Speaker 00 How are they able to kill a mammoth with a spear? And it may be, it might have been that they would walk up and jab it in the heart. Like, it might have been.
49:48 Speaker 02 While it stood and looked at them.
49:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, so.
49:51 Speaker 02 It probably was.
49:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, so picture two, if you, 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, they might have been just one of the most fast, they, 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.
50:24 Speaker 02 I, 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.
50:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:42 Speaker 02 How great this might be. And that, of course, was true for coyotes up until about a 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 and 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 Noahuatl language of the Aztecs.
51:15 Speaker 00 Well, that's where it comes from?
51:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, it comes from, from the Noahuatl language and.
51:20 Speaker 00 You told me this before, but I forgot.
51:21 Speaker 02 Yes, it's C O Y O T L is how it's spelled in the language, but the L is silent, and so it would be pronounced coyote.
51:32 Speaker 02 Sort of the way, you know, many of us, you obviously pronounce it with just two syllables. I'm sort of more out of the, you know, the cartoon phase of Road Runner and Coyote. Yeah, Wile E. So I do three syllables, but, 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.
52:17 Speaker 02 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, were interacting, and that could be one of the reasons why, of course, that they decided, well, wow, these guys, these guys, they can function as, as a figure that tells us a lot about ourselves.
52:43 Speaker 00 Yeah. Of course, you're writing about and talking about the animals that these cultures talked about, because there's, there's something there.
52:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:52 Speaker 00 Do you ever wonder?
52:56 Speaker 00 Take the, the opossum. Or anything, right? Let's, let's take the opossum. Um, there, there must have been, there has to have been, like, a, a, a understanding of it. I mean, there's an understanding of it as it produces an oil, right? It's really soft fur.
53:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:15 Speaker 00 The leather's very poor quality, like, there's probably like that functional understanding of it.
53:18 Speaker 02 Kind of.
53:19 Speaker 00 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 cults built around bears, right? All the, all the imagery and religious understanding about buffalo.
53:41 Speaker 00 Were there some things that, does it seem like there were some animals were just kinda there? Like, you know, was the opossum just kinda there? Or did it have a spiritual role?
53:50 Speaker 02 Well, I have not actually encountered a spiritual possum in any of my reading.
53:58 Speaker 00 No, me neither. They just don't get their due.
54:00 Speaker 02 No, they don't get their due.
54:01 Speaker 00 It's noteworthy. He can hang from his tail.
54:03 Speaker 02 He can hang from his tail. He can certainly do things. 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.
54:15 Speaker 00 Oh, I'm sure.
54:16 Speaker 02 About, because it was, for one thing, I mean, you have generation after generation handing 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 agriculturalist 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 21st 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 it was the last
54:54 Speaker 02 one, I talked about Joseph Epps Brown's interviews with Lakota elders in the 1930s. And he got to interview, he was a religious, a 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 plains. And by the 1930s, they were in their late 80s and 90s, but they still remembered a lot and they knew a lot about the, you know, the prior to reservation life period.
55:33 Speaker 02 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 Joseph Epps Brown discovered from these interviews is that the Lakota idea was that all of these, all of those creatures, bears, eagles, bison,
56:14 Speaker 02 along with dragonflies, shared a special power that they called umi or yum, 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, 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.
56:57 Speaker 02 When the wind blew from the north, and of course, what they were describing were the big annual migrations, where you started 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 of those kind of features were associated with animals, I think, that we would think of as charismatic in some way.
57:19 Speaker 00 Sure.
57:20 Speaker 02 Yeah. And probably not, I haven't seen anything that he's had to say about possums, but.
57:26 Speaker 00 I spent, I spent a little bit of time with an Amerindian 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.
57:45 Speaker 00 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. And he just-
58:10 Speaker 02 This went right by-
58:13 Speaker 00 It's just, I was like, wow, that's not how that-
58:15 Speaker 02 Maybe there is something about the possum.
58:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, well- Just wasn't even worth, wasn't even worth commenting on.
58:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, maybe that, yeah, that was a special power that made the possum invisible.
58:29 Speaker 00 Well, Dan, thank you, man. Appreciate you taking the time to talk and I'm looking forward to the next show as usual.
58:34 Speaker 02 All right. Thank you, Stephen.
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