Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
Coyote bumped into something with his foot. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I am a cherry tree.”
“Good. I must be near the river.”
Coyote went on slowly like that, feeling ahead with his feet. If he could find the river he would know which way to go.
He bumped into something again. “Who are you?”
“I am a cottonwood,” the tree said to him.
“I must be very near the river now.”
Again he felt something with his foot. “Who are you?”
“I am a willow.”
“Indeed! I must be right at the river.”
Coyote was stepping very carefully now but still he was falling over things. Finally he tripped and fell in the river and the current took him away.
The motif of wandering blindly is repeated in the Winnebago trickster cycle. Here trickster has committed a series of wildly antisocial acts, ending in the accidental killing of a group of children during a fit of hunger. The father of these children chases trickster all over; he finally escapes only by running to “the place where the sun rises, the end of the world,” and leaping into the ocean. “As he did not … know where to find the shore, he swam along aimlessly.” Soon he bumps into some fish. Several species are named, the last of which—the white fish—is able to orient him and he finds the shore. Then, “again he wandered aimlessly about the world.”
Before long, he comes upon a plant that says to him: “He who chews me will shit!” Trickster does not believe it, eats the plant, and ends up producing such a pile of feces that he has to climb a tree. Then he falls from the tree and is blinded by his own filth.
He started to run. He could not see anything. As he ran he knocked against a tree. [He] cried out in pain. He reached out and felt the tree and sang:
“Tree, what kind of a tree are you? Tell me something about yourself!”
And the tree answered, “What kind of a tree do you think I am? I am an oak tree. I am the forked oak tree that used to stand in the middle of the valley.”
As in the earlier story, trickster bumps into one tree after another until he is led to water where he is able to wash himself.
The trees and fish in these stories have what I’d like to call “species knowledge.” They are the opposite of the aimless wanderer. They are placed in space the way a species is placed by its needs. Some species of fish swim near the shore, others don’t; there are trees like the willow that grow only at the water’s edge and trees that can grow at greater and greater distances from water. These stories, then, seem deliberately to set trickster’s aimless wandering against beings that are anything but aimless, beings that are situated in space by their nature.
Now let us set these tales alongside one of the most famous Native American stories, “The Bungling Host,” in which trickster, hungry as ever, drops in on some animal friend—bear or kingfisher or muskrat or snipe—who catches and prepares food in his own special way. Here is an episode from the Okanagon version (in which, by the way, Mole is Coyote’s wife):
One time there was no food at Coyote’s lodge. He … went to visit his brother Kingfisher.
“Kingfisher, what have you got to eat,” asked Coyote. “I am very hungry.”
Kingfisher did not like this rude way of talking, but he sent for his son and told him to go get three willow sticks.
Boy Kingfisher went out and got the sticks and came back. Kingfisher heated them over the fire until they were strong. Then he took them out, twisted them up and tied them to his belt.
He flew up onto the top of his lodge and from there he flew to the river and down through a hole in the ice. When he came up there was a fish hanging on each willow stick.
Coyote ate until his belly was round, but he saved some fish for his wife and his children at home.
“You must come over to see me tomorrow,” said Coyote.
“I don’t think I will come over,” said Kingfisher.
“Oh, you must come over. We will have a nice meal, you will like it. You come over tomorrow.”
Kingfisher didn’t want to go, but said he would.
The next day when Kingfisher came over Coyote told his son to go get three willow sticks. When Boy Coyote came back Coyote stuck the sticks in the fire until they were hard. Then he bent them up and stuck them on his belt. Then Coyote crawled up to the top of his lodge.
“What are you doing up there?” asked his wife.
“Why, you know I’ve done this before. I am getting food for our brother, Kingfisher.”
Coyote jumped off the top of the lodge down to the river but he missed the hole and broke his neck and was killed.
Kingfisher had been watching all the time. He walked over to where Coyote lay and took the three sticks from his belt and jumped into the hole in the ice. Soon he came up with many fish. Then he stepped over Coyote four times and Coyote came back to life.
“This is my way, not your way,” said Kingfisher. “I do not imitate others like you do.”
Coyote took the fish up to his lodge and showed them to Mole and to his children.
“Look at these big fish. I caught them the way Kingfisher did. Kingfisher is afraid of my power. He told me not to do this again. He knows my medicine is strong.”
Mole cooked the fish.
Two things—the stories just cited about “species knowledge” and the fact that one of trickster’s names is “imitator”—lead me to read “The Bungling Host” as a tale of an animal that does not have, as Kingfisher says, “a way.” Kingfisher, Snipe, Polecat, Bear, Muskrat—each of these animals has a way of being in the world; each has his nature. Specifically, each of them has his own way of hunting and, in these stories at least, he is never hungry, because he has that way. Coyote, on the other hand, seems to have no way, no nature, no knowledge. He has the ability to copy the others, but no ability of his own.
This lack has several consequences. For one thing it means, as Carl Jung put it, that trickster is “stupider than the animals.” Animals at least have inborn knowledge, a way of being, and trickster doesn’t. The animals know not to eat that plant that causes them to defecate mountains; the animals know which way the river is; the animals know how to hunt for their particular foods. Trickster knows none of this, and so ends up hungry, stumbling around covered in his own mess.*
It seems a dangerous position for an animal to be in, stripped of instinct. What possible use could there be in having lost the mother wit to be in the world? What conceivable advantage might lie in a way of being that has no way?
A first answer might be that whoever has no way but is a successful imitator will have, in the end, a repertoire of ways. If we can imitate the spider and make a net, imitate the beaver and make a lake, imitate the heron’s beak and make a spear, imitate the armadillo and wear armor, imitate the leopard and wear camouflage, imitate poison ivy and produce chemical weapons, imitate the fox and hunt downwind, then we become more versatile hunters, greater hunters. And although in “The Bungling Host” trickster fails as an imitator, elsewhere imitation is part of his power.
Perhaps having no way also means that a creature can adapt itself to a changing world. Species well situated in a natural habitat are always at risk if that habitat changes. One reason native observers may have chosen coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world. For one thing, coyote young, like human