Describing first contact between European visitors and the indigenous peoples of North America, John Sutton Lutz goes into much detail on the topics of translation and means of communication of such events. For him, these events are rich, and “elaborately staged” (Lutz 7), reverberating with aftershocks from the “collision of fundamentally different systems of thought” (Lutz 2). There are special people, known as translators, who perform delicate work at the edges of such a cataclysm. They are “Coyote- [and] … Raven-work[ers]” (Lutz 10), transforming and muddling the facts of the collision into their own unique narratives. But after the translators are done their job, we are left with their epics to keep and pass down the generations essentially without revision.

Wendy Wickwire offers us another perspective on translation. Her good friend and storyteller Harry Robinson is a translator; his stories come from the Okanagan language, nsyilxcən, and he adapted them into English to accommodate his “growing number of listeners” (Wickwire 29). But my understanding of Wickwire’s explanation gives me the impression that any storyteller is a translator, if not through language, then through time and place. This is the Coyote work: making sense of the stories we hear, and then making them accessible or meaningful or hilarious to those we share them with. Just as the only thing we can expect from Coyote is that he will never behave according to our expectations, so too do storytellers turn us on edge when they reveal information and perspective that we never saw coming. Take Robinson’s ethnographically unmanageable story of Coyote and the king of England, for example. Coyote is the tricked party in this story, as the agreement so earnestly negotiated between the two during their meeting is never brought to action in Canada. Robinson negotiates themes of dishonesty and selfishness with an eye both to European historical narratives and the omnipresent Coyote.

Wickwire asserts that Robinson is no “myth-teller— the bearer of the single, communal accounts rooted in the deep past” (29). By this she means his stories transcend the expectations scholars, historians, and ethnographers place on them, namely that they be faithful, timeless reproductions of narratives from the earliest possible translators. But this is not what Coyote does. He is “right there” and alive (Wickwire 1) anytime we open a door to his world. And in with Coyote come refreshed perspectives and new, personalized approaches to old narratives.

Robinson’s story of the two twins, Coyote and the younger white one, challenge the perception of first contact as a uniquely cataclysmic encounter when he describes the preordained nature of the invasion of North America by the younger twin’s relatives, the Europeans. We can see the potential for disaster in the return of the Europeans in this story, but its translation from a typical myth of first contact puts that event in its place along with other significant events, for instance the creation story of the two siblings and the role of each in the present. We also see the inseparability of each side in the encounter— we are twins, after all!

Coyote urges us to reconsider everything, especially the stories we tell, because this is how we as individuals identify and claim a place in the world. He reminds us that completely static, pre-translated stories can deny us part of our basic human need to involve ourselves in our own stories, whether we create them ourselves or shape them from the ones we picked up from our translators.

Works Cited

Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 1 – 15. Print.

“About Our Language.” FirstVoices nsyilxcən Welcome Page, 2013. Web. 07 February 2014.

“Wendy Wickwire.” University of Victoria, n.d. Web. 07 February 2014.

Wickwire, Wendy. “Introduction.” Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory, by Harry Robinson. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 1 – 30. Print.