Coyote Tales

One of the things about this blog that maybe only I understand well is its aim to provide a space for me to express some of the "Trickster" in me-- the Native American story-genre that means a great deal to me, even as it confounds, if you ask the Indians, most white people.

I've been reading this wonderful book, Our Stories Remember, by Joseph Bruchac, and find that he has some edifying things to say about tricksters. Ethnologists who've written about the coyote and other tricksters and their stories have invariably remarked upon "the inconsistency of having a character who is profoundly sacred and clever on the one hand and incomprehensibly stupid on the other." (Maybe "inconsistent" to these authors, but for me, a remarkably appropriate mirror!)

Bruchac writes: "Okay, okay, but just listen for a minute. How can you have a character such as Coyote who is the Creator of the people one moment and then a total buffoon the next? Not only that, he is dishonest, deceitful, totally libidinous and licentious, as dirty and malodorous as two-day-old road kill. Everything about the American Indian Trickster seems to be the antithesis of the image of the Indian that non-Indians still appear to be most comfortable and most familiar with, the noble nineteenth-century Indian-- in particular, the Hiawatha of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." Or, one might add, our contemporary sense of the Noble Savage seen in as diverse places as our fascination with "shaman" training and Old Town, San Diego.

Point One is, Trickster speaks of Native Americans from Native Americans in a way that resists our efforts of romanticization, idealization, or otherwise "cleaning them up" to make them fit with our sense of who they should be.

Point Two is, Trickster spoke to Native Americans about the nature of the world they were living in, and the underlying nature of humanity and of all things. So the "inconsistent" combination of the sacred and the profane that people of other cultures had such difficulty appreciating-- because they were trying to reconcile the irreconcilable-- made sense to american aborigines. Trickster said meaningful things about how the world was.

What I wonder is: Why did we Indo-Europeans not develop mythic stories on a par with those of the Tricksters? Do we really think the world operates all that rationally, all that orderly?

My guess is that we do, or we think that it should. But, to my mind, it doesn't. And maybe never has.

To tell a story that demonstrates the "trickster"-nature of our world these days, I want to tell you what happen to the mother of my daughter a few months back when she attempted to fly from the East coast to the West for a visit.

With all good intentions, she packed two things in her suitcase: a jicama; and a word game like Scrabble that comes in a convenient-to-travel-with cloth pouch, shaped like a big banana-- hence the name of the game: Bananagram. She placed both objects in her suitcase for travel under the plane, and proceeded to the gate to await take off. The flight however was delayed. In not very short order she found out that she, of all people, was the reason for the delay! She was summoned by TSA to an "interview" room, and asked repeatedly about what she was carrying in her suitcase. Over and over again, she had both to spell "jicama" to the agents and explain what it was! Then she was asked why she was carrying a "grenade" and where she had got it. This was of course even more puzzling to her-- a non-violent and gentle woman-- than the agents' unfamiliarity with jicama. But while they were interrogating her, the authorities closed the airport (yes, the whole thing) and called the bomb squad. Only once the bomb squad arrived was it determined that the "grenade" she was alleged to have been carrying was the Bananagram game. Heck, it looked like a grenade on the x-ray! As near as I can tell, pretty much without apology, and certainly without explanation to the other delayed passangers, they cleared her to fly, and everybody went on their way.

I just wish that the local news folks had had sense of humor enough to report that the international airport had been closed down for a couple of hours and evacuated all because of a jicama and a word-game. But maybe they couldn't spell "jicama" either...

The thing is, this is Trickster at work. This is Coyote in our world. For our world is not the smooth running and orderly place we like to think it to be! It is disorderly and irrational-- and even TSA agents make silly mistakes.

Finally, it must be said that the meaning of the Trickster tales, the "end of the day" reason why they are told in the first place, is to lead us to laughter. Fact is, maybe the only way they were/are like us, Native Americans tended to get too "serious-ed up." Coyote and the other tricksters reminded them of the divine comedy we are living.

That's what trickster tales do for me, too. If for T.S. Eliot, the world ends "not with a bang, but a whimper," for me the world ends in laughter-- laughter at ourselves, laughter at the way things are.

Another story goes that a European, maybe a well-meaning ethnologist, noted that the Indians called the North American continent "Turtle Island," because their creation stories had described how it came to be on the back of a Great Turtle. The rational European asked what was "under" the Turtle. The Native American, a little trickster in him, replied, "It's turtles all the way down." Turtles, maybe; laughter, certainly.