June 17, 2025 • 54 mins
Thousands of years ago Native people in the West chose, among all the possibilities, the coyote as the deity animal in their various stories of North America’s creation. Then they proceeded to fashion thousands of stories around “Old Man America,” the oldest literary figure in America. Long described as a Trickster, the deity Coyote actually was a human avatar whose stories richly conveyed human nature in both its admirable and not-so-admirable forms. As part coyote and part human, deity Coyote stands in a progression of human gods, one whose insights into human nature have allowed him to survive into the modern age.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
When Native people cast about for an American animal to
carry their creation stories, the intelligent survivor coyote became Deity. Coyote,
an avatar for humans who taught them about human nature
for thousands of years. I'm Dan Flores, and this is
the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck. Still
(00:24):
in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time
for the season that calls us home. A portion of
every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
waters and wildlife enjoy responsibly. Old Man America in the
(00:59):
remotest time of early North America, after he had molded
mud from the ocean bottom into mountains, plains, and forests
to create the essential topography of the continent, Coyote was
going along. He had placed stars in the sky, some
as pictures, some as a latticed road across the night.
(01:20):
Some tossed willy nilly into the inky black. He had
arranged the year into four seasons, and he had populated
the world with humans as the special helper of the Creator,
who seemed not especially interested in any of this hands
on creation work himself. Coyote had killed monster after monster
(01:41):
on behalf of his human charges, who he had then
located in good monster free spots across America. He had
released animals like buffalo from underground, and admittedly with a
few unlucky mistakes, had placed salmon and other fish and
many of the rivers. He had invented penises and z
giinas and taught humans what to do with them, and
(02:02):
he created a sexual division of labor among men and women.
The first technology in the form of fire, came from Coyote. Then,
not without some remorse, he had introduced death to the world. Now,
with all these fundamental creations in place, Coyote had no
intention of stepping into the background or hiding himself. He
(02:25):
wanted to enjoy how much humans appreciated his creativity. One morning,
Coyote was going along and spotted a handsome young warrior
who told Coyote he was embarking on a journey of
(02:47):
war against his enemies. Although Coyote was actually a peaceful
sword who thought war and battles to the death were
very bad ideas, he told his new companion that he
was a famous warrior and would be indispensable on the quest.
That first night, the warrior said they would camp at
a place called scalped Man by the fire. Coyote did
(03:09):
not like the sound of that. At the camp, Kyote
relaxed while the warrior cooked and did all the chores.
Then Coyote took the best pieces of the meal for himself,
even laying extra meat over his chest and legs in
case he woke hungry in the night. Sometime in the night,
Coyote heard a sound, and when he looked, there was
scalp man standing over him. Quick as he could, he
(03:32):
swung his club, but somehow what he hit was his knee,
which caused him to yowl in pain, waking the warrior.
I have taken care of Scalpman, Coyote told him, and
they went back to sleep. Having clubbed his own knee,
Coyote leapt through much of the next day, but made
it okay to a camp called cooked meat flying all around.
(03:55):
But when Coyote heard the warrior described the next night's
camp where the the arrows fly around, his knee suddenly
took a turn for the worse. Coyote lagged far behind
that next day, hoping for a camp somewhere else, but
the warrior led them on that night. Arrows began to
fly from every direction. The warrior stood and caught one
(04:17):
after another, while Coyote twisted and twirled and crawled on
the ground, trying to avoid them, until one arrow grazed
his arm. I've been killed, Coyote shouted, But when the
warrior pulled him to his feet and he found himself
still alive, Coyote asserted that actually his hurt knee had
caused him to fall asleep, and he had been dreaming.
(04:40):
The next night, their camp was at a place called
where the women visit the men. This place sounded like
an excellent camp to Coyote. His knee improved so remarkably
that day that he got far ahead on their march.
That night, a woman did come to Coyote, but in
the darkness he believed her to be old. Hoping much
(05:01):
younger women would arrive, he sent her away, only to
see in the firelight as she turned away that in
fact she was young and very beautiful. Coyote cried out
for her to return, telling her it had been some
spirit who had told her to leave, but she vanished
into the night. The camp following this one was called
(05:22):
war Clubs. Flying around all that day Coyote's knee hurt
so much that he was barely able to arrive at
the spot sure enough that night, clubs twirled at them
from every direction. The warrior caught to one for each
of them, but Coyote dodged and weaved so much that
a club finally beamed him. When he came to, Coyote
(05:43):
told the warrior that in his boredom, he had actually
just fallen asleep. That's why he had been lying so
flat and still. Then the warrior told Coyote that their
next camp was to be at a place called Vagina's
Flying around, Coyote's knee at once felt into entirely well,
and he was ready to depart then and there. He
(06:04):
pleaded for more details, but the warrior fell asleep. Coyote
sat by the fire all night, thinking of vaginas and
how many he might be able to carry with it.
His knee now stronger than had ever been in his life,
Coyote left early and ranged far ahead the next day.
That night, as promised, vaginas began to sail into camp,
(06:25):
and Coyote could tell they were just the kind he liked,
Young and plump. For most of the night, juicy vaginas
whizzed maddeningly out of reach, with Coyote flailing and chasing
and panning until he was near collapsed. Finally, near dawn,
Coyote caught one, but exhausted as he was when he
finally pinned it and mounted it, Coyote's organ resolutely refused
(06:47):
to rise to the occasion. The next night was their
final camp, and the warrior told Coyote this one was
called where the enemy attacks without delay. Coyote his knee
began to throb, and all day long he hung back
on the trail, crying piteously, and sure enough, when the
next morning came, enemies attacked from all sides. Coyote at
(07:11):
once ran for far horizons, but was overtaken, clubbed, and scouted. Meanwhile,
the warriors subdued all his enemies, then looked for Coyote.
When he knew all was clear, Coyote stood and announced
that he was going along now, but the warriors should
consider himself lucky that he had happened upon Coyote, otherwise
(07:32):
he would have had to engage in this adventure with
no help at all. From a famous warrior. Stories about Coyote,
often called Old Man coyote and rarely, although they are
present in the Cannon. Stories about old Woman coyote are
(07:55):
the oldest preserved human stories from North America. Both is
that coyote spelled with upper case a capital see to
distinguish the deity version from the ordinary coyote trotting by
while you read is America's oldest surviving literary figure. He
is also the most ancient god figure of which we
(08:17):
have record from the continent. When Siberian hunters first started
boting down the coastlines are crossing Beringia, at some point
in their entry of northwestern America, they began to encounter coyotes.
Wolves they knew from Asia and well enough that at
some point in their migration, these first Americans arrived with
domesticated ones, wolf like dogs whose wild ancestors in those
(08:41):
times were recent. But by the time of the Clovis
people at least, who spread to America more than thirteen
thousand years ago, continental coyotes were familiar creatures. Intriguingly, something
about coyotes captured the imaginations of these first Americans. Religious
(09:01):
explanations for the world and how it works are untold, thousands,
maybe millions of years old, so these former Siberians arrived
with intact religions and deities. But as these first human
residents settled in from California to the Mississippi River, from
the Pacific northwest to future New Mexico and Arizona, Coyote
(09:22):
emerged as the deity of the ancient Contina. No one
knows when this happened or exactly how coyote came to
embody so many different people's creation stories and ruminations on
human nature. All we know now, based on the oral
coyote stories collected among American Indians and set down by
(09:43):
nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographers and folklores, is that there
were thousands of coyote tales. No other native deity in
America came anywhere close to producing a body of oral
literature to rival them. The story here about Coote and
his knee, although written in my own voice, in its
(10:03):
original form, was collected from the Wichitas of the southern plains,
But the opening paragraph of this episode I distilled from
several groups from all over the West, the Navajos in
the southwest, the Crows on the northern plains, the Kurrak,
and wasco in California, the Monomonee of the Great Lakes,
the Coalville and Klamath of the Pacific Northwest, and the
(10:27):
Salish in Blackfeet from the northern Rockies. For almost all
of the past ten thousand years west of the Mississippi River,
coyote has been America's universal deity. Originally, he was a
Paleolithic god, but he survived the millennia to appear among
agricultural peoples like the Wichitas. Ultimately, his fame reached as
(10:50):
far south as the Aztecs, who knew him as Wayway Coyotal.
Old Man Coyote truly is Old Man America. The history
of coyotes and the history of humans has many parallels,
(11:13):
but one difference between us is that across our own
evolutionary history, we humans have created thousands of philosophies of
meaning we call religions, while coyotes, so far as we
can tell, embrace no religious tradition beyond life the sacredness
of existence. In so far as we go, our oldest
(11:34):
forms of religious explanations featured animals as deities, a type
of religion called animism that was fashioned by humans living
their lives as hunters or hunter gatherers, what we might
call Coyotism is certainly a paleolithic religion. The famed psychologist
Carl Jung is only one of hundreds, from scientists to
(11:57):
poets who have found coyote enduringly fascinating, in part because
of how fundamental he is in human thought. In Jung's view,
the character of coyote is a faithful copy of an
absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, a forerunner of the Savior, and
(12:19):
like him god, man and animal at once, he is
both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being. The
Western religious traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity sprang from
(12:39):
later periods of human history, following our domestication of plants
and animals, what anthropologists called the Neolithic Revolution. Early religions
could feature animals, particularly the sacred bull, as deities, but
over time, hurting and agricultural cultures gradually replaced animal gods
(13:01):
along with gods of special places on the landscape, another
feature of animism with deities that assumed human form. The
Greek gods, who are so foundational in Western cultures, are
classical examples of this evolution. Four thousand years ago, the
Greeks replaced animal and plant deities with gods and goddesses
(13:22):
in human form, Artemis, who became a mistress of the
animals as a goddess of the hunt, and Demater, who
evolved into a human form goddess of wheat and crops.
