Coyote and Man

The performances in class on Thursday were to say the least, outstanding. Although, impromptu they were just the right amount of catharsis that the originators of these tales intended. Reading the tales and visualizing them in my mind, while engaging, in no way had the same impact that the actual performances had. I've read the entire book already, yet the tales I remember best are the ones, we enacted in the class. I can understand while oral tradition is a much more effective means of transferring these stories from generation to generation.  Changing the subject slightly, I want to talk about one thing I noticed in these "trickster" tales. Although Coyote can be somewhat malicious, he genuinely cares about his people. While he is can perform all of these tricks and sometimes violent acts and attacks, he does not seem to tolerate other spirits, to do them. This ties in why "human beings" can immediately relate to these tales. Hey, he's just like us. He laughs, eats, cries, makes love and farts. Critic and writer Barbary Babcock says, 
"Although trickster's actions and personality may seem ridiculous or extreme, some scholars have noted that he/she serves an important purpose in traditional and contemporary narratives. Trickster may work as a kind of outlet for strong emotions or actions in which humans cannot indulge. These actions are at the margins of social morality and normal behavior, so humans can express and feel things through the trickster that would be unsafe to express or experience outside of stories."
I could not agree more. But my favorite quote it this one,

Tricksters are real in stories but not in the flesh. Tricksters are not blood or material, but imagination. Tricksters are the kind of thought that raises hope, that heals, that cures, that cannot be traced. The power of a trickster would be diminished, even abolished, by human representations. Humans are not tricksters, but tricksters can be human. Tricksters are not moral but live forever in imagination. And the trickster is not immortal either. Tricksters liberate the mind, and they do so in a language game. Tricksters do not represent the real or the material. Tricksters are not alive in tribal imagination to prove theories of the social scientists. Tricksters have become anthropologists, but no anthropologist has ever understood a trickster. Tricksters have become anthropologists if only long enough to overturn their theories and turn them into cold shit. But tricksters are not moral or functional. Tricksters are not artifacts. Tricksters never prove culture or the absence of culture. Tricksters do not prove the values that we live by, nor do they prove or demonstrate the responses to domination by colonial democracies. Tricksters are not comsumables. Tricksters are not breakfast cereal. Tricksters are ethereal. Tricksters only exist in a comic sense between two people who take pleasure in a language game and imagination, a noetic liberation of the mind. . . . 

                                                    ~ Gerald Vizenor, 1993