Father Berard Haile - Navajo Coyote Tales: The Curly Tó Aheedlíinii Version

This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are productsof the authors imagination or are used in a fictional setting. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1984 by the University of Nebraska Press

All rights reserved

Published in collaboration with LUFA-type and the Museum of Northern Arizona

First Bison Books printing: 1984

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Haile, Berard, 18741961.
Navajo coyote tales.
(American tribal religions; v. 8)
English and Navajo.
1. Navajo IndiansLegends. 2. Indians of North AmericaSouthwest, NewLegends. 3. Coyote (Legendary character) 4. Navajo languageTexts. I. Luckert, Karl W., 1934 II. Title. III. Series.
E99.N3H243 1984 398.24529744420979 83-23462
ISBN 0-8032-2330-7
ISBN 0-8032-7222-7 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-7473-0 (electronic: e-pub)
ISBN 13: 978-0-8032-7474-7 (electronic: mobi)

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Acknowledgments

When a book of this kind finally appears in finished form, its editor owes thanks to a number of friendly people and institutions. First and foremost he appreciates the enthusiasm with which the late Curly T Aheedlinii has cooperated with Father Berard to make his Coyote legends available, in writing, for future generations. Special thanks are due to the Franciscan Missionary Union for granting permission to add yet another work of Father Berard to the growing list of American Tribal Religions monographs. Copies of the manuscript are being stored in University of Arizona Special Collections and at the Museum of Northern Arizona. Both institutions have graciously assisted the editor during his research and furnished working copies of the manuscript. Irvy W. Goossen has again transcribed Father Berards original orthography, to make it correspond to contemporary written Navajo. The Navajo text has been typeset by Ursula Luckert. For the introductory essay helpful suggestions were offered by Ekkehart Malotki.

Karl W. Luckert

Coyote in Navajo and Hopi Tales

An introductory essay
to Volumes Eight and Nine
of the American Tribal Religions series
by Karl W. Luckert

ROAMING IN RELIGION AMONG GODS

Volumes Eight and Nine of the American Tribal Religions monograph series present Coyote tales of the Navajo and Hopi Indians. Coyote tales, in books dedicated to the publication of religious documents, are destined to raise some eyebrows. What does the Coyote of Navajo and Hopi mythology have to do with religion? Is Coyote perhaps a divine being or god? Quite naturally, these questions immediately raise the more basic issue of definitions. What is religion? What are gods? The first of these questions, concerning the definition of religion, pertains to the scope of this monograph series, the second affects our understanding of mythological characters in every volume.

Religion is a category of thought conceived by and for Western minds. Every category under which world-wide phenomena are being classified is, in some sense, inadequate for its task. Categories, in order to be useful, must be broad enough to accommodate data from a variety of cultures all over the world; they must in a precise manner differentiate their contents from subject matters which do not belong. Because definition-makers also belong to specific cultures, their personal histories of thought can never be completely isolated from their task. How restrictive might a definition of religion be?

A popular example of an overly restrictive definition is the case of religion being defined in terms of some notions about the supernatural. This definition limits our perception of religious phenomena to culture areas of the world in which nature is believed to be clearly definable. Not everywhere in the world have peoples perspectives of their world become schizoid in the same manner as oursnature/supernatural, matter/spirit, physics/metaphysics. On the contrary, most peoples of the world revere gods who manifest themselves visibly within the realm we comprehend as nature and who easily drift away from that realm, extra-naturally. A Western commentator, though he may have a clear historical perspective of this issue, finds himself nevertheless in a quandary when he tries to explain it. The statement, that most gods in the world are manifest materially as well as spiritually, subscribes, implicitly and too quickly, to the matter/spirit dichotomy of the Indo-European worldview. Once an ontology has been cut into opposing halves, and once the parts have in a given language been named, speakers of that language will thenceforth have great difficulty thinking about that which once was an undivided whole. Most peoples of the world do not divide reality exactly in the same manner as we Indo-Europeans; their worlds tend to break along fault lines which are indigenous to their own experience. They are more likely to resolve our matter/spirit dichotomy by distinguishing, instead, various degrees of visibility among such entities which we have classified as matter. The corollary, degrees of invisibility, includes for most peoples what we Indo-Europeans have all too quickly vaporized into the category of spirit. All this adds up to saying that the religions, of people who do not think material nature, and who therefore do not distinguish nature and the supernatural, cannot be understood fairly by applying our alien definition.

Another definition of religion, as reverence for and dependence on God or gods, is also overly restrictive. This definition deprives the historian of religions of the flexibility which he needs to understand the sudden religious counter-movements which denounce the gods of earlier traditions and in protest declare them non-existent. Primitive Buddhism, Marxism, and other such atheisms are cases in point.

Religion defined as human response to manifestations of sacred realities (i.e. hierophanies), is an adequate statement as long as ones audience consists of people who cherish among their own memories personal encounters with qualitatively describable sacred realities. This writer can no longer assume such an audience. He therefore defines religion quantitatively in terms of what is greater, as mans response to so-conceived greater-than-human configurations of reality.

Every human being lives in three proportionally distinct dimensions of reality. He lives among so-conceived greater realities, among potential equals, and among so-conceived lesser realities. Lesser entities can be manipulated, experimented with, conquered and controlled; human aggression and progress, the sciences, technology and the arts, all score heavily as involvements in this dimension of reality. At the middle of the spectrum potential equals share, communicate, and compete with one another; social cooperation and humanistic learning thrive at this balance point of equality in accordance with the Golden Rule. By so-conceived greater-than-human configurations of reality a human being is fascinated, awed, scared, experimented with or dealt with in some other fashion, tranquilized and eventually done in. Thus, ranging from fascination, which is the mildest form of religious experience, to mystic surrender or death which constitutes the most intense, religion encompasses half of all possible degrees of human experience and ontological involvement.