One of the most intriguing questions about coyote is simply this,
Why did the ancient settlers of North America pick this
(13:43):
particular animal as their deity? Ten thousand years and more
in the past, the first Americans would have had many
scores of animal candidates for their deity figures. Charismatic creatures
like mammos or dire wolves or saber toothed cats might
seem to us more likely choices, and in the early
stages of human settlement, perhaps they had been gods. My
(14:06):
own speculation is that as the Wisconsin I says, gave
way to a rapidly warming world, joined at the same
time by the great simplification event known as the Pleistocene extinctions,
which took all three of my suggested species and many others.
The wild coyotes around Indian peoples of the time fascinated
(14:27):
them as creatures endowed with special abilities. I suspect that
it was the coyotes self evident ability to survive those
profound changes when the big charismatic species could not that
attracted human attention. There probably was also an easy identification
with the social lives of predatory wild coyotes that made
(14:50):
them feel familiar to human hunters. In his book Pueblo
Gods and Myths, anthropologists Hamilton Tyler writes that the ability
of an animal to become a god is in part
due to his symbolic potential, which is to say, the
number of ideas he can stand. For a god, even
(15:12):
the simplest god, is based upon a certain amount of
abstraction in the human mind. Another anthropologist, Lewis Hyde, believes
that coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind.
The stories themselves look to predator pray relationships for the
birth of cunning. How it goes on, One reason native
(15:35):
observers may have chosen coyote is that the former in
fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is
therefore a consummate survivor in a shifting world, especially before
our lives in cities which obscured our deep dependency on
nature and diverted our powers of observation. We humans were
(15:57):
profound observers of the natural world. These early Americans would
not have failed to notice one other characteristic of wild
coyotes in a dangerous and changing world, that the secret
of their uncanny ability to survive everything nature through at
them lay in a remarkable intelligence, the kind of trickster
(16:18):
figures that hide mentions make up a very old human
religious figure found in many animistic religions around the world
in the form of many creatures hairs, spiders, blue jays, ravens,
even human figures like the Norse trickster Loki. But here
in America, the coyote took up the mantle of a
(16:39):
god who lived by his wits. Having a smart god,
after all, was crucial to survival also to our understanding
of human nature in the animal within. In early American mythology,
coyote is almost never the ultimate cause God. More often,
(17:03):
as in the coyote stories from people like the Salish
and the Nespers, he's an immortal helper deity, semi divine
and present and engaged in earthly life. Most often in
the stories, coyote inhabits the world before humankind. Sometimes his
initial form is human, which he gives up for his
(17:23):
coyote body once humans are present. In stories that are
set following the creation, however, coyote is commonly a kind
of an anthropomorphic animal, a coyote man. He preserves a
tale and a sharp muzzle and erect ears, but he
stands and walks upright, has a wife and a family,
and is capable of shape shifting into a form so
(17:45):
human like that often the other characters in a story
only suspect by his behavior that they are dealing with
Coyote himself. It does not take very much time or
analytical effort with the coyote s tales to draw a
conclusion about who Coyote really is, and that realization is
what makes him so intriguing. As a god. Coyote is
(18:09):
the god within his mythical function in the beginning is creation.
Coyote takes the basic structure of the world as set
in motion by the Creator, then improves on it and
gives it the natural laws that make it work that done.
His larger purpose in the many oral stories about him
(18:30):
is to reveal human nature more clearly and rather than
a perfect deity, Jung's savior figure a Jesus who teaches
a codified morality and is set up as a role
model for humans. Coyote personifies the full suite of humanity's traits,
good and bad. As a character, Coyote is the full Monty.
(18:55):
He's at once admirable, inspirational, imaginative, inner, energetic, a whirlwind
biophysical force with a large capacity for taking sensuous pleasure
in life. But he's also selfish, vain, deceitful, and quite
often envious, lustful, and ridiculous, possessed of an overconfidence that
(19:17):
gets him into endless fixes. Coyote's major flaw, resulting from
a combination of all of his human traits, is that
he finds cause, sometimes admirably, sometimes laughably, never to be
quite satisfied with the world, And because he is invariably
unable to predict consequences with any accuracy, his tinkering with
(19:40):
the world can produce disaster, especially and this is a
major theme in so many of the stories for Coyote himself.
Coyote is almost universally referred to as a trickster. But
after reading many scores of Native Coyote stories, I've begun
to think think we've been missing the point. While there
(20:03):
are certainly stories that feature tricks, the foolly is actually
just a means to an end. Again and again, the
point is not the trick. The point is why the
trick works, and invariably the reason is a result of
the foibles of human nature. These stories survive for thousands
of years because there's such penetrating exposees of the human condition.
(20:28):
Coyote was at his best when he taught lessons, almost
always uncomfortable or funny, ones about human behavior and motives.
As North America's oldest surviving deity, Coyote has bequeathed us
a continental world of imagination, creation, artistry, also hubrious and trouble,
(20:50):
it's difficult not to see the Coyote impulse writ large
in humanity. In deed, to my mind, therein lies a
test for stories about old men America, given what we
now know about ourselves using the modern tools of evolutionary
psychology and neuroscience. Looking at these ancient stories with twenty
(21:12):
first century insight, what can we say about how accurately
they show that people living thousands of years ago understood
as well as we do today exactly who we humans are.
The acquisition of status in games of romance and love,
experiential jolts to enhance neurochemistry and mood states a mind
(21:38):
conflicted over sin and virtue. For the long ago Americans
who selected wild coyotes as a suitable avatar for their
earthly deity, then worked out so many stories about him.
What better subjects for the adventures of their coyote god
than these, No doubt, Over the centuries, storytellers of Mark
(21:59):
Twain like Brilliance dazzled audiences laid into the night with
the many astounding adventures of Coyote, and romanticize their people's
trajectory through time. Coyote often operates as the very god
of Richard Dawkins's selfish gene, in which form his character
is usually that of a self absorbed buffoon. The stories
(22:23):
are that holds up such behavior and plain view. For
comic ridicule, Coyote stories were wildly entertaining. It was still
is perversely pleasurable to observe a character who so blithely
ignores rules and restrictions, usually with predictable results. Although benefits
(22:44):
from rule breaking happen often enough with Coyote to keep
things interesting, but a moral code it's rarely there, nor
are there promises of eternal life salvation from death, that
ancient and oppressive burden of our self awareness. What Old
Man America teaches us instead is delight in being alive
(23:08):
in a world of wondrous possibilities. Coyotism is a philosophy
for the realists among us, those who can do a
Cormac McCarthy like appraisal of human motives but find a
kind of chagrined humor in the act, who may think
of the human story as cyclical, even predictable, because human
(23:30):
nature never seems to change. These ancient stories from across
Western America lay death for all of us directly on
Coyote's doorstep, and story after story, it is Coyote who decreed,
(23:53):
for two admittedly rather admirable reasons, that all human beings
would have to die if humans never died. Coyote reason
this explanation is a part of stories from both the
Yanas of California and the Navajos of the Southwest. Overpopulation
and the destruction of the earth would be the result. Hence,
(24:14):
the initial reason Coyote invented death was actually an environmental one.
The Yanas said it was Coyote, who made it law
that humans would have to die to create space for
the generations down the timeline. Coyote also rationalized death for
a second reason, this time as a great teacher about life. Well,
(24:38):
you know, if you die, then you really have to
take life seriously. You have to think about things more.
Coyote himself was immortal, but when death visited him directly,
he had some serious second thoughts about what a good idea.
Death was one of the most poignant of all Coyote stories.
(25:00):
He's a nest purse account called Coyote and the Shadow People.
It's something close to a North American version of the
Greek myth of Orpheus and his wife Eurydus. I tell
it here rewritten in my own voice from the original
ethnographic account. Coyote and his wife were living happily when
(25:27):
she became sick. When she died, Coyote was overcome with
grief and loneliness. Others had died, but this was different.
So when death spirit came to him and offered to
take him to the place where his wife had gone, Coyote,
who was filled with hope, What I tell you, said,
Death Spirit, you must do everything exactly as I say.
(25:50):
Not once are you to disregard my commands and do
something else. So Coyote traveled with Death Spirit, thinking of
his wife, but noticing that his god was very difficult
to see and follow. He looked more like a shadow
than anything real. When he pointed out herds of horses
in the plane over which they traveled our bushes covered
(26:11):
in service berries, Coyote saw nothing, but he exclaimed over
the horses and pretended to eat the berries. Soon enough,
the guide announced that they had arrived and led Kyote
to where his wife was said to be sitting with
many others inside a very very long lodge. Again, the
(26:32):
spirit cautioned Coyote to do exactly as he said. Coyote
made every effort to do so, but while he felt
the spirit's presence, as far as he could see, they
were sitting in an open prairie. But Death Spirit told
him that conditions were different here, that when night fell
in the living world, it would be dawn in this place.
