I haven’t read any non-fiction that wasn’t a gaming book in a while, and I don’t believe any reviews of such have yet appeared here. My non-fiction tastes tend toward history, mythology, archeology, religion and philosophy. _A Coyote Reader is an exploration of the Coyote figure in western Native American culture, as well as its recent flourishing in modern American literature as well. The author also attempts to relate the mythic Coyote to the biological animal.

Bright is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics & Anthropology, at UCLA and Professor Adjoint of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder, and has devoted much of his professional life studying the Karuk tribe of northern California, learning their language and myths. A Coyote Reader thus includes much from this tribes’ lore, but is not exclusive of others.

The books chapters each focus on a different aspect of Coyote: the wanderer, the glutton, the loser, the (horny) old man and so on. In each, Bright shares one or more stories illustrating Old Man Coyote in this role as well as discusses how the biological Coyote. This later exploration shows Coyote to be an amalgam of his animal namesake and our human selves.

Coyote, to nearly all Native American cultures in whose traditions he appears, is a combination of trickster, benefactor of mankind and architect of the world-as-is (as opposed to the creator of a more perfect world). On one hand, he teaches humans how to fish and hunt and brings them fire, on the other, he is responsible for the existence of death (and usually regrets asking for it to exist).

In the case of translated tales, Bright presents them in a form that while not a literal translation attempts to preserve the ethnopoetic intent and feel of the original. The result is a poetic form that is quite different from what most westerners are used to. For example, we see many lines like this:


So then that’s how they went upriver.
And Coyote arrived upriver.
And he saw it was empty.
And in the mountains he saw there were fires,
  there were forest fires,
    up in the mountain country.

Information is frequently repeated. At first this was distracting to me as I read the stories and excerpts of stories, but after a while I grew used to it. The rhythm and flow created by it felt more natural and read quite fast.

The stories are at time hilarious, earthy, bizarre, touching and even frustrating. And of course, this is because the multi-faceted trickster is all of these things to a great many peoples.

Clearly, Bright is an excellent scholar and has great dedication and love of Native American culture and language, and this shows in this excellent work. I wouldn’t recommend for introducing someone to Old Man Coyote, unless perhaps they were also interested in the more academic aspects of this sort of topic, but for someone more familiar with Coyote this is a great work for expanding one’s knowledge of the most ubiquitous figure in Native American myth. Seeing the stories in a form more faithful to their source was very enriching, and the exploration of Coyote’s various roles was fascinating.