Tricky Tricksters

Question: So when creating pantheons, especially for North America, how should I treat animal gods like Raven and Coyote? Those two specifically seem to be the most widespread gods among the many tribes, so which pantheon should they be placed in? Or should they play a role in every pantheon they appear in?

Coyote and Raven are tricksy people, aren't they? I've seen some pantheon-writers make them universal gods across all of North America, some that try to give them different faces in different areas, and some who even smash both of them together and call them the same Native American trickster-archetype guy. I'm sure you guys know this by now, but we're not big fans of mashing different gods together in spite of their differences no matter where in the world their religion was based, but sometimes you can't avoid it. So what do you do with the most famous tricksters?

Well, first of all, it's very easy to get an overly simplified image of what Raven and Coyote really are - because there are actually quite a few Ravens and Coyotes. Early recorders of folklore and myth in the Americas generally translated the names of gods literally, resulting in tales about Raven doing this and Coyote doing that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every god called "Coyote" is the same guy. Think about if the writers that recorded European myths had done that: you'd have stories of Thunder doing this and Lord doing that, and you'd end up with this weird conception that Thunder and Lord are two guys who just turn up in the religions of like five different civilizations across the continent. But in reality, Thor and Taranis and Brontes and Ukko all translate to "Thunder", while Zeus and Baal and Adonis and Baldur all translate to "Lord", and you might inadvertently be smashing a bunch of very different gods together just because you thought they had the same name.

Raven and Coyote have this same problem. Native American myths often involve personified animal spirits or deities, but the use of the same animal does not necessarily mean you're talking about the same god. The Pomo tribes of northern California tell stories about a Coyote, and so do the Crow tribes of Ohio, but they're separated by the same amount of distance as Rome is separated from the China, so how can we assume they're the same god? Instead of rolling with the name, or even the imagery (raven and coyote are pretty straightforward for purposes of art), we need to look at their myths and how they're treated in those different cultures.

I'm not a Coyote or Raven expert, sad to say, so I can't give you a direct "here's the Miwok version of Coyote, and here's the Navajo version of Coyote, and here's why they're different gods" spiel; you'll need to research them and decide that for yourself (any Native American scholars out there want to throw their opinions into the ring? Comments are open!). What I can recommend, however, is looking at the different Coyote stories from different tribes and seeing where they intersect and where they don't. If one native peoples' Coyote does or represents things that Coyotes in other native cultures aren't doing, chances are he's his own distinct figure and should get his own writeup as a god. If several cultures seem to tell the same or very similar stories about Raven and what he does, then it's more likely that they're all looking at the same god from slightly different angles, and it becomes a question of which of those cultures' pantheons you think his presence is most strong in. Just as you have to at some point say, "Okay, I'm putting my foot down and saying that Zeus and Baal are not the same guy even though they're both thunder-god pantheon-kings with unruly death and ocean brothers and a penchant for bulls", or, "Okay, I really can't make a good case to justify Kannon and Guanyin being different people when they have everything in common," so you have to look at Native American gods and decide when they're the same people and when they're not.

Once you get to that point, you'll have to go with your gut when it comes to deciding which pantheon to put a god who spans a few different cultures into. There are no hard and fast rules, but my suggestion is to see which pantheon he figures the biggest in - which culture thinks he's the most important and gives him the most face time? That's probably the one that is best considered his "home" pantheon, just as we consider Lugh one of the Tuatha because he's much more central and important in Irish myth than in the other nearby Celtic cultures that also include him. As a secondary concern, you might also consider which pantheon "needs" him more; if you're statting two nearby pantheons, and Coyote could be in either but one of them is struggling for members, maybe it would serve your game world better to put him there to give those people a stronger pantheon structure.

Problems like this - the general perception by most of us that the Native American tribes had basically the same gods across the entire vastness of North America - are one of the reasons that the official Scion line never included them and that fan attempts to do so often fall flat or come up as collections of general tropes rather than as part of vibrant and individual religions. In a broader scope, this is a problem with most things modern people try to do with Native American lore, because we tend to conceive of Native Americans themselves as this broad category of people who are basically the same thanks to our historical near-eradication of most of them and the resulting cultural crackdown that has all but erased any individual features they had left. We think of Native Americans as brown-faced people with braids and feathers, and unless we've actually gone out to study them, we really don't know the difference between Sioux and Cherokee and Navajo, despite the fact that assuming they must all be the same culture is as insane as assuming that everyone in Asia is from the same culture or that everyone in Europe speaks the same language.

My advice for those who want to work with Native American religions in Scion is always to go out and learn everything you possibly can about the particular tribes and areas you're interested in. Dive into the Zuni, read everything on the Algonquin you can get your hands on, and if you live near a museum or reservation festival dedicated to a Native American tribe, go out and see what you can learn from direct exposure. Never assume they're all the same people and that they therefore have the same gods, and never take the word of a dead white guy from the seventeenth century as gospel when you have so much awesome modern scholarship and opportunity to find out more at your fingertips now.

Coyote and Raven aren't necessarily just Coyote and Raven, and the only way to give them a fair shake is to get down into their stories and decide for yourself how much they overlap and where they're different; after all, simply having the same animal totem doesn't make gods anywhere else in the world identical. It's a lot of work, but it's one hundred percent worth it to have a pantheon at the end that is as independent, rich and mythically resonant as all the others that Scion already offers.

(Yes, I totally want to write some Native American pantheons, starting with the Inuit, but you guys keep voting for more white people for some reason, so that may be a while.)