(26:53):
Sure enough, when night fell, Coyote began to hear people whispering.
He began to see many fires in the lot, and
to recognize old friends, whom he greeted and was able
to walk about with and reminisce, and he was overjoyed
to find his wife at his side. Late in the day,
the people began to grow faint and hard to see.
(27:14):
Then the spirit came to him and told him that
as Don came in the living world, night came for them,
but that Coyote should remain where he sat and not move,
and Coyote said he would. When Don came, Coyote found
himself sitting in the open prairie. As instructed, He remain
there all day, broiling in the heat, but sitting as
(27:36):
he had been told. This went on for several dawns
and several nights, with Coyote's friends and his wife returning
and making merry, then fading as Don came, and kyoteing
waiting patiently in the heat of the day. Finally, after
too long, the death spirit came to him and said,
tomorrow you will go home. You will take your wife
(27:58):
with you. He told Coyote they would travel for five
days and pass five mountains, and that while he could
talk with his wife no matter what, he should not
touch her. That he should never lay a hand on
her until they had passed the last of the five mountains.
Then the spirit admonished Coyote, You, Coyote, must guard against
(28:20):
your inclination to do foolish things. At dawn, Coyote and
his wife started out, although Coyote could barely discern her,
but when they crossed the first mountain, Coyote could feel
her presence more strongly. When they camped on the homeward
side of the second mountain, she became clearer to him,
(28:42):
and in the next camp, beyond the third mountain, clearer still.
Now they were making their fourth camp, with only the
final mountain to cross the next day, and Coyote could
at last see his wife's face and her young body.
She was almost a living person again, Kayo. He had
dared not reach out to her before, but now looking
(29:03):
at her right there with him, he was overcome with
joy at having her again, and so impulsively ran to
embrace her. Stop Stop, Coyote, she cried, but it was
too late. At the very instant he touched her body,
she vanished. On learning of Coyote's folly, death spirit was
(29:25):
furious and he did not hesitate You, Coyote were about
to establish the practice of returning from death. Only a
short time away the human race is coming, but you
have spoiled everything and established for them death as it is.
At this Coyote hung his head and wept. But then
(29:45):
he had an idea. Drawing himself up, he retraced the
journey he and death spirit had made. He tried with
all his might to see the horses taste the service berries.
He found the spot where the long law which had stood,
even where he had sat with his wife beside him,
And when night fell he strained to hear voices and seafires.
(30:09):
When down came, Coyote found himself sitting in an open
empty plane. God's come and go, But old Man America
(30:39):
was too useful a deity to abandon them. One example
of the native sense of coyote power famously occurred among
the Navajos during the greatest misfortune that ever befell them hunters, herders,
and raiders from the North who had arrived in four
corners of the Southwest some six hundred years ago. The
Navajos found themselves at war with US troops during most
(31:02):
of the eighteen fifties and early eighteen sixties, distracted by
the Civil War. In a fit of exasperation at the
success of Navajo raids. The Army sent Taos mountain man
and scout Kit Carson, in command of a contingent of troops,
into Navajo country in eighteen sixty three, where Carson's men
(31:22):
conducted a horrific scorched earth campaign against them. By eighteen
sixty four, some eight thousand Navajos had surrendered to the
Frontier Army, only to find themselves condemned to an incarceration
in eastern New Mexico, three hundred miles from home. Their
long walk to the Bosca Redondo prison camp and four
(31:44):
years of being held there under constant guard is one
of the most painful memories of Navajo history. But Navajos
also remember how this episode ended. After years of pleading
to return home and frequent breakouts of small groups that
fled westward across New Mexico, in eighteen sixty eight, the
(32:05):
US finally agreed to allow the Navajos to return to
their homeland. In Navajo oral tradition, the act that accomplished
this long for release was not negotiation or pleading, but
their ritual performance of a coyote way ceremony, which infused
Navajo leaders with enough coyote power finally to affect their release.
(32:32):
Coyote power, surviving by one's intelligence and wits when others cannot,
embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of
pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates, exultation and
sheer aliveness, rueful chagrin at our shortcomings. These are the
(32:56):
lessons Old Man America has been granting for thousands of years.
Through those flashing canines. Coyote spoke truth, and he spoke
it across an unfathomable expanse of time.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
In your in your podcast, you talked about, uh, this
idea that some that someone was the first, some person
was the first to be like, hey look a coyote. Yeah,
or coyote right. Uh. That's the thing I never thought
about with that animal. That's the thing I've wondered about
(33:45):
a lot, is if you if you accept this that
this leading theory that that the humans that came to
North American and South America passed through this kind of
arctic follow track, right, and they were Arctic people that
were living north of snakes. Okay, for instance, for generations.
(34:12):
I mean, all idea of snakes probably was going you know,
I mean it was like probably race, maybe there was
some narrative or story that still had it in mythology,
like probably like buy and large, it was not a
part of discussions. And then people start picking their way
(34:33):
down the continent, and there was the first not like
oh people like if you got into it, there would
be like a person. A person was the first to say,
look at that, Yeah, what is that? Do you know
what I mean? Like picture it? Right? You don't think
about the fact that someone that they were going like, look,
(34:54):
never seen one of those before.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
It's just so hard. It happened so much much, right,
it happened hundreds of times over again, but it's so
hard to picture what that would have been, like, I.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Know, and it's a fascinating thing to imagine, you know.
I will say I've read an account one time by
it was an anthropologist who was arguing that we as humans,
because you know, most primates do have an aversion to snakes,
that we may even coming down through an arctic filter
(35:28):
like that, and having been not around snakes for who
knows fifteen thousand years or twenty thousand or whatever, that
we would have had a genetic memory of a snake
being alarming and hit. One of his arguments about that
was that he said, notice how easy it is to
teach a child not to reach out and touch a
(35:52):
snake or a spider. But it's hard to teach them
not to walk across the street in front of traffic
or not stick their hands in an outlet. But if
they get the whole spider and sake thing really fast.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, no, it's a great point. And that's why it
would be so good to have footage of this first
snake encounter. That's the thing to see if he just
tried to jump on it and grab it to bring
it home to show everybody, or if he thought, like, eah, yeah,
something about that thing. I don't know what it is,
but I like it.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, I think that may be the reaction something about it. Huh,
you want to get a slithering thing.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
You don't need to get too many pages into the Bible,
and there's a snake. He's not a good guy.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
No, that's that's true. But yeah, so somebody did see
as you have set us up for. Somebody did see
a coyote for the first time. And you know, the
thing that I was fascinated by when I sat down
to work on this podcast, and this one comes out
of my book Coyote America. When I was working on
that book, I was confronted with writing this chapter about
(37:02):
this animal that was a knew was one of the
most significant deities in North American history. The oldest deity
of which we have, the oldest literary figure actually of
which we have any kind of knowledge, is Coyote with
a capital C, this little canid that so many Native
(37:23):
people made into a kind of a deity, or a
semidity at least. And what I was confronted with was
about one hundred and twenty five years or so ago,
ethnographers interviewing Native people and collecting their stories, their creation stories,
and whatever stories they could, and then followed by a
whole group of folk lories who came along one hundred
(37:45):
years ago, and we're doing the same thing with Native people.
They collected thousands of coyote stories. Every group you talk
to seem to have twenty or fifty or seventy or
one hundred coyote stories. And so I was trying to
make sense of all of that and once again kind
(38:06):
of realizing, all right, a chapter in a book, you know, Okay,
it can be maybe twenty five pages long here, and
I've got hundreds of these things, so I can't do,
you know, just kind of a listing of every one
of them in some kind of summary. I have to
try to figure out what they were all about, what
(38:28):
they meant. And the ready example that seemed to be
out there in the existing literature was that Coyote was
one of these trickster figures that we have around the world,
low key among the Norse, for example. I mean, most
cultures have some record of a trickster figure. But as
I kept reading these things, I kind of decided, you know,
and I don't know if anybody else believes me on this,
(38:51):
but what I decided about this was that we had
actually kind of missed the point in talking about Coyote
as a trickster, because him being a trickster was not
really the point of what these stories were all about.
What these stories are all about is why the trick works,
(39:12):
on whoever it is who's being tricked, and the reason
the trick works. And this is what kind of gave
me the insight into the sort of stories I ended
up telling in that chapter, is that the reason the
trick works is because of human nature, because of our
own foibles and our ability to fall for things because
we are glutton us or where jealous are you know,
(39:36):
we're narcissistic or whatever. It's like the Seven Deadly Sins.
That's kind of what many of the coyotes stories are about.
And so they're actually instruction in human nature and how
easy it is to fool somebody or trick somebody because
(39:58):
of who human beings are. To me, that seemed to
be a more interesting thing about these stories than that
just coyote was a trickster.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
I think.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Obviously, this is a story of people projecting ideas and
values and thoughts on this animal. But there's a reason.
