Before...

(Translated from Nsyilxcen – (Syilx)Native American-Okanagan)

The Old One was bored. The great being had fashioned the Earth from a woman and had spent many eons with her as a companion. Their conversations were wonderful, but nothing ever changed so there was little to talk about after a while. The animals of the Earth were interesting for a while, but they were creatures of habit and rarely did anything out of the ordinary. They were creatures of instinct. Earth offered her body to the Old One to make new beings that had a will of their own and would provide for countless eons of entertainment for the Old One. At first, the Old One wouldn’t hear of it. The great being refused to sacrifice the only friend it had. The Earth came up with a compromise. The Old One could take small bits of her and form them into beings that would live on her and inside her. The Old One saw that this would work and immediately went about the task of creating the first beings of the early world.

These early beings became known centuries later as the ancients and they were the first people of the world. These people weren’t just people with a spoken language, but part animal as well. They were given great powers to watch over the Earth but could do so as they saw fit. The Old One didn’t want to diminish the Earth much more, so he used much less of her body to make new people. These people also had language and a will of their own, but they were made plainly and thus were formed ignorant and nearly powerless. To make up for the lack of power in them, he gave them the ability to multiply quickly...much like the animals. The ancients also had this ability but to a much lesser extent. Before long, people were nearly everywhere on Earth, with the few ancients living among them. The Old One and the Earth enjoyed watching them together, but this tranquility wasn’t to last.

Some of the ancients were cruel and selfish and ate many of the people whom they saw as vermin or pests. The Old One saw that the people would soon be driven to extinction if things kept up the way they were. The Old One decided to intervene and sent Coyote – one of the names for a clever trickster being. Coyote convinced the people to band together and slay the ancient ones, good and bad alike. The people listened and obeyed, and the tables quickly turned... nearly driving the ancients out of existence altogether. The remaining ancients and the people continued to fight with each other to the point where the multitudes of people did drive some of the ancients from existence. The rest learned to avoid the people or hide among them. Coyote stayed on the Earth for a time, teaching and conditioning the people to always stay vigilant against anyone who displayed abilities that Coyote explained were unnatural. The Old One and Mother Earth looked on in sadness seeing that they had made things even worse. They both vowed not to interfere in the lives of the people or ancients any further, allowing them to make their own choices for good or ill. They continued to watch the people and the few ancients that survived, but soon forgot about the clever Coyote. They hadn’t heard from the creature in a while and assumed it had left.

But the Coyote had changed its name and continued to instruct the people in ways that were beneficial towards it. The people were short-lived, and the Coyote had an easy time slowly changing how and what they thought. Before long, the peoples of the Earth knew the Coyote by many names and Coyote would sometimes use this hubris to pit one group of people against another whenever it became too bored with the way everything was playing out. By the time the Old One and Mother Earth figured out what was happening, they discovered that they were now much weaker than the Coyote as it had convinced the people that they didn’t exist. Thus, began the modern world.