Coyote (Máʼii) vs Raven

The disruptive Holy Person of the Diné origin story, whose theft of the Water Monster's child brings the flood of the lower world and whose impatience scatters the stars; Coyote stories are traditionally told only in winter.

Coyote stories hold a special place in Diné tradition, and many Diné people teach that they should be told only in winter. This entry summarises Coyote's role in published accounts of the origin story; readers who follow the seasonal practice may prefer to read it in winter.

The central figure of Tlingit and Haida oral tradition, who steals daylight from a wealthy old man's nested boxes at the head of the Nass River and, in a Haida telling, coaxes the first people from a clamshell on the beach at Haida Gwaii.

As the poet and translator Robert Bringhurst wrote of the Haida telling, Raven "never actually creates anything; he made the world by stealing, exchanging, redistributing, and generally moving things around." Both Tlingit and Haida traditions cast Raven this way: greedy, funny, and self-interested, yet the figure through whom the world's useful and beautiful things (daylight, salmon, the first people) come to be. Raven's stories are told today by Tlingit and Haida people as living oral tradition, and Sealaska Heritage Institute, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian nations' own cultural institution, publishes Raven stories for public audiences.