There's also a biological basis for it. Right, There's a
reason it's not rock stories or snake stories or you know,
(40:34):
turkey stories.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Right. I wonder if you.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Can kind of you obviously covered it in the podcast,
but distilled down what it is about the coyote. It
makes it such a natural foil for people.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, that's a great question, because obviously it's like ten
thousand years ago or you know, further back in time
when people are first here, and we don't know how
far back the coyote stories go whether they were present
during the actual Padiolyithic where there were pleciscene stories, or
they occurred after that. But they're obviously old. There doesn't
(41:09):
seem to be anything any older. And so what you
have to then kind of come up with an explanation
for us why pick that animal? I mean, if indeed
the stories go back into the Pleistocene. I mean, you've
got mammoths around, you've got saber toothed cats. If you're
looking for a deity, you know, what better deity can
(41:32):
you come up with than a step lion or something.
And yet the animal that's come down to us in
North American history as the animal they pick is this little, small,
thirty five pound, you know, junior wolf. And so there
had to be an explanation for that. And as I
(41:53):
cast about for explanations to try to figure it out,
I thought, well, okay, so one of the things is
clearly coyotes are survivors of the extinctions in a way
that sabertoothed cats or ground slaws or step lions aren't
those all disappear. Coyotes survive, so they're still around. And
therefore you've come up with a deity figure that is
(42:15):
still present in your world that you get to see
or at least see some examples of. But the other
thing I decided that probably played a role in it,
and this is a result of reading a lot of
those coyote tales from the various native groups. Coyote, the
animal out there in nature, is a supremely intelligent creature.
(42:40):
That's why they have survived down to the present day.
No matter what we've been able to throw at them,
whatever poison, whatever trapping, whatever helicopter shooting, they are still
here and they're not going anywhere. In fact, they've spread
across all of North America and are becoming one of
the first animals since the places seen us the Isthmus
(43:01):
of Panama into South America. So there's something about them.
They're obviously extremely successful. That success is based on I
think an observable intelligence, and I think native people thought
of them, And that's what I argue in Coyte America
is they thought of them as avatars, as stand ins
(43:23):
for humans in the world, where you could watch the
coyote as it went through the world and watch what
it did and how it survived, and think this is
boint that's a good example of how you do that.
And so as an avatar for humans, as a stand
in for humans in the world, I think you start
(43:44):
to get some recognition of you know, this is the
kind of deity figure they came up with it. And
we can talk about this if you guys want to.
But one of the interesting things about coyote to me
is this is a very different deity figure than say
a Jesus or something or or Mohammed. I mean, this
is not a god figure who lives the perfect life
(44:08):
and offers himself up as an example for everybody else
because of his perfection. In fact, he's kind of a
deity figure that you laugh at because he exhibits so
many of the obvious characteristics of human beings.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Something I can't help but wonder about with coyotes is
what was their initial behavior like around people? And when
I say that, what I'm referring to is it's really
well documented that animals gradually learn how to deal with people.
(44:49):
And we have some like pretty recent scenarios right of
like whalers out in the Pacific or elsewhere coming across
islands that hadn't been previously alanized by humans and like
you can just walk up and pick things up. Birds
are landing on you. They have no idea what you are, right,
that's exactly right, Yeah, iological first contact. Yeah, it helps
(45:12):
you kind of explain, well, how we're clovist hunters. How
are they able to kill a man with a spear?
And it maybe it might have been that they would
walk up and jab it in the heart like it might.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Have been while it stood and looked at them. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
So yeah, so picture too, if you picture like is
kind of sly and opportunistic as that animal is, picture
it being from his perspective seeing a human or a
group of humans who got a camp and they got
stuff they killed, and you know, they got dogs running around,
(45:49):
Like what is his attitude toward them? And it might
have been that they might have been just one of
the most fast. They could have been one of the
more fascinating things to engage with as they kind of
tried to figure out what this new thing is.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah. I think you're probably right in every bit of that, Stephen,
because I think, for one thing, I think coyotes would
have regarded the arrival of humans as this is a
whole new opportunity. I mean, I mean we could hardly
have imagined how great this might be. And that, of
course was true for coyotes up until about one hundred
(46:24):
years ago or so. But I think one of the
reasons that that coyotes have always hung around humans. And
I mean, when I was doing the work on this book,
I was looking at archaeological investigations of say Chaco in
places like that, and there's evidence of coyotes in the
in the city itself, so that made me think. And
of course in Mexico City, where the name comes from,
(46:48):
coyote is from the original no Wat language of the Aztecs.
It's yeah, it comes from from the no Wat language.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
And I forgot.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Coyotl is how it's spelled in the language. But the
L is silent, and so it would be pronounced coyote
serve of the way you know, many of us you
obviously pronounced it with just two syllables. I'm sort of
more out of the you know, the cartoon phase of
rod and coyote, yeah, Wiley, so I do three syllables.
(47:25):
But it was an animal that was I mean, there
are suburbs of Mexico City named after coyotes, so I
think it was an animal that was very present around
human camps and villages, and of course one of the
reasons it's an urban animal. Today, coyotes have entered cities
(47:45):
all over the United States in large part because everywhere
humans are, we generate a lot of rats and mice
and that's one of their favorite prey, and so the
presence of humans means, wow, we're going to have an
abundance of the goodies that we like to go for.
So yeah, I think they were probably from from a
(48:05):
very early on in their relationship, humans and coyotes were interacting,
and that could be one of the reasons why, of
course that they decided, Wow, these guys, these guys, they
can functions as a figure that tells us a lot
about ourselves.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Of course, you're writing about and talking about the animals
that these cultures talked about, because there's there's something there.
Do you ever wonder take the apostle or anything? Right,
let's take the apostle. There must have been there has
(48:43):
to have been like an understanding of it. I mean,
there's an understanding of it. As it produces an oil, right,
it's really soft fur. The leather's very poor quality, Like
there's probably like that function. But you know what I mean,
like like you have you find all these dozens and
dozens of stories about myths and creation stories and things
(49:06):
about coyotes. Then you have all these these these religious
colts built around bears, right, all the all the imagery
and religious understanding about buffalo. Were there some things that?
Does it seem like there was some animals were just
kind of there, like you know, was the apossum just
kind of there or did it have a spiritual role?
Speaker 1 (49:28):
Well, I have not actually encountered a spiritual a possum
in any of I reading.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
I mean neither that they just don't get their due now,
they don't get there. It's like it's noteworthy. He can
hang from his tail, I.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
Mean, can his sale. He can certainly do things. And
you know, Native people were obviously they were really close
observers of all this kind of natural history, and so
they had a tremendous amount of information. Oh, I'm sure
about because it was for one thing. I mean, you
have generation after generation hand down stories. But it's part
(50:02):
of the entertainment that you engage in in the world
when you're living in a natural kind of setting and
engaging the world as a hunter. Gatherer or a early
agricultural which or something. You're observing things, probably in a
way that we don't really do as a result of
the way we live in the twenty first century. So
I think they knew a hell of a lot about
(50:23):
a lot of animals. But I've noted and I talk
about in one of the chapters I think it was
or one of the podcasts I think was a last one.
I talked about Joseph Epps Brown's interviews with Lakota elders
in the nineteen thirties, and he had got the interview.
He was a religious scholar of religion who taught at
(50:45):
the University of Montana in fact, and he got to
interview some of the people who had been present still
alive as young kids on the buffalo hunting planes. By
the nineteen thirties, they were in their late eighties and nineties,
but they still remembered a lot, and they knew a
(51:05):
lot about the you know, the prior to reservation life period.
And Brown quizzed them about the animals that had power,
and the animals that they indicated were the ones not
like possums, but they were animals like so bears had
(51:26):
particular power over underground, over the underground, because of course
they hibernate in the winter. Eagles have particular power in
the air. Bison are associated with the winds. And one
of the things that josepheps Brown discovered from these interviews
is that the Lakota idea was that all of these
(51:48):
all of those creatures, bears, eagles, bison, along with dragonflies,
shared a special power that they called umi or yume,
which was whirlwind power. They all had the ability, and
this was a highly sought after power by native people because,
(52:12):
for one thing, if you engage whirlwind power, it made
you difficult to evidently kill in a battle. But it
also was a kind of a special power that controlled
the winds, and bison especially were associated with winds because
they knew that when the wind began to blow from
the south, bison herds would start to appear. When the
(52:36):
wind blew from the north, and of course what they
were describing were the big annual migrations where you start
getting northers and the bison herds start migrating south onto
the plains. When the wind blows in the north. The
bison are absent when it comes from the south, and
so all those kind of features were associated with animals.
I think that we would think of as charismatic in
(52:57):
some way, and probably not. I haven't seen anything that
he had to say about possums, but.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
I spent uh, I spent a little bit of time
with Ammerindian group in South America, the Chimane, and I
was out with them hunting one time and they were
very eager to get a howler monkey, and they get
a holler monkey, and they had some handful of other
(53:27):
things they ate that are just not part of our
food repertoire. And one night we're out and there's a possum.
This is in Bolivia. There's a possum on a tree,
and I'm thinking to myself, Man, that possum is in
bad shape. If these guys like monkeys, they're gonna love
that possum.
Speaker 1 (53:46):
And he just just went right.
