Ban

Ban, Coyote, is the trickster of O'odham story and one of the beings present from the world's beginning. He works alongside Earth Doctor and Elder Brother, yet his greed, curiosity, and heedlessness continually undo their careful designs: in various tales he scatters the neatly arranged stars across the sky, meddles with the ordering of death, or spoils a plan through appetite. Coyote is at once buffoon and shaper, a figure whose disruptions become part of the fabric of the finished world. He recurs throughout the later O'odham tale cycles as the archetypal fool and schemer.

Domains

• trickster

Powers

• trick, meddle, and disrupt
• assist the shaping of the world

Relations

• companion: I'itoi
• ally: Jewed Maakai

Sources

• Ruth M. Underhill, Papago Indian Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946)
• Donald Bahr et al., The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)