Mą’ii Narratives: Coyote

Animation has been a part of everyday life in mainstream America and Native American communities for decades. Contemporary Indigenous artists, animators, actors, directors, producers, and script writers, now more than ever, offer audiences a new angle on Native American culture in developing animation to voice Indigenous narratives both present and traditional. Native people have a wonderful respect for animation and understand the influence and power it has.

Based on traditional Navajo stories which have been told and passed along generations upon generations, they are an integral part of Navajo oral tradition. Coyote stories have been used to teach the young and are reminders to living a good life. Folded in humor and misadventure, the listener/reader learns that the results of Coyote’s selfishness, greed, tricks, and deceit are often painful and humiliating. 

Through frequent re-counting, Navajo children learn at a young age how to behave appropriately. The coyote is a classic iconic American animal, producing the oldest body of literature in North America in the form of Native and Non-Native coyote narratives from as far back as ten thousand years. Navajo cultural observances for coyote stories are intended for winter story-telling season specifically October through February.

The films represent a significant slice of film history and Native American animation history. Kent Tibbetts, the Director of the San Juan School District Media Center in Moab, Utah, a small community in southeast Utah near the Navajo Nation, and Don Mose, Jr., who was a Navajo cultural consultant, worked with Computer Image Corporation (CIC), a Denver-based firm who was at the time pioneering computer animation. They offered to create Coyote Tales in an experimental capacity and ultimately creating five 16 mm animated films. The project became a collaborative effort involving Navajo art students, elders, cultural consultants of San Juan School District, and CIC technicians.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.