By Matthew Kincanon | FāVS News Reporter
Among the various Indigenous tribes in the U.S., Coyote is a creator in many stories, but also a trickster, who takes on various roles. Two Indigenous authors have incorporated the character and his stories into their recent books, where the entity helps discuss some sensitive subjects while helping people better understand themselves.
Finding healing and releasing shame
Cree Whelshula’s (enrolled Coeur d’Alene, descendant of Arrow Lakes of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Spokane Tribe, Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, and Chippewa Cree) recent book “Healing Ain’t Cute,” according to the synopsis on Amazon, blends psychology and Native philosophy to explore trauma and its effects on the brain, as well as healing through humor and how pain becomes medicine through movement, prayer and laughter.
“It is not about perfection. It is about power in the mess. It is about finding humor in the hurt and ceremony in the chaos,” the synopsis said.
After facing some challenges in the last year, Whelshula, who writes under the pseudonym Falcon Wildshoe, has been working on healing and self-reflection, especially in the context of struggles she has had with her own mental health. She has been searching for solutions while working on herself.
Indigenous people face many mental health issues in the U.S. According to the NIH in 2024, Indigenous communities face disproportionate rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance use disorders, and suicide risks, adding that “cultural sensitivities, historical contexts, and tailored care approaches significantly elevate treatment and care strategies.”
She also feels a lot of people she has spent time with in the last several months are in the same boat as her and a lot of the information she has found for herself was difficult to share without giving them a full lecture. There are also people, she said, who are not ready to hear about these kinds of things.
“I felt like if I put it into a book, that people who felt ready would at least have access to it and be able to digest it at their own pace,” she said.
One thing she has learned is that many issues are rooted in relationships, the trauma due to boarding schools and colonization and has to do with attachment wounds and emotional scars.
One of the goals of the book is to allow people to release some of the shame that comes with issues such as depression, anxiety or chronic fatigue. She said her book delves into what causes this and offers ways on how to address it.
Coyote: Teacher and disruptor
How does Coyote play in all this? Whelshula said the character is the embodiment of duality; he can be the most harmful but also the most healing. That energy is shown in the book where someone can be chaotic and still be healing, and they don’t have to be perfect all the time.
Also, when she was younger, she had a stuffed Wiley Coyote toy that was her favorite but lost him at a party at a rollerskating rink, which really upset her and that memory stuck with her. Several months ago, she was thinking about it and decided to buy herself a new one, feeling that it was part of healing her childhood self.
“Coyote is the teacher who shows you that even your worst mistakes can become medicine,” the description on Amazon said. “He will call your trauma your spiritual side quest, remind you that you are not broken, just colonized, tired, and probably hungry, and then tell you to drink some water and get back to work.”
Coyote, she said, represents the parts of people that learn through mistakes, embarrassment, contradiction and lived experience rather than perfection. She explained healing is often messy and nonlinear, and he reflects that truth.
“Instead of presenting healing as something tidy or aspirational, Coyote allows me to show how growth actually happens in real life,” she said. “Through humor, missteps and uncomfortable realizations, Coyote reminds us that wisdom does not come from being flawless. It comes from surviving, reflecting, and continuing forward with more awareness.”
Making difficult conversations more accessible
Her book focuses on turning pain into power and understanding how, she said, “some of our biggest lessons are through mistakes, and embracing that as part of the journey and not looking at that as failures or shame,” she said.
She explained how Coyote makes difficult conversations more accessible because he invites laughter, humility and honesty. When topics like anxiety, shame or depression are filtered through Coyote, she said they feel less clinical and less isolating.
“He creates emotional permission to admit struggle without attaching moral failure to those experiences. Humor becomes a doorway, not a way to minimize pain, but a way to soften defenses so people can recognize themselves in the stories,” she said. “Coyote lets readers breathe while still sitting with very real and heavy emotions.”
Even though the book is written from the perspective of being Indigenous, Whelshula feels it contains a lot of useful information for anyone who reads it, especially those who deal with shame and guilt or are struggling.
