In almost every Native mythology of North America there is a character who is hard to classify. He is clever and foolish, creator and destroyer, generous and greedy, capable of grand deeds and ridiculous blunders. Scholars call him the trickster. He has different names and forms among different peoples: Coyote, Raven, Hare, Spider, Nanabozho. Understanding him means understanding a way of telling the sacred very far from our own habits.
A contradictory character
The trickster is neither a god in the usual sense nor a simple hero. He is often a being of the first times, when the world did not yet have its present shape. Through his actions, sometimes intended and sometimes accidental, he brings about things that still exist: fire, light, death, the shapes of animals, landscapes.
At the same time, the trickster breaks every rule. He is hungry, vain, a liar, obsessed with sex and food. He falls into his own traps, is killed and comes back to life, makes a fool of himself in front of everyone. Stories about him were often told in winter, around the fire, and made the audience laugh, children included.
Coyote
Coyote is the most widespread trickster in the West: on the Plains, in the Great Basin, in California, the Southwest and the Plateau. In many stories he takes part in the creation of the world or changes its order. A story found in several variants explains why death is final: Coyote decides that the dead must not return, and when his own son later dies he asks in vain for the rule to be changed.
In other stories Coyote steals fire for humans, scatters the stars across the sky in disorder instead of arranging them carefully, or tries to imitate other animals and fails comically. His greed always leads him to go too far.
Raven who steals the light
On the Northwest Coast, among the Tlingit, Haida and neighbouring peoples, the trickster is Raven. His most famous story explains the origin of light. In the beginning the world was dark, because an old chief kept the sun, the moon and the stars in closed boxes in his house.
Raven turned himself into a cedar needle or a speck of dust and fell into the water the chief's daughter was drinking. She became pregnant and gave birth to a child, who was Raven himself. The grandfather adored his grandson and, to stop him crying, let him play with the boxes one after another. The child opened them, freed the stars and the moon and finally, taking back his bird form, flew off with the sun. In some versions, the smoke of the smoke hole he escaped through turned him black forever.
Nanabozho
Among the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes the trickster, who is also a culture hero, is Nanabozho, also called Nanabush or Wenabozho. Sometimes he looks human, sometimes like a great hare. In a very important story he rebuilds the earth after a flood: several animals dive to bring up a little mud from the bottom of the water, and only the small muskrat succeeds, at the cost of its life. Nanabozho places the mud on the back of a turtle and the land grows from there. This is why many Native peoples call North America «Turtle Island».
Nanabozho teaches humans many things, but he is also the hero of grotesque misadventures, which show what happens when greed takes over.
Iktomi, the Spider
Among the Lakota the trickster is Iktomi, the Spider, who can take human form. He is cunning and talkative, deceives others but often ends up deceived. Iktomi stories also served to teach children to recognise vanity and lies.
Why the trickster is sacred
In 1956 the anthropologist Paul Radin published a study of the trickster cycle of the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk), accompanied by essays by Carl Gustav Jung and Károly Kerényi. Since then the trickster has become a central figure in the comparative study of myth.
Interpretations are many, but some ideas recur:
- the trickster shows the boundaries of human behaviour by crossing them;
- he embodies the disorderly creativity from which the world arises before rules;
- the laughter he provokes is not irreverence, but a way of passing on teachings;
- his defeats make the price of selfishness plain.
Many Native storytellers prefer not to reduce these stories to «symbols». They are tales to be heard in the right season, from those who know how to tell them, and their meaning grows with the listener.
In short
- The trickster is a figure both creative and foolish found in many Native mythologies.
- Coyote dominates the stories of the West and often explains the origin of death and disorder.
- Raven, on the Northwest Coast, steals the sun and releases light into the world.
- Nanabozho rebuilds the earth on a turtle's back: Turtle Island.
- The laughter of the stories carries moral and religious teachings.