Speaker 2 (53:51):
It's just I was like, Wow, there is something about
the possum. Wasn't even worth commenting.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Yeah, well maybe that, Yeah, that was a special power
that made the possum invisible.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Well, Dan, thank you man, appreciate you taking time to
talking and looking forward to the next show as usual.
Speaker 1 (54:12):
All right, thank you Steven
When Native people cast about for an American animal to
carry their creation stories, the intelligent survivor coyote became Deity. Coyote,
an avatar for humans who taught them about human nature
for thousands of years. I'm Dan Flores, and this is
the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck. Still
(00:24):
in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time
for the season that calls us home. A portion of
every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
waters and wildlife enjoy responsibly. Old Man America in the
(00:59):
remotest time of early North America, after he had molded
mud from the ocean bottom into mountains, plains, and forests
to create the essential topography of the continent, Coyote was
going along. He had placed stars in the sky, some
as pictures, some as a latticed road across the night.
(01:20):
Some tossed willy nilly into the inky black. He had
arranged the year into four seasons, and he had populated
the world with humans as the special helper of the Creator,
who seemed not especially interested in any of this hands
on creation work himself. Coyote had killed monster after monster
(01:41):
on behalf of his human charges, who he had then
located in good monster free spots across America. He had
released animals like buffalo from underground, and admittedly with a
few unlucky mistakes, had placed salmon and other fish and
many of the rivers. He had invented penises and z
giinas and taught humans what to do with them, and
(02:02):
he created a sexual division of labor among men and women.
The first technology in the form of fire, came from Coyote. Then,
not without some remorse, he had introduced death to the world. Now,
with all these fundamental creations in place, Coyote had no
intention of stepping into the background or hiding himself. He
(02:25):
wanted to enjoy how much humans appreciated his creativity. One morning,
Coyote was going along and spotted a handsome young warrior
who told Coyote he was embarking on a journey of
(02:47):
war against his enemies. Although Coyote was actually a peaceful
sword who thought war and battles to the death were
very bad ideas, he told his new companion that he
was a famous warrior and would be indispensable on the quest.
That first night, the warrior said they would camp at
a place called scalped Man by the fire. Coyote did
(03:09):
not like the sound of that. At the camp, Kyote
relaxed while the warrior cooked and did all the chores.
Then Coyote took the best pieces of the meal for himself,
even laying extra meat over his chest and legs in
case he woke hungry in the night. Sometime in the night,
Coyote heard a sound, and when he looked, there was
scalp man standing over him. Quick as he could, he
(03:32):
swung his club, but somehow what he hit was his knee,
which caused him to yowl in pain, waking the warrior.
I have taken care of Scalpman, Coyote told him, and
they went back to sleep. Having clubbed his own knee,
Coyote leapt through much of the next day, but made
it okay to a camp called cooked meat flying all around.
(03:55):
But when Coyote heard the warrior described the next night's
camp where the the arrows fly around, his knee suddenly
took a turn for the worse. Coyote lagged far behind
that next day, hoping for a camp somewhere else, but
the warrior led them on that night. Arrows began to
fly from every direction. The warrior stood and caught one
(04:17):
after another, while Coyote twisted and twirled and crawled on
the ground, trying to avoid them, until one arrow grazed
his arm. I've been killed, Coyote shouted, But when the
warrior pulled him to his feet and he found himself
still alive, Coyote asserted that actually his hurt knee had
caused him to fall asleep, and he had been dreaming.
(04:40):
The next night, their camp was at a place called
where the women visit the men. This place sounded like
an excellent camp to Coyote. His knee improved so remarkably
that day that he got far ahead on their march.
That night, a woman did come to Coyote, but in
the darkness he believed her to be old. Hoping much
(05:01):
younger women would arrive, he sent her away, only to
see in the firelight as she turned away that in
fact she was young and very beautiful. Coyote cried out
for her to return, telling her it had been some
spirit who had told her to leave, but she vanished
into the night. The camp following this one was called
(05:22):
war Clubs. Flying around all that day Coyote's knee hurt
so much that he was barely able to arrive at
the spot sure enough that night, clubs twirled at them
from every direction. The warrior caught to one for each
of them, but Coyote dodged and weaved so much that
a club finally beamed him. When he came to, Coyote
(05:43):
told the warrior that in his boredom, he had actually
just fallen asleep. That's why he had been lying so
flat and still. Then the warrior told Coyote that their
next camp was to be at a place called Vagina's
Flying around, Coyote's knee at once felt into entirely well,
and he was ready to depart then and there. He
(06:04):
pleaded for more details, but the warrior fell asleep. Coyote
sat by the fire all night, thinking of vaginas and
how many he might be able to carry with it.
His knee now stronger than had ever been in his life,
Coyote left early and ranged far ahead the next day.
That night, as promised, vaginas began to sail into camp,
(06:25):
and Coyote could tell they were just the kind he liked,
Young and plump. For most of the night, juicy vaginas
whizzed maddeningly out of reach, with Coyote flailing and chasing
and panning until he was near collapsed. Finally, near dawn,
Coyote caught one, but exhausted as he was when he
finally pinned it and mounted it, Coyote's organ resolutely refused
(06:47):
to rise to the occasion. The next night was their
final camp, and the warrior told Coyote this one was
called where the enemy attacks without delay. Coyote his knee
began to throb, and all day long he hung back
on the trail, crying piteously, and sure enough, when the
next morning came, enemies attacked from all sides. Coyote at
(07:11):
once ran for far horizons, but was overtaken, clubbed, and scouted. Meanwhile,
the warriors subdued all his enemies, then looked for Coyote.
When he knew all was clear, Coyote stood and announced
that he was going along now, but the warriors should
consider himself lucky that he had happened upon Coyote, otherwise
(07:32):
he would have had to engage in this adventure with
no help at all. From a famous warrior. Stories about Coyote,
often called Old Man coyote and rarely, although they are
present in the Cannon. Stories about old Woman coyote are
(07:55):
the oldest preserved human stories from North America. Both is
that coyote spelled with upper case a capital see to
distinguish the deity version from the ordinary coyote trotting by
while you read is America's oldest surviving literary figure. He
is also the most ancient god figure of which we
(08:17):
have record from the continent. When Siberian hunters first started
boting down the coastlines are crossing Beringia, at some point
in their entry of northwestern America, they began to encounter coyotes.
Wolves they knew from Asia and well enough that at
some point in their migration, these first Americans arrived with
domesticated ones, wolf like dogs whose wild ancestors in those
(08:41):
times were recent. But by the time of the Clovis
people at least, who spread to America more than thirteen
thousand years ago, continental coyotes were familiar creatures. Intriguingly, something
about coyotes captured the imaginations of these first Americans. Religious
(09:01):
explanations for the world and how it works are untold, thousands,
maybe millions of years old, so these former Siberians arrived
with intact religions and deities. But as these first human
residents settled in from California to the Mississippi River, from
the Pacific northwest to future New Mexico and Arizona, Coyote
(09:22):
emerged as the deity of the ancient Contina. No one
knows when this happened or exactly how coyote came to
embody so many different people's creation stories and ruminations on
human nature. All we know now, based on the oral
coyote stories collected among American Indians and set down by
(09:43):
nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographers and folklores, is that there
were thousands of coyote tales. No other native deity in
America came anywhere close to producing a body of oral
literature to rival them. The story here about Coote and
his knee, although written in my own voice, in its
(10:03):
original form, was collected from the Wichitas of the southern plains,
But the opening paragraph of this episode I distilled from
several groups from all over the West, the Navajos in
the southwest, the Crows on the northern plains, the Kurrak,
and wasco in California, the Monomonee of the Great Lakes,
the Coalville and Klamath of the Pacific Northwest, and the
(10:27):
Salish in Blackfeet from the northern Rockies. For almost all
of the past ten thousand years west of the Mississippi River,
coyote has been America's universal deity. Originally, he was a
Paleolithic god, but he survived the millennia to appear among
agricultural peoples like the Wichitas. Ultimately, his fame reached as
(10:50):
far south as the Aztecs, who knew him as Wayway Coyotal.
Old Man Coyote truly is Old Man America. The history
of coyotes and the history of humans has many parallels,
(11:13):
but one difference between us is that across our own
evolutionary history, we humans have created thousands of philosophies of
meaning we call religions, while coyotes, so far as we
can tell, embrace no religious tradition beyond life the sacredness
of existence. In so far as we go, our oldest
(11:34):
forms of religious explanations featured animals as deities, a type
of religion called animism that was fashioned by humans living
their lives as hunters or hunter gatherers, what we might
call Coyotism is certainly a paleolithic religion. The famed psychologist
Carl Jung is only one of hundreds, from scientists to
(11:57):
poets who have found coyote enduringly fascinating, in part because
of how fundamental he is in human thought. In Jung's view,
the character of coyote is a faithful copy of an
absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, a forerunner of the Savior, and
(12:19):
like him god, man and animal at once, he is
both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being. The
Western religious traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity sprang from
(12:39):
later periods of human history, following our domestication of plants
and animals, what anthropologists called the Neolithic Revolution. Early religions
could feature animals, particularly the sacred bull, as deities, but
over time, hurting and agricultural cultures gradually replaced animal gods
(13:01):
along with gods of special places on the landscape, another
feature of animism with deities that assumed human form. The
Greek gods, who are so foundational in Western cultures, are
classical examples of this evolution. Four thousand years ago, the
Greeks replaced animal and plant deities with gods and goddesses
(13:22):
in human form, Artemis, who became a mistress of the
animals as a goddess of the hunt, and Demater, who
evolved into a human form goddess of wheat and crops.
