Moderns Lessons Taught by the Trickster Coyote (Part 4)

One of the reasons for this blog is to show how mythologies continue to play important roles in our modern lives. So, having written a series of other posts about coyote the animal and the trickster deity, I wanted to devote this last one to thinking about the meaning of coyote to the world circa 2020.

Coyotes Evolving as a Idiom

We’ve already touched on coyotes as used in idioms in Mexico and the US. I believe that as coyotes continue to spread across the United States and the rest of North America, they will increasingly creep into our English idioms. One especially cruel example in recent years is the term coyote ugly. Let’s hope future idioms are a tad less gothic.

Kai-oat versus Kai-oat-ee

The secular American mythologies surrounding coyotes have begun changing since the start of the environmental movement. Whereas before they were almost universally viewed as a varmint that should be shot on sight, now Americans are more culturally divided between the pro- and anti-coyote camps. This even shows up in how the word is pronounced, with those in the rural West (where more livestock is raised) saying “kai-oat” whereas those in more urban areas elsewhere saying “kai-oat-ee.”

This is not a hard and fast rule, but the way the word is pronounced is often indicative of the stories told about coyotes. “Kai-oat” folklore tends toward viewing coyotes as villains, whereas “kai-oat-ee” folklore is often viewed as more neutral and might involve tales of how they’ve crawled up onto a freezer to cool off in the summer or taken a ride on public transportation. One form of the word tends to infer villainy while other has other inferences, such as victimhood or charm.

Future pronunciations may tell us a lot about status of coyotes in our collective, cultural imaginations.

Coyote in Modern Media

How will Old Man Coyote live on in our mythologies? Of course, stories will continue to be told orally in some traditions and will live on books such such as Barry Holstun Lopez’s Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America, not to mention the Internet.

But will there be new narratives about Coyote, ones that deal with the modern world? Does Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner count? Even if not, I’m sure new tales are constantly being created both within and outside the Native American cultures (and, yes, this also raises the cultural appropriation question.)

My guess is that Old Man Coyote still has a long future ahead of him. Like so many mythological characters, he may well get his own movie, television, video game and the like. I’m hoping so. The media is already saturated with legendary creatures such as vampires, werewolves, and zombies, not to mention a variety of Norse gods. I hope Coyote’s time is coming (if such stories can be done well).

Apparently, there is already a show called Coyote in the works, which stars Michael Chiklis  and is about a border patrol agent who discovers an underground tunnel used to smuggle black market goods in from Mexico. This usage of the word coyote, of course, refers to people paid by migrants to help them illegally cross the U.S.–Mexico border. So, it sounds like the coyote-as-villain trope, but I hope it’ll be more nuanced than that.

Coyote at the End of the World

Coyotes were evolved for prairie lands and deserts. As such, they may be a perfect animal to survive and thrive in an era of global warming. We will see how this plays out. In what could turn out to be one of life’s great ironies, humanity may be creating an environment in which it, as a species, struggles yet its long-time nemesis prospers.

If Coyote can be seen as a stand-in for the wiliness and resiliency of Nature, then this particular trickster deity might well, in a case of abiding poetic justice, have the last laugh.

Images:

Elymus cinereus and coyote by Matt Lavin from Bozeman, Montana, USA; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Leymus_cinereus_and_coyote_(5823379836).jpg

Coyote walking on iced-over pond at Sherburne National Wildlife Refugee, Minnesota. From Wikimedia Commons: By Lorie Shaull - https://www.flickr.com/photos/number7cloud/49700054243/in/photostream/

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