10 The Colonial and Revolutionary PeriodsCourage is one strategy of survival, cunning is another. They are by no means
mutually exclusive, of course, which is why so often in Native American legend the
hero is also a trickster. The trickster is, however, less a lawgiver usually than a breaker
of laws, a rebel against authority and a violator of taboos. And one remarkable feature
of Native American tales is just how quickly the great culture bringer can turn into an
imp, metamorphosing from creator to clown and then back again. The great trickster
figure in these tales is Coyote. There are many others. Blue Jay, Rabbit, Raven, Mink,
and Ground Squirrel all play their part as troublemakers. So do such human or semi-
human characters as Iktome the Sioux Spider Man, Whisky Jack of the Cree and
Saultaux, Old Man of the Crow and Blackfoot tribes, Manabozho of the central
woodlands and Great Lakes regions, and Veeho of the Cheyenne. But it is Coyote who
can be found everywhere in tales of the trickster. Certainly, his character may vary
from tribe to tribe. In the Plains and plateau regions, stories about Coyote give equal
measure to his cleverness and to his clowning, his lechery and cheating, whereas in the
North Pacific Coast area there is more attention given to his sharp wit than to
his buffoonery. But, even when a tribe has a trickster of its own, Coyote often appears
as his companion in mischief. And certain traits are common to Coyote wherever he
is found: not least, his spontaneity, his skill at disguise, and his gift for metamorphosis.
Fundamental to the character of the trickster is resistance to authority, a celebra-
tion of the subversive impulse. Authority, after the arrival of Columbus, gradually
came to be associated with the whites – or, to be more exact, a claim to authority –
and so it is no surprise to find that, in many versions of these stories, the victim of
trickery is white. In one variation on the tales of sharp trading popular in
Anglo-American folklore as well as Native America, Coyote meets a white man who
believes that “nobody ever got the better of him” in a trade. “I’ve cheated all the
Indians around here,” he boasts. But Coyote fools and robs him, by persuading the
white trader to lend him his horse and his clothes while he goes to get his “cheating
medicine” so that they can engage in a cheating contest. This Brule Sioux story of a
trickster outwitting a white man, and making an idiot of him into the bargain, finds
a more complex variation in a White Mountain Apache tale. Coyote fools some white
traders into giving him a horse, clothes, saddle, and pistol, fools some white soldiers
into buying a tree on which he has strung up some money, then fools “the big man
in charge” of the town by selling him a burro whose excrement, so he claims, is
money – “and it comes out of him every day.” In stories like this, the boundaries
between trickster and hero are more than usually permeable, since Coyote is clearly
getting back at and getting even with the figure who, historically, got the better of the
encounter between Old World and New. The celebration of the spontaneous in life,
cunning and carnival, is here also a reversal of the familiar rhythms of power: for
once, the white man gets the raw end of the deal.
Not all the animals that appear in Native American tales are tricksters, of course.
Animals are a constant, talkative presence in these stories and their contacts with the
human world are incessant and intimate. The animal and human realms merge in
Native American belief, humans metamorphose into animals and vice versa, and there
are frequent marriages across the shifting, elusive boundaries that divide the two.GGray_c01.indd 10ray_c 01 .indd 10 8 8/1/2011 7:54:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 53 AM