One of the most intriguing questions about coyote is simply this,
Why did the ancient settlers of North America pick this
(13:43):
particular animal as their deity? Ten thousand years and more
in the past, the first Americans would have had many
scores of animal candidates for their deity figures. Charismatic creatures
like mammos or dire wolves or saber toothed cats might
seem to us more likely choices, and in the early
stages of human settlement, perhaps they had been gods. My
(14:06):
own speculation is that as the Wisconsin I says, gave
way to a rapidly warming world, joined at the same
time by the great simplification event known as the Pleistocene extinctions,
which took all three of my suggested species and many others.
The wild coyotes around Indian peoples of the time fascinated
(14:27):
them as creatures endowed with special abilities. I suspect that
it was the coyotes self evident ability to survive those
profound changes when the big charismatic species could not that
attracted human attention. There probably was also an easy identification
with the social lives of predatory wild coyotes that made
(14:50):
them feel familiar to human hunters. In his book Pueblo
Gods and Myths, anthropologists Hamilton Tyler writes that the ability
of an animal to become a god is in part
due to his symbolic potential, which is to say, the
number of ideas he can stand. For a god, even
(15:12):
the simplest god, is based upon a certain amount of
abstraction in the human mind. Another anthropologist, Lewis Hyde, believes
that coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind.
The stories themselves look to predator pray relationships for the
birth of cunning. How it goes on, One reason native
(15:35):
observers may have chosen coyote is that the former in
fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is
therefore a consummate survivor in a shifting world, especially before
our lives in cities which obscured our deep dependency on
nature and diverted our powers of observation. We humans were
(15:57):
profound observers of the natural world. These early Americans would
not have failed to notice one other characteristic of wild
coyotes in a dangerous and changing world, that the secret
of their uncanny ability to survive everything nature through at
them lay in a remarkable intelligence, the kind of trickster
(16:18):
figures that hide mentions make up a very old human
religious figure found in many animistic religions around the world
in the form of many creatures hairs, spiders, blue jays, ravens,
even human figures like the Norse trickster Loki. But here
in America, the coyote took up the mantle of a
(16:39):
god who lived by his wits. Having a smart god,
after all, was crucial to survival also to our understanding
of human nature in the animal within. In early American mythology,
coyote is almost never the ultimate cause God. More often,
(17:03):
as in the coyote stories from people like the Salish
and the Nespers, he's an immortal helper deity, semi divine
and present and engaged in earthly life. Most often in
the stories, coyote inhabits the world before humankind. Sometimes his
initial form is human, which he gives up for his
(17:23):
coyote body once humans are present. In stories that are
set following the creation, however, coyote is commonly a kind
of an anthropomorphic animal, a coyote man. He preserves a
tale and a sharp muzzle and erect ears, but he
stands and walks upright, has a wife and a family,
and is capable of shape shifting into a form so
(17:45):
human like that often the other characters in a story
only suspect by his behavior that they are dealing with
Coyote himself. It does not take very much time or
analytical effort with the coyote s tales to draw a
conclusion about who Coyote really is, and that realization is
what makes him so intriguing. As a god. Coyote is
(18:09):
the god within his mythical function in the beginning is creation.
Coyote takes the basic structure of the world as set
in motion by the Creator, then improves on it and
gives it the natural laws that make it work that done.
His larger purpose in the many oral stories about him
(18:30):
is to reveal human nature more clearly and rather than
a perfect deity, Jung's savior figure a Jesus who teaches
a codified morality and is set up as a role
model for humans. Coyote personifies the full suite of humanity's traits,
good and bad. As a character, Coyote is the full Monty.
(18:55):
He's at once admirable, inspirational, imaginative, inner, energetic, a whirlwind
biophysical force with a large capacity for taking sensuous pleasure
in life. But he's also selfish, vain, deceitful, and quite
often envious, lustful, and ridiculous, possessed of an overconfidence that
(19:17):
gets him into endless fixes. Coyote's major flaw, resulting from
a combination of all of his human traits, is that
he finds cause, sometimes admirably, sometimes laughably, never to be
quite satisfied with the world, And because he is invariably
unable to predict consequences with any accuracy, his tinkering with
(19:40):
the world can produce disaster, especially and this is a
major theme in so many of the stories for Coyote himself.
Coyote is almost universally referred to as a trickster. But
after reading many scores of Native Coyote stories, I've begun
to think think we've been missing the point. While there
(20:03):
are certainly stories that feature tricks, the foolly is actually
just a means to an end. Again and again, the
point is not the trick. The point is why the
trick works, and invariably the reason is a result of
the foibles of human nature. These stories survive for thousands
of years because there's such penetrating exposees of the human condition.
(20:28):
Coyote was at his best when he taught lessons, almost
always uncomfortable or funny, ones about human behavior and motives.
As North America's oldest surviving deity, Coyote has bequeathed us
a continental world of imagination, creation, artistry, also hubrious and trouble,
(20:50):
it's difficult not to see the Coyote impulse writ large
in humanity. In deed, to my mind, therein lies a
test for stories about old men America, given what we
now know about ourselves using the modern tools of evolutionary
psychology and neuroscience. Looking at these ancient stories with twenty
(21:12):
first century insight, what can we say about how accurately
they show that people living thousands of years ago understood
as well as we do today exactly who we humans are.
The acquisition of status in games of romance and love,
experiential jolts to enhance neurochemistry and mood states a mind
(21:38):
conflicted over sin and virtue. For the long ago Americans
who selected wild coyotes as a suitable avatar for their
earthly deity, then worked out so many stories about him.
What better subjects for the adventures of their coyote god
than these, No doubt, Over the centuries, storytellers of Mark
(21:59):
Twain like Brilliance dazzled audiences laid into the night with
the many astounding adventures of Coyote, and romanticize their people's
trajectory through time. Coyote often operates as the very god
of Richard Dawkins's selfish gene, in which form his character
is usually that of a self absorbed buffoon. The stories
(22:23):
are that holds up such behavior and plain view. For
comic ridicule, Coyote stories were wildly entertaining. It was still
is perversely pleasurable to observe a character who so blithely
ignores rules and restrictions, usually with predictable results. Although benefits
(22:44):
from rule breaking happen often enough with Coyote to keep
things interesting, but a moral code it's rarely there, nor
are there promises of eternal life salvation from death, that
ancient and oppressive burden of our self awareness. What Old
Man America teaches us instead is delight in being alive
(23:08):
in a world of wondrous possibilities. Coyotism is a philosophy
for the realists among us, those who can do a
Cormac McCarthy like appraisal of human motives but find a
kind of chagrined humor in the act, who may think
of the human story as cyclical, even predictable, because human
(23:30):
nature never seems to change. These ancient stories from across
Western America lay death for all of us directly on
Coyote's doorstep, and story after story, it is Coyote who decreed,
(23:53):
for two admittedly rather admirable reasons, that all human beings
would have to die if humans never died. Coyote reason
this explanation is a part of stories from both the
Yanas of California and the Navajos of the Southwest. Overpopulation
and the destruction of the earth would be the result. Hence,
(24:14):
the initial reason Coyote invented death was actually an environmental one.
The Yanas said it was Coyote, who made it law
that humans would have to die to create space for
the generations down the timeline. Coyote also rationalized death for
a second reason, this time as a great teacher about life. Well,
(24:38):
you know, if you die, then you really have to
take life seriously. You have to think about things more.
Coyote himself was immortal, but when death visited him directly,
he had some serious second thoughts about what a good idea.
Death was one of the most poignant of all Coyote stories.
(25:00):
He's a nest purse account called Coyote and the Shadow People.
It's something close to a North American version of the
Greek myth of Orpheus and his wife Eurydus. I tell
it here rewritten in my own voice from the original
ethnographic account. Coyote and his wife were living happily when
(25:27):
she became sick. When she died, Coyote was overcome with
grief and loneliness. Others had died, but this was different.
So when death spirit came to him and offered to
take him to the place where his wife had gone, Coyote,
who was filled with hope, What I tell you, said,
Death Spirit, you must do everything exactly as I say.
(25:50):
Not once are you to disregard my commands and do
something else. So Coyote traveled with Death Spirit, thinking of
his wife, but noticing that his god was very difficult
to see and follow. He looked more like a shadow
than anything real. When he pointed out herds of horses
in the plane over which they traveled our bushes covered
(26:11):
in service berries, Coyote saw nothing, but he exclaimed over
the horses and pretended to eat the berries. Soon enough,
the guide announced that they had arrived and led Kyote
to where his wife was said to be sitting with
many others inside a very very long lodge. Again, the
(26:32):
spirit cautioned Coyote to do exactly as he said. Coyote
made every effort to do so, but while he felt
the spirit's presence, as far as he could see, they
were sitting in an open prairie. But Death Spirit told
him that conditions were different here, that when night fell
in the living world, it would be dawn in this place.
