4. Lutz writes: “Christianity is to Europe what the Transformer stories are to the Indigenous west coast of North America. Indigenous rationality rested on the transformer myths as European rationality and assumed superiority rested on Christian mythology” (First Contact 41). Connect this quotation to Wickwire’s surprise when she realizes that Coyote is able to “travel freely between pre-historical and historical time zones” (11) –thinking of Coyote as a master transformer. Now, consider that in Lutz’s survey of 200 contact performances, he mentions Coyote only once and this is in context with his accounts of first encounters having common “spiritual components.” And, in this story the story-tellers identify Simon Fraser as a manifestation of Coyote. According to Lutz, “[s]everal nlaka’pamux accounts of their meetings with Simon Fraser identify him as the ‘sun’; others suggest he was a manifestation of the transformer-trickster Coyote …” (“First Contact” 38). Or, another way to put this, is that Coyote the transformer appears as Simon Fraser. My question is why do you think it is that Coyote is so central in the stories that Robinson tells, both the ancient and the historical stories, yet is a small example in Lutz’s survey of over 200 stories? I am NOT asking you to critique Lutz’s discussion. Rather, look for your answer in Wickwire. In particular, pay attention to her comments about time, myth and history.
Lutz’s discussions focus on a singular moment, Coyote is a character that is (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut) “unstuck in time.” The approaches of Robinson and Lutz are completely different; Lutz and the anthropologists he cites are looking to, at first, situate these encounters in a temporal context, their approach falls within an academic realm, which means that information is privileged over creativity, whereas they are on more even ground in the stories of Robinson. What separates Robinson’s storytelling approach from the aforementioned scholars is that he seems to be more focused on elucidating patterns in history; less concerned with the moment, more so with the arc of time. Wendy Wickwire acknowledges Claude-Levi Strauss’s hot/cold framework of myth or legend near the introduction’s outset. While commonly Native storytelling is associated with the “cold” side of the binary (meaning the narratives take place in a “timeless and ahistorical” zone) Robinson’s storytelling blends the hot and cold approaches (Wickwire 11).
Lutz is concerned with the uniting factor of the “spiritual component” of these first stories, but other than this, he looks for disparities. As he notes, we should not “be surprised by conflicting versions of the same event” (Lutz 37). Robinson’s voice is a singular one and his stories, while separate, seem to take place all in the same semi-fictive realm. “The appearance of the Europeans was a novel manifestation, but it was not a threat to the indigenous spiritual ordering of the world… Rather than immediately destabilize traditional beliefs, the arrival of the Europeans was merely proof of the ongoing proof of these beliefs” (Lutz 38). Robinson does not see the arrival of Europeans as some breaking point between two mythical epochs, he rather fits their arrival into pre-existing contexts. Myths are ancient and well-worn with repeated telling, so one would think this should speak to their continuing relevance to modern day issues. As Wickwire says, “just as there were monsters roaming round in Coyote’s time, so too were monsters roaming through the landscape in more recent times” (14). Lutz’s analysis is experiential- how did each party in these early encounters react to and interpret the actions of the other? But Robinson is looking at the skeleton of history and fleshing it out in the image of his spiritual beliefs. Coyote reappears constantly throughout history because his persona is embodied by myriad historical figures.
The irony here is that, based on what I said above, one might be inclined to grant more credence to the scholarly analysis and retelling of first stories. It almost sounds like Robinson bends the historical material to fit the spiritual material but the opposite is true; the spiritual is what is mutable here, as it does not create narrative, it complements it. Franz Boas, however, bent his retellings to make Native myth seem “colder.” Wickwire quotes Michael Harkin’s assertion that the “collectors’ goal was to document ‘some overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people’” (22). She also notes how Boas himself omitted the appearance of a gun in a story James Teit had written to him (Wickwire 23). The short answer to the question is that Robinson’s approach is a mixture of the hot and cold; he finds a fork in the road, and takes it. “Sometimes I might tell stories and I might go too far in the one side like./ Than I have to come back and go on the one side from the same way” (Robinson, qtd. in Wickwire 13). Robinson seems aware of the necessity of mixing the historical and mythic elements in his stories which accounts for the frequency of Coyote’s appearances.
Works Cited
Lutz, John Sutton. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance.” Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007. Print. 30-45.
Robinson, Harry, and Wendy C. Wickwire. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Vancouver: Talon, 2005. Print.