More Trickster for 2014

Native American literature is known not only for creation myths but also for trickster figures such as Coyote, Raven, and Rabbit. The picture of the coyote above is from Wikimedia Commons.

To begin with, here is the site where I found the Mayan tale "Coyote and The Hen" and the story of "Coyote's Adventures in Idaho" as well as stories about the other tricksters.  I really like that this site notes where a number of tales come from.  

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/loreindx.html

To find out which stories come from our area, here is a map.   

Here a professor from Pittsburg State University in Kansas discusses the trickster in Native American culture.  This site also contains links to various tribes' stories about Coyote.  

 https://web.archive.org/web/20110222015434/http://members.cox.net/academia/coyote.html

The author of this site from the College of the Siskiyous in California discusses Native American traditional prose narratives in general:

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/index.htm

(The picture above is from Trinity University's online journal on trickster studies.)

For more detailed information, see Wyman P. Meinzer's contribution to a 1995 symposium on the coyote in the American Southwest:

 https://web.archive.org/web/20090730021916/http://texnat.tamu.edu/symposia/coyote/p30.htm

Here are a few more stories about Coyote:

http://www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/wa.html

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/legend_001.htm

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/flood.htm

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/coyote.htm

  

Other trickster figures are Raven and Rabbit.  As you will see below, different tribes in different regions had their tricksters.  Alaska and the Pacific Northwest had Raven.

To see Gordon Miller's watercolor of Raven, see this link below:  

http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/nwca/nwcam11e.shtml

In the Southeastern U.S., Rabbit was the trickster.  

Here is a link to Professor Hanlon's article:  

http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/tales/rabbitotter.htm

Then once you move to Africa and the Caribbean, the trickster is Anansi the Spider.  In South Carolina, this figure is called Aunt Nancy.

Tricksters appear in other cultures' stories as well.  Reynard the Fox, a figure from French folktales, is depicted below.  (The picture comes from Wikimedia Commons, but it originally appeared in a children's book from the 1860s.)