(26:53):
Sure enough, when night fell, Coyote began to hear people whispering.
He began to see many fires in the lot, and
to recognize old friends, whom he greeted and was able
to walk about with and reminisce, and he was overjoyed
to find his wife at his side. Late in the day,
the people began to grow faint and hard to see.
(27:14):
Then the spirit came to him and told him that
as Don came in the living world, night came for them,
but that Coyote should remain where he sat and not move,
and Coyote said he would. When Don came, Coyote found
himself sitting in the open prairie. As instructed, He remain
there all day, broiling in the heat, but sitting as
(27:36):
he had been told. This went on for several dawns
and several nights, with Coyote's friends and his wife returning
and making merry, then fading as Don came, and kyoteing
waiting patiently in the heat of the day. Finally, after
too long, the death spirit came to him and said,
tomorrow you will go home. You will take your wife
(27:58):
with you. He told Coyote they would travel for five
days and pass five mountains, and that while he could
talk with his wife no matter what, he should not
touch her. That he should never lay a hand on
her until they had passed the last of the five mountains.
Then the spirit admonished Coyote, You, Coyote, must guard against
(28:20):
your inclination to do foolish things. At dawn, Coyote and
his wife started out, although Coyote could barely discern her,
but when they crossed the first mountain, Coyote could feel
her presence more strongly. When they camped on the homeward
side of the second mountain, she became clearer to him,
(28:42):
and in the next camp, beyond the third mountain, clearer still.
Now they were making their fourth camp, with only the
final mountain to cross the next day, and Coyote could
at last see his wife's face and her young body.
She was almost a living person again, Kayo. He had
dared not reach out to her before, but now looking
(29:03):
at her right there with him, he was overcome with
joy at having her again, and so impulsively ran to
embrace her. Stop Stop, Coyote, she cried, but it was
too late. At the very instant he touched her body,
she vanished. On learning of Coyote's folly, death spirit was
(29:25):
furious and he did not hesitate You, Coyote were about
to establish the practice of returning from death. Only a
short time away the human race is coming, but you
have spoiled everything and established for them death as it is.
At this Coyote hung his head and wept. But then
(29:45):
he had an idea. Drawing himself up, he retraced the
journey he and death spirit had made. He tried with
all his might to see the horses taste the service berries.
He found the spot where the long law which had stood,
even where he had sat with his wife beside him,
And when night fell he strained to hear voices and seafires.
(30:09):
When down came, Coyote found himself sitting in an open
empty plane. God's come and go, But old Man America
(30:39):
was too useful a deity to abandon them. One example
of the native sense of coyote power famously occurred among
the Navajos during the greatest misfortune that ever befell them hunters, herders,
and raiders from the North who had arrived in four
corners of the Southwest some six hundred years ago. The
Navajos found themselves at war with US troops during most
(31:02):
of the eighteen fifties and early eighteen sixties, distracted by
the Civil War. In a fit of exasperation at the
success of Navajo raids. The Army sent Taos mountain man
and scout Kit Carson, in command of a contingent of troops,
into Navajo country in eighteen sixty three, where Carson's men
(31:22):
conducted a horrific scorched earth campaign against them. By eighteen
sixty four, some eight thousand Navajos had surrendered to the
Frontier Army, only to find themselves condemned to an incarceration
in eastern New Mexico, three hundred miles from home. Their
long walk to the Bosca Redondo prison camp and four
(31:44):
years of being held there under constant guard is one
of the most painful memories of Navajo history. But Navajos
also remember how this episode ended. After years of pleading
to return home and frequent breakouts of small groups that
fled westward across New Mexico, in eighteen sixty eight, the
(32:05):
US finally agreed to allow the Navajos to return to
their homeland. In Navajo oral tradition, the act that accomplished
this long for release was not negotiation or pleading, but
their ritual performance of a coyote way ceremony, which infused
Navajo leaders with enough coyote power finally to affect their release.
(32:32):
Coyote power, surviving by one's intelligence and wits when others cannot,
embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of
pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates, exultation and
sheer aliveness, rueful chagrin at our shortcomings. These are the
(32:56):
lessons Old Man America has been granting for thousands of years.
Through those flashing canines. Coyote spoke truth, and he spoke
it across an unfathomable expanse of time.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
In your in your podcast, you talked about, uh, this
idea that some that someone was the first, some person
was the first to be like, hey look a coyote. Yeah,
or coyote right. Uh. That's the thing I never thought
about with that animal. That's the thing I've wondered about
(33:45):
a lot, is if you if you accept this that
this leading theory that that the humans that came to
North American and South America passed through this kind of
arctic follow track, right, and they were Arctic people that
were living north of snakes. Okay, for instance, for generations.
(34:12):
I mean, all idea of snakes probably was going you know,
I mean it was like probably race, maybe there was
some narrative or story that still had it in mythology,
like probably like buy and large, it was not a
part of discussions. And then people start picking their way
(34:33):
down the continent, and there was the first not like
oh people like if you got into it, there would
be like a person. A person was the first to say,
look at that, Yeah, what is that? Do you know
what I mean? Like picture it? Right? You don't think
about the fact that someone that they were going like, look,
(34:54):
never seen one of those before.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
It's just so hard. It happened so much much, right,
it happened hundreds of times over again, but it's so
hard to picture what that would have been, like, I.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Know, and it's a fascinating thing to imagine, you know.
I will say I've read an account one time by
it was an anthropologist who was arguing that we as humans,
because you know, most primates do have an aversion to snakes,
that we may even coming down through an arctic filter
(35:28):
like that, and having been not around snakes for who
knows fifteen thousand years or twenty thousand or whatever, that
we would have had a genetic memory of a snake
being alarming and hit. One of his arguments about that
was that he said, notice how easy it is to
teach a child not to reach out and touch a
(35:52):
snake or a spider. But it's hard to teach them
not to walk across the street in front of traffic
or not stick their hands in an outlet. But if
they get the whole spider and sake thing really fast.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, no, it's a great point. And that's why it
would be so good to have footage of this first
snake encounter. That's the thing to see if he just
tried to jump on it and grab it to bring
it home to show everybody, or if he thought, like, eah, yeah,
something about that thing. I don't know what it is,
but I like it.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, I think that may be the reaction something about it. Huh,
you want to get a slithering thing.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
You don't need to get too many pages into the Bible,
and there's a snake. He's not a good guy.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
No, that's that's true. But yeah, so somebody did see
as you have set us up for. Somebody did see
a coyote for the first time. And you know, the
thing that I was fascinated by when I sat down
to work on this podcast, and this one comes out
of my book Coyote America. When I was working on
that book, I was confronted with writing this chapter about
(37:02):
this animal that was a knew was one of the
most significant deities in North American history. The oldest deity
of which we have, the oldest literary figure actually of
which we have any kind of knowledge, is Coyote with
a capital C, this little canid that so many Native
(37:23):
people made into a kind of a deity, or a
semidity at least. And what I was confronted with was
about one hundred and twenty five years or so ago,
ethnographers interviewing Native people and collecting their stories, their creation stories,
and whatever stories they could, and then followed by a
whole group of folk lories who came along one hundred
(37:45):
years ago, and we're doing the same thing with Native people.
They collected thousands of coyote stories. Every group you talk
to seem to have twenty or fifty or seventy or
one hundred coyote stories. And so I was trying to
make sense of all of that and once again kind
(38:06):
of realizing, all right, a chapter in a book, you know, Okay,
it can be maybe twenty five pages long here, and
I've got hundreds of these things, so I can't do,
you know, just kind of a listing of every one
of them in some kind of summary. I have to
try to figure out what they were all about, what
(38:28):
they meant. And the ready example that seemed to be
out there in the existing literature was that Coyote was
one of these trickster figures that we have around the world,
low key among the Norse, for example. I mean, most
cultures have some record of a trickster figure. But as
I kept reading these things, I kind of decided, you know,
and I don't know if anybody else believes me on this,
(38:51):
but what I decided about this was that we had
actually kind of missed the point in talking about Coyote
as a trickster, because him being a trickster was not
really the point of what these stories were all about.
What these stories are all about is why the trick works,
(39:12):
on whoever it is who's being tricked, and the reason
the trick works. And this is what kind of gave
me the insight into the sort of stories I ended
up telling in that chapter, is that the reason the
trick works is because of human nature, because of our
own foibles and our ability to fall for things because
we are glutton us or where jealous are you know,
(39:36):
we're narcissistic or whatever. It's like the Seven Deadly Sins.
That's kind of what many of the coyotes stories are about.
And so they're actually instruction in human nature and how
easy it is to fool somebody or trick somebody because
(39:58):
of who human beings are. To me, that seemed to
be a more interesting thing about these stories than that
just coyote was a trickster.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
I think.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Obviously, this is a story of people projecting ideas and
values and thoughts on this animal. But there's a reason.
