Coyote

Coyote is the great transformer and culture-hero of the Lower and Middle Columbia. Journeying upriver through the myth-age world, he frees the water held back by monsters and hoarders, sends the salmon into the Columbia, and fixes the fishing sites at the Cascades and the Long Narrows. He slays the devouring beings that would prey on the human people about to arrive, and in the same motion ordains the customs by which those people will live and die. He is also an unruly glutton and dupe whose appetites repeatedly land him in trouble, and Chinookan narrators hold both aspects together without contradiction: the ordering of the world is accomplished by a figure who is at once wise maker and foolish rogue. His deeds are inscribed on the landscape itself, so that named rocks, falls, and rapids along the river are remembered as things Coyote made or things he transformed.

Domains

• transformation
• rivers and fishing
• trickery

Powers

• opens the Columbia
• frees the salmon
• kills the devouring monsters
• ordains the customs of the people

Epithets

• Italapas — Coyote the TransformerGeorge Gibbs, A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon (New York: Cramoisy Press, 1863), s.v. Italapas (secondary)

Relations

• companion: EagleThe two travel together to the land of the dead to recover the departed.Ella E. Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 'Coyote and Eagle in the Land of the Dead' (secondary)

Sources

• Coyote is the central transformer-trickster of Chinookan mythology, who opens the Columbia, releases the salmon, kills the monsters, and orders the world before the human age.: Franz Boas, Chinook Texts, BAE Bulletin 20 (1894) (primary); Franz Boas, Kathlamet Texts, BAE Bulletin 26 (1901) (primary); Edward Sapir, Wishram Texts (1909) (primary); Melville Jacobs, Clackamas Chinook Texts, Parts 1-2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, 1958-1959) (primary)