First Creator

First Creator is one of the two world-shapers of Mandan cosmology, identified with Coyote. In the creation narrative recorded by Will and Spinden, First Creator and Lone Man raise a ball of earth from beneath the primal water and divide it, creating the Missouri River as the boundary; First Creator takes the country to the south and west and makes its hills, timbered coulees, springs, and the large game animals — buffalo, elk, and antelope — useful to people for food and clothing. Distinctively among Siouan peoples, the Mandan and Hidatsa cast Coyote not as a buffoon-trickster but as a powerful creator deity. In some versions First Creator, dismayed by human ingratitude, sends a great flood, after which Lone Man preserves the people.

Domains

• creation of the land
• game animals and the hunt

Powers

• to shape the broken uplands and game animals south of the Missouri
• to walk the early world in the body of the coyote

Epithets

• CoyoteMartha Warren Beckwith, Mandan-Hidatsa Myths and Ceremonies (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. 32), New York: J. J. Augustin for the American Folklore Society, 1938. (secondary)

Relations

• companion: Lone ManFirst Creator and Lone Man are the paired world-shapers of the Mandan creation; agreeing to divide the work, First Creator took the country south of the Missouri and Lone Man the country to the north, leaving the river between them.George F. Will and Herbert J. Spinden, The Mandans: A Study of Their Culture, Archaeology and Language (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 3, No. 4), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1906. (secondary)

Sources

• First Creator is the elder Mandan creator deity, identified with Coyote, who together with Lone Man divided a ball of earth and shaped the broken uplands and game animals south of the Missouri.: George F. Will and Herbert J. Spinden, The Mandans: A Study of Their Culture, Archaeology and Language (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 3, No. 4), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1906. (secondary); Alfred W. Bowers, Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. (secondary)