American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Like many native groups of western North American, the Karok of Northwestern California believed that the earth had once been inhabited by a pre-human race - the ikxareeyavs, translatable as "First People." Their myths describe the adventures, the loves, and the misfortunes of these people during a period of time which ends with the spontaneous emergence of the human species. At that point, the First People are transformed into animals, plants, inanimate objects, or intangible spirits-often after an announcement that, "When human beings come, they will live in such-and-such a way." The most famous of the First People is Coyote, who appears in many myths and plays the same paradoxical (but all-too-human) combination of roles as he does in the literature of other tribes: lawgiver and hero, but also trickster, buffoon, and dupe. Karok myths are told in different ways by different individuals -and, indeed, in slightly different ways even by single individuals. A narration which is told as a complete myth by one person may be only an episode in a longer myth told by another person. Nevertheless, some of the best-known Karok stories deal with a famous journey, in which Coyote travels from the "Center of the Earth" far to the north, upriver to Klamath Falls, to seek shell-money-but fails, floats (or is chased) downstream, all the way to the river-mouth at Requa, but finally "hitch-hikes" back to his home at Panamniik (modern Orleans). It is tempting, from our European viewpoint, to hypothesize an "original" or "complete" or "correct" version of Coyote's Journey; but such a concept is probably meaningless in a preliterate (and, furthermore, highly individualistic) society like that of the Karok. It is more likely that episodes have been combined, detached, or modified by individual story-tellers over a period of many centuries. I should emphasize, then, that the arrangement of incidents into the single narrative which appears below is my doing; I do not know that any Karok narrator ever put elements together in exactly this way. My motive is to offer a sample of Coyote's adventures, translated in a style which aims to preserve as much as possible of Karok literary structure, while still being accessible to English-speaking readers.