Creator, clown, and catastrophe of many North American nations, and the only one of them currently colonizing your suburb.
Documented
Sacred and ridiculous at once
Coyote cycles from the Southwest, Plains, Plateau, and California nations make him co-creator of the world and constant saboteur of his own plans. Some nations restrict the tales to winter telling, treating them as living material, not content.
Assessment: Documented in collections across a continent. The restrictions themselves tell you the stories were taken seriously.
Stories
Beep beep
The cartoon version: a scrawny coyote with an Acme catalog, flattened for eighty years by a roadrunner. The sacred fool became a punchline about shipping delays.
Assessment: Pop culture absorbed the silhouette and discarded the theology. It happens to a lot of gods.
Interesting claims
The animal read the stories
The modern echo: while forests and rivals vanished, coyotes expanded their range across the entire continent in a century, into every major city, exactly the behavior the trickster tales predict.
Assessment: The range expansion is documented ecology. Whether it validates the mythology is a poem, not a paper.
Sources and further reading
Bright, A Coyote Reader
Toelken on Navajo seasonal telling restrictions
Southwest and Plateau Coyote cycle collections
USGS and urban ecology records of coyote range expansion
Worth asking
When the trickster is thriving and everyone else is endangered, who told the truer story?