episodic tales, the first of which, The Age of Beginnings, narrates the ascent of the progenitors of Earth's inhabitants from storey to storey of the Underworld, and their final emergence upon Earth" As the story develops Coyote guides the humans down to earth while badger continues to the underworld. "One day they saw the Sky stooping down and the earth rising to meet it. At the point of contact, Coyote and Badger sprang down from the world above; Badger descended into the world below, but Coyote remained with the people (First Man)" He also appears in a legend of the White Mountain Apache, "Coyote fights a lump of pitch" (a variant of the Tar-Baby theme), and in similar legends of the Zapotec and Popoluca of Mexico. Coyote plays a prominent role in many stories in the Diné (Navajo) mythos; see Coyote (Navajo mythology). Functional cognates Coyote is compared to both the Scandinavian Loki, and also Prometheus, who shared with Coyote the trick of having stolen fire from the gods as a gift for mankind, and Anansi, a mythological culture hero from Western African mythology. In Eurasia, rather than a coyote, a fox is often featured as a trickster hero, ranging from kitsune (fox) tales in Japan to the Reynard cycle in Western Europe. Claude Lévi-Strauss, French anthropologist proposed a structuralist theory that suggests that Coyote and Crow obtained mythic status because they are mediator animals between life and death. Language revitalization and preservation Coyote figures prominently in a number of Indigenous language and cultural and preservation projects in North America. For example, the Secwepemc people of the Kamloops Indian Band in Kamloops, British Columbia, have named their recently opened elementary school the Sk'elep School of Excellence, while educational websites such as one co-sponsored by the Neskonlith Indian Band of Chase, British Columbia prominently feature stories about Sk'elep. See also Huehuecoyotlh References 9. Cooper, Guy. “World Mythology.” World Mythology, by Roy G. Willis, vol. 1, Metro Books, 2012, pp. 220–234. External links Native American Coyote Mythology Coyote, He/She Was Going There: Sex and Gender in Native American Trickster Stories Trickster: Shaman of the Liminal Mythological canines Animal gods Trickster gods Creator gods Shapeshifters Mythologies of the indigenous peoples of North America Coyotes in religion Mythological archetypes