There's also a biological basis for it. Right, There's a
reason it's not rock stories or snake stories or you know,
(40:34):
turkey stories.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Right. I wonder if you.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Can kind of you obviously covered it in the podcast,
but distilled down what it is about the coyote. It
makes it such a natural foil for people.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, that's a great question, because obviously it's like ten
thousand years ago or you know, further back in time
when people are first here, and we don't know how
far back the coyote stories go whether they were present
during the actual Padiolyithic where there were pleciscene stories, or
they occurred after that. But they're obviously old. There doesn't
(41:09):
seem to be anything any older. And so what you
have to then kind of come up with an explanation
for us why pick that animal? I mean, if indeed
the stories go back into the Pleistocene. I mean, you've
got mammoths around, you've got saber toothed cats. If you're
looking for a deity, you know, what better deity can
(41:32):
you come up with than a step lion or something.
And yet the animal that's come down to us in
North American history as the animal they pick is this little, small,
thirty five pound, you know, junior wolf. And so there
had to be an explanation for that. And as I
(41:53):
cast about for explanations to try to figure it out,
I thought, well, okay, so one of the things is
clearly coyotes are survivors of the extinctions in a way
that sabertoothed cats or ground slaws or step lions aren't
those all disappear. Coyotes survive, so they're still around. And
therefore you've come up with a deity figure that is
(42:15):
still present in your world that you get to see
or at least see some examples of. But the other
thing I decided that probably played a role in it,
and this is a result of reading a lot of
those coyote tales from the various native groups. Coyote, the
animal out there in nature, is a supremely intelligent creature.
(42:40):
That's why they have survived down to the present day.
No matter what we've been able to throw at them,
whatever poison, whatever trapping, whatever helicopter shooting, they are still
here and they're not going anywhere. In fact, they've spread
across all of North America and are becoming one of
the first animals since the places seen us the Isthmus
(43:01):
of Panama into South America. So there's something about them.
They're obviously extremely successful. That success is based on I
think an observable intelligence, and I think native people thought
of them, And that's what I argue in Coyte America
is they thought of them as avatars, as stand ins
(43:23):
for humans in the world, where you could watch the
coyote as it went through the world and watch what
it did and how it survived, and think this is
boint that's a good example of how you do that.
And so as an avatar for humans, as a stand
in for humans in the world, I think you start
(43:44):
to get some recognition of you know, this is the
kind of deity figure they came up with it. And
we can talk about this if you guys want to.
But one of the interesting things about coyote to me
is this is a very different deity figure than say
a Jesus or something or or Mohammed. I mean, this
is not a god figure who lives the perfect life
(44:08):
and offers himself up as an example for everybody else
because of his perfection. In fact, he's kind of a
deity figure that you laugh at because he exhibits so
many of the obvious characteristics of human beings.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Something I can't help but wonder about with coyotes is
what was their initial behavior like around people? And when
I say that, what I'm referring to is it's really
well documented that animals gradually learn how to deal with people.
(44:49):
And we have some like pretty recent scenarios right of
like whalers out in the Pacific or elsewhere coming across
islands that hadn't been previously alanized by humans and like
you can just walk up and pick things up. Birds
are landing on you. They have no idea what you are, right,
that's exactly right, Yeah, iological first contact. Yeah, it helps
(45:12):
you kind of explain, well, how we're clovist hunters. How
are they able to kill a man with a spear?
And it maybe it might have been that they would
walk up and jab it in the heart like it might.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Have been while it stood and looked at them. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
So yeah, so picture too, if you picture like is
kind of sly and opportunistic as that animal is, picture
it being from his perspective seeing a human or a
group of humans who got a camp and they got
stuff they killed, and you know, they got dogs running around,
(45:49):
Like what is his attitude toward them? And it might
have been that they might have been just one of
the most fast. They could have been one of the
more fascinating things to engage with as they kind of
tried to figure out what this new thing is.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah. I think you're probably right in every bit of that, Stephen,
because I think, for one thing, I think coyotes would
have regarded the arrival of humans as this is a
whole new opportunity. I mean, I mean we could hardly
have imagined how great this might be. And that, of
course was true for coyotes up until about one hundred
(46:24):
years ago or so. But I think one of the
reasons that that coyotes have always hung around humans. And
I mean, when I was doing the work on this book,
I was looking at archaeological investigations of say Chaco in
places like that, and there's evidence of coyotes in the
in the city itself, so that made me think. And
of course in Mexico City, where the name comes from,
(46:48):
coyote is from the original no Wat language of the Aztecs.
It's yeah, it comes from from the no Wat language.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
And I forgot.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Coyotl is how it's spelled in the language. But the
L is silent, and so it would be pronounced coyote
serve of the way you know, many of us you
obviously pronounced it with just two syllables. I'm sort of
more out of the you know, the cartoon phase of
rod and coyote, yeah, Wiley, so I do three syllables.
(47:25):
But it was an animal that was I mean, there
are suburbs of Mexico City named after coyotes, so I
think it was an animal that was very present around
human camps and villages, and of course one of the
reasons it's an urban animal. Today, coyotes have entered cities
(47:45):
all over the United States in large part because everywhere
humans are, we generate a lot of rats and mice
and that's one of their favorite prey, and so the
presence of humans means, wow, we're going to have an
abundance of the goodies that we like to go for.
So yeah, I think they were probably from from a
(48:05):
very early on in their relationship, humans and coyotes were interacting,
and that could be one of the reasons why, of
course that they decided, Wow, these guys, these guys, they
can functions as a figure that tells us a lot
about ourselves.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Of course, you're writing about and talking about the animals
that these cultures talked about, because there's there's something there.
Do you ever wonder take the apostle or anything? Right,
let's take the apostle. There must have been there has
(48:43):
to have been like an understanding of it. I mean,
there's an understanding of it. As it produces an oil, right,
it's really soft fur. The leather's very poor quality, Like
there's probably like that function. But you know what I mean,
like like you have you find all these dozens and
dozens of stories about myths and creation stories and things
(49:06):
about coyotes. Then you have all these these these religious
colts built around bears, right, all the all the imagery
and religious understanding about buffalo. Were there some things that?
Does it seem like there was some animals were just
kind of there, like you know, was the apossum just
kind of there or did it have a spiritual role?
Speaker 1 (49:28):
Well, I have not actually encountered a spiritual a possum
in any of I reading.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
I mean neither that they just don't get their due now,
they don't get there. It's like it's noteworthy. He can
hang from his tail, I.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
Mean, can his sale. He can certainly do things. And
you know, Native people were obviously they were really close
observers of all this kind of natural history, and so
they had a tremendous amount of information. Oh, I'm sure
about because it was for one thing. I mean, you
have generation after generation hand down stories. But it's part
(50:02):
of the entertainment that you engage in in the world
when you're living in a natural kind of setting and
engaging the world as a hunter. Gatherer or a early
agricultural which or something. You're observing things, probably in a
way that we don't really do as a result of
the way we live in the twenty first century. So
I think they knew a hell of a lot about
(50:23):
a lot of animals. But I've noted and I talk
about in one of the chapters I think it was
or one of the podcasts I think was a last one.
I talked about Joseph Epps Brown's interviews with Lakota elders
in the nineteen thirties, and he had got the interview.
He was a religious scholar of religion who taught at
(50:45):
the University of Montana in fact, and he got to
interview some of the people who had been present still
alive as young kids on the buffalo hunting planes. By
the nineteen thirties, they were in their late eighties and nineties,
but they still remembered a lot, and they knew a
(51:05):
lot about the you know, the prior to reservation life period.
And Brown quizzed them about the animals that had power,
and the animals that they indicated were the ones not
like possums, but they were animals like so bears had
(51:26):
particular power over underground, over the underground, because of course
they hibernate in the winter. Eagles have particular power in
the air. Bison are associated with the winds. And one
of the things that josepheps Brown discovered from these interviews
is that the Lakota idea was that all of these
(51:48):
all of those creatures, bears, eagles, bison, along with dragonflies,
shared a special power that they called umi or yume,
which was whirlwind power. They all had the ability, and
this was a highly sought after power by native people because,
(52:12):
for one thing, if you engage whirlwind power, it made
you difficult to evidently kill in a battle. But it
also was a kind of a special power that controlled
the winds, and bison especially were associated with winds because
they knew that when the wind began to blow from
the south, bison herds would start to appear. When the
(52:36):
wind blew from the north, and of course what they
were describing were the big annual migrations where you start
getting northers and the bison herds start migrating south onto
the plains. When the wind blows in the north. The
bison are absent when it comes from the south, and
so all those kind of features were associated with animals.
I think that we would think of as charismatic in
(52:57):
some way, and probably not. I haven't seen anything that
he had to say about possums, but.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
I spent uh, I spent a little bit of time
with Ammerindian group in South America, the Chimane, and I
was out with them hunting one time and they were
very eager to get a howler monkey, and they get
a holler monkey, and they had some handful of other
(53:27):
things they ate that are just not part of our
food repertoire. And one night we're out and there's a possum.
This is in Bolivia. There's a possum on a tree,
and I'm thinking to myself, Man, that possum is in
bad shape. If these guys like monkeys, they're gonna love
that possum.
Speaker 1 (53:46):
And he just just went right.
Speaker 2 (53:51):
It's just I was like, Wow, there is something about
the possum. Wasn't even worth commenting.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Yeah, well maybe that, Yeah, that was a special power
that made the possum invisible.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Well, Dan, thank you man, appreciate you taking time to
talking and looking forward to the next show as usual.
Speaker 1 (54:12):
All right, thank you Steven
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