dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 183he is always traveling, he’s really stupid, he’s kind of bad... most
of the time he’s just into mischief’.^34 Jarold Ramsey adds that the
basic narrative is that coyotes are ‘unkillable’ and although ‘they
may suffer bad luck or just retribution in the form of starvation,
poisoning, dismemberment, ingestion by monsters, incineration,
drowning, fatal falls... it is a universal convention that they
survive’.^35 Ortiz’s Coyote, travelling to his own wedding, gets
sidetracked into a gambling party. The infl ection of the poem is
a casual orality which communicates a guarded affection for the
Coyote: ‘... you know, Coyote / is in the origin and all the way
/ through’ (p. 434 ). Placed in a literary framework, the Coyote
is described humorously as ‘an existential man / a Dostoevsky
Coyote’ (p. 434 ). We are told that, losing dramatically at cards, he
had quite literally lost everything including his skin and fur. Some
mice, fi nding Coyote in the cold, take pity on him and reclaim
pieces of fur, pasting them onto his body, the result being an ‘old
raggy blanket’ which looks like ‘scraps of an old coat’ (p. 434 ).
Ortiz frames Coyote as dependent upon those who are around him.
Wai Chee Dimock comments upon this interdependency: ‘Coyote
is literally what others make of him. His stories have to be about
other animals, for they need to be there if these stories are to have
their customary semi-happy ending’.^36 In effect, Ortiz uses the
Coyote story as a way of indicating strong bonds of community and
inter-subjectivity. The conversational and discursive framework
he establishes enables the poetic text to perform the retelling of an
oral narrative with immediacy.
Joy Harjo is of Cherokee descent and a member of the Muscogee
Nation of Oklahoma. Her prose poem ‘Deer Dancer’ is a lament
for the disconnection of contemporary native experience with
ancestry and an affi rmation of reconnecting with ancient rituals
and beliefs.^37 Set in a run-down bar, the tale is narrated by a com-
munity ‘we’, who identify themselves as ‘Indian ruins’ or ‘broken
survivors, the club of the shotgun, knife wound, of poison by
culture’ (p. 5 ). A stranger enters to dance for and amongst them:
‘No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we recognized, her
family related to deer’ (p. 5 ). Harjo evokes as a basis to her poem
the Native American mythology of a deer woman. Interpreted
as a siren, the deer woman is associated with dancing, seduction,