How Death Came into This World

One of the most well-versed in reanimation is the trickster, Coyote, who was there at creation, along with Creator, singing it into being, taking part in the salvage process that made the world. He has died countless times in the stories told across tribes and languages, in bookstores, and through the recordings in the archives—stuck on repeat, always coming back to life. Most significantly, Coyote risked his own life in order to bring Death into this world.

Immediately after creation, it is said, he made his intentions clear: “I, Coyote, going along in this world, will ruin it.”1 Establishing his authority as “the First Being of olden times,” he claims, “I say let the old people die when they die/Someone who’s dead is not going to wake up. . . . The world is made with Death in it.” Challenging Creator’s monologue and the intention to create a world consistent throughout, without error or the absence that Death introduces, he says, “it’s not going to be just your world,” thereby inserting difference into the Creator’s sameness and subverting possession in the right of creation.2 Creator responds with a threat: “‘Well, now,’ replied Earthmaker, / ‘if you talk like that, / you’ll not be in this world for long.’”

Creator advised the beings of the world to kill Coyote, so that he could do no more harm, no more mischief, and everyone could live eternally and in peace without Coyote’s bringing death into the world. But this was not enough. “‘At the same time,’ said Earthmaker. / ‘All of you go and find every place / where Coyote has pissed or shat! / Don’t any of you miss the places / where he has scratched the dirt.’”3 And they did, seeking out every site marked by Coyote, of which he was both promiscuous and thorough: “He pissed on every kind of thing there was / and scratched up the ground with his hind feet. / He went everywhere, even up toward the land of the Spirit Masters.”4 The beings sought out all of these places, destroying them and rubbing them out, even going so far as to gather together all of his “droppings.” Eventually they captured Coyote himself.

Lacking the courage to physically harm Coyote, the beings placed him on an islet in the middle of a very deep and fast-moving stream. “‘Here you will die!’ they said. ‘You who are so clever with words—here you will starve to death!’”5 The verbal mastery of Coyote is countered with the act of starvation. They waited on the bank of the river for four days to make sure Coyote was dead.

Meanwhile, Coyote was still on the islet.

After awhile, he shat. A gopher head crawled out.

“What shall I do?” Coyote asked the gopher head.

“Give me good counsel!”

“Well,” said the gopher head,

“if you just stay here like you are you will die!”

“Ah! That’s the way you always talk to me,” said Coyote.

Then, when he had strained again,

a bunch of dry grass crawled out.

“What am I to do?” asked Coyote.

“How shall I survive? Advise me well!”

“Why, you must just turn yourself into mist,”

said the bunch of grass,

“and then, when the mist rises

and floats up off the river at dawn,

it will carry you along with it

and bring you to shore.

When you have called out,

then, from the midst of the high country,

the places where you have pissed,

where you have scratched up the ground—

even where you have lifted your leg against a clump of grass—

these places will answer you.”

“Whenever this bunch of dry grass talks to me,

it always gives me good advice,” exclaimed Coyote.

He stuck the grass back where it came from

and plugged it up with the gopher head.6

After turning into mist and leaving the islet, Coyote goes on to escape death two more times before Creator and the other beings finally give up, allowing Coyote to his devices. There is always a second chance, a movement of the imagination, where there can be found a prototype of the collective soul. It is no accident that the trickster was marooned on an islet, and it is no accident that it was the second time he asked the question, to the second interlocutor, the grass, the rhizome, wherein Coyote receives his second chance at life in the form of mist. Grass, the material of baskets, the hider of bones, the diffuse, gives Coyote his power of dispersion, both through transformation into mist and through the return to Coyote’s own diffuse markings—territorial pissings and scratchings. In this way, between the islet and the erased territory, Coyote finds a way.

This way, however, marked as it is by the event of Death, an event made possible by Coyote’s own repeated escapes from this event, is a way of nonarrival. The Creator is tricked into allowing Death to enter the world, and it is this death that disturbs ownership through divesting the rights of monologic creation. In seeking to interrupt this event, Creator and the other beings locate the site of contestation in territorialized land, as it is through the erasure of Coyote’s own territorial markings that they seek to stop Death’s arrival. Death as interruption of eternal life and Life as incessant interruption of Death’s arrival are played out as if in a game over ownership of territory, and this ownership is made through either creation of territory or a secondary marking. The land, marked and unmarked, is made to bear the traces of this masculine altercation, and these traces are either erased and ghostly, as in the dispersed voices of Coyote’s rubbed-out markings, or they are the footsteps written into the land that mark the path of Creator’s passing when he gave up and left the world (mostly in rocks and stream beds).

The arrival of Death is a nonarrival, or perhaps the arrival of nonarrival. In creation, everything has fully arrived, eternal, extending out like points becoming lines on to infinity. And it is only through a killing that occurs before Death has arrived—the killing of Coyote who wills Death’s arrival (one that includes a social assemblage of all the other beings in the world: the hunting party)—that the arrival can be maintained and the event of nonarrival can be stopped. To kill before death exists in this world is to not just produce a paradox but to disturb the very foundations of arrival, in the form of creation itself. Coyote, if killed before the arrival of Death, would have gone on dying forever, never released from the starvation feeding off his clever words. Caught between the tongue and the stomach, he would have been the one exception, the sacrifice that would have ensured the continued existence of every other being to infinity.

But what happened on that islet? Coyote was given a second chance in response to a second question. Taking the suggestion offered up by grass, the second thing to come out of his anus, he became mist and escaped across the water, calling to and called by the places he had marked, though these markings had been erased. Is this not a new beginning? Does not Coyote re-create the world through transforming into the barely material form of mist, akin to spirit, and splitting time between a world that still bears his mark and one erased and unmarked? Mirroring the forking of the river’s path by the islet, a forking of time occurs, allowing Coyote to survive and beat the Creator at his own game. Did Coyote also die on that islet?