A book that will not hold still
Coyote’s Bones is only a slim gathering, but it may be the most accurate formal portrait of Jaime de Angulo available. It moves from childhood recollection to comic family sketch, from Native California narrative to psychological speculation, and from song to compressed lyric without accepting that these activities belong to separate professions. The discontinuity is not editorial failure. It is the shape of a life that passed through medicine, linguistics, anthropology, poetry, radio, and ranch work while remaining fully at home in none of them.
This makes the volume unusually useful for reading de Angulo. A conventional monograph would have made him look more settled than he was. Here the seams remain visible. The scholar, raconteur, translator, and self-created Old Coyote interrupt one another, making it impossible to decide where field record ends and literary performance begins. That instability demands caution, but it also tells the truth about cultural transmission: stories do not arrive without a teller, and the teller never arrives without a history.
The person who still has bones
The book’s central image comes from “The Man Who Went to the Land of the Dead.” A grieving husband follows his dead wife beneath the sea and enters Coyote’s country. The dead recognize him as an intrusion because he still has bones. He cannot remain, but Old Man Coyote gives him a song for the return journey. The episode turns bone into a double sign. Bone marks the mortal burden that excludes the man from the dead, yet it also marks the body capable of returning, singing, and bearing witness.
The story therefore resists an easy spiritualization of grief. The husband is not rewarded with escape from embodiment. He is returned to the world carrying a dangerous form of knowledge. His later dancing appears excessive and socially troubling; those around him do not receive his altered status as uncomplicated wisdom. De Angulo preserves the disquieting remainder of initiation: someone may come back from an ordeal with a song and still have no secure place in the community that must hear it.
The shaman at the edge
The poems gathered near the end deepen that problem. Their medicine people are not triumphant spiritual celebrities. They are wounded, ridiculous, isolated, exhausted, or dismissed. Power appears as an obligation that can make ordinary membership difficult. In “The Very Old Shaman,” the elder who seems useless sits on what are finally revealed as Coyote’s bones; what looks like social remainder becomes protection during the storm.
That reversal matters for any psychology tempted to idealize shamanism. The shamanic figure is not simply the culture’s honored healer. He or she may also be the person made strange by contact with what the collective cannot comfortably absorb. De Angulo knew the seduction of identifying with that position, and the book cannot be treated as neutral evidence about Indigenous traditions. But it can be read as evidence about the psychic and social cost of the intermediary role he repeatedly imagined and inhabited.
Ethnography after the footnote
De Angulo’s reflections on perception and thought contain the strengths and liabilities of early twentieth-century anthropology. He notices that abstract Western classifications can sever thought from feeling, place, family, and animal life. He also generalizes across peoples and sometimes installs “the Indian” as the corrective image Western consciousness needs. The writing is most valuable when the reader holds both facts at once: he heard relationships that disciplinary science often filtered out, and he remained a culturally situated mediator capable of distortion.
The book’s broken archive is therefore more than a curiosity. De Angulo often survives in scholarship as a citation, source, eccentric informant, or marginal intermediary. Coyote’s Bones reverses that scale. The material ordinarily pushed into the footnote—the song, the scandalous life, the uncertainty of transmission—moves into the main text and shows how much of the argument the margin had been carrying all along.
Where to read next
Read Coyote’s Bones beside Old Time Stories to hear how voice and song change the tales, and beside A Jaime de Angulo Reader for the wider field of his memoir, fiction, and ethnographic writing. Paul Radin’s The Trickster supplies a productive contrast: Radin pursues a comparative figure, while de Angulo makes the instability of the teller part of the evidence.