At some point, after he stocked the rivers with salmon and peopled the villages with descendants and in-laws, Coyote disappeared. Of course, he did not die—at least not permanently. Coyote, like the Coyote People, could not be put down forever. He would come back. Someday... probably? And we would too. At least that’s what the Coyote People believed back when we still called ourselves Coyote People.

The most common account held that Coyote would reappear in the End Times. When things came full circle, the trickster who molded the world into its Indigenous state would be there. Just to do whatever trickster shit needed to be done—make something, like a son; or break something, like the witches’ fishing weir; or steal something, like goose eggs or a wife; or invent essential ergonomic functions, like the elbow; or live a life full of damn good stories. Because how the world ends is just as important as how it begins.

Some said Coyote would reappear as a cooler version of Jesus. Cooler because if you listen to stories of his feats, Coyote resurrected way more than just once and did more to create our world than Jesus. Jesus died for our sins, and yet thereafter we were still sinners who could be damned to Hell. In the single act of liberating salmon—just one of many feats—Coyote provided over half of the Coyote People’s calories most years. While Christianity hands down eternal sentences for life mistakes, Coyote fills bellies, lives his own mistakes, and laughs about it all. According to a belief common among the Coyote People in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Coyote’s next coming would mark the renewal of the world and the return of an old and good Indian way of life.

Christians fingered Coyote as the Antichrist. Many believed the Indian way of life was the Devil’s work. That the Coyote People and our beliefs were wrongheaded, and that we would be punished for all time if we did not renounce Coyote and follow Jesus. And to make sure we did, they kidnapped our children and took them to schools where kids and even newborns were physically, psychologically, and sexually abused, assaulted, traumatized, neglected, diseased, starved, raped, and sometimes even killed.

I have come to see Coyote as creator and destroyer, messiah and Antichrist, forefather and deadbeat dad. He is the embodiment of forces greater than ourselves that drive and ride the metamorphoses of the world: of climate, geology, environment, technology