A Coyote Reader

Anthropological linguist Bright, editor of The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, attempts in this ambitious new volume to explore the meaning and importance of the trickster figure Old Man Coyote for western Native Americans; he also inquires into the origins of the Coyote's character as a blend of human and coyote. Bright assembles an interesting collection of traditional Coyote tales as well as a good cross-section of original stories and poems by prominent contemporary Native writers such as Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose and Peter Blue Cloud. Coyote is revealed in all his complexity as prodigious traveler, brigand, sexual predator and demiurge shaper of the world. Unfortunately, in the end, Bright fails to answer the central questions of his inquiry and makes some dubious choices in his selections as well. He muddies the picture by including several tales from non-Native authors in order to consider Coyote's continuing power in the dominant culture. Equally questionable is his decision to ``adapt'' the stories recorded by Native storytellers into poetry in keeping with his belief in ``ethnopoetic'' translation methods. (Mar.)