Nih'ançan is the great trickster and transformer of Arapaho oral tradition, protagonist of the tribe's largest body of tales. His name, cognate with the word for spider, was later applied to the white man, and both senses color his character: a clever shaper of the world who also blunders through greed, lust, and vanity into ludicrous defeats. He at once benefits humanity, ridding the land of dangers and setting the order of things, and models the folly to be avoided, so that his stories serve both as cosmogonic explanation and as moral instruction.