A Trickster Shared, With Local Variation, Across the Southwest

Coyote is among the most widely distributed trickster figures in North American Indigenous storytelling, appearing under various names and with locally distinct stories across a great many Southwestern, Great Basin and Plains peoples, and the Navajo Maii represents one specific, well documented regional tradition within this much broader pattern rather than a figure unique to the Dine alone; this atlas treats the Navajo Coyote tradition on its own terms here, consistent with how it treats Iktomi as the specifically Lakota register of a structurally comparable trickster role rather than collapsing distinct nations' trickster traditions into one undifferentiated figure. Navajo storytelling convention traditionally restricted the telling of Coyote stories to winter, the same seasonal restriction found in Lakota Iktomi storytelling, reflecting a broader pattern across several Indigenous North American oral traditions in which certain categories of sacred or powerful story are understood to carry real consequences if told outside their proper season, a convention some Navajo storytellers and communities continue to observe today.