She wants readers to see that if someone as flawed, impulsive and chaotic as Coyote can still be sacred, important, and necessary, then so can they. His stories, she explained, remind people that worth is not erased by mistakes, and that redemption is not about becoming perfect, but about remaining human and continuing to learn.
Understanding family through Coyote
Whelshula is not the only Indigenous author whose book uses Coyote to talk about difficult subjects. Oscar nominee Julian Brave NoiseCat’s (Canim Lake Band Tsq’secen) recent book, “We Survived the Night” is about his relationship with his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, and the trauma, survival and identity of Indigenous people in North America.
According to the synopsis, NoiseCat “grapples with the erasure of North America’s First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, while illuminating the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental and political movements reshaping the future.”
Working on this while he was making his film “Sugarcane,” he used elements of his people’s oral history to ornament the text. As he worked on it, he noticed parallels between Coyote and his father.
“Coyote is your epic creator and destroyer who makes the world and yet is also a fool and an abandoner of his kids,” NoiseCat said.
Once he saw the parallels, he realized part of the purpose of the Coyote stories was to get at some of the trickster ways of the patriarchs in families, transforming the book and remade it into an effort to bring back to life a nearly-dead trickster tradition of his people.
In the Coyote stories, he found a tradition that spoke to the complexities of masculinity and human nature that helped him understand his father. These stories also helped NoiseCat understand his family, himself and the Indian world he has been reporting on for the last decade.
Understanding North America and human nature through Coyote
One of the stories he shares is when Coyote breaks a fish trap and leads the fish up the river in the beginning of time. Interestingly, NoiseCat said, the place where the fish trap was broken was where 11,000 years ago experts said there was an ice dam holding up a series of glacial lakes across the interior of British Columbia. This story is described in the chapter “General Theories of Indian Relativity.”
“These are serious works of oral literature that demand to be taken seriously by the humanities that get at the truths about our nature as human beings, truths about significant, environmental and cultural histories of North America; of a people who are able to, in our oral history, remember an event that happened 11,000 years ago and pass it generation to generation,” NoiseCat said.
Coyote stories, he said, are not just important to his people but are essential to understanding the history of North America and human nature. He also described how entertaining they are with their humor and wordplay.
“The central character is a guy who’s always out there tricking and getting tricked, and stealing stuff and getting his stuff stolen. They’re very lively stories,” he said.
Understanding Indigenous way of life and identity through Coyote
For stories like Coyote’s to be passed down from one generation to the next, they need to be engaging and memorable, rather than lectures, he said. This would explain why the tradition is so lively, funny and entertaining.
Part of the implicit purpose of the book is to say people can’t understand Indigenous life and the history of North America and current affairs without Indigenous peoples, their cultures, ways of life and interconnectedness, he said.
The title of the book comes from his own Tribe’s way of life, derived from the traditional way of giving a morning greeting, which translates to “You survived the night.”
After learning that, NoiseCat wondered what it was like for his ancestors to greet one another with that acknowledgement, particularly in the winter of 1863 when two-thirds of their nation died of smallpox or when the children were taken away to residential schools.
“I think that there’s a lot of poetry, social commentary and sort of dark humor in that phrase and I think that combination of social commentary, poetry and dark humor is something I try to carry throughout the text,” he said.
The core of ‘We Survived the Night’
While the book at its core is a father-son narrative, it also includes a prominent non-Native mother character.
“It is a story about someone who is a child of two worlds, both a Native world and a non-Native world and trying to navigate what it means to be Indigenous in an era when that is something that has just now started to come back into strength,” NoiseCat said.
He added the book is about people’s relationships with their parents, the land, culture and traditions, asks questions about what gives people meaning and what connects them, and gets at questions about spirituality and life and death.
“Those are all things that I think Indigenous life and stories can help us better understand, but you don’t have to be Indigenous to care about them,” he said.
Whelshula’s book can be purchased here, and NoiseCat’s book can be purchased here.
FāVS News uses professional journalists and thoughtful commentary to explore faith, values and ethics. Support journalism like this by making a tax-deductible donation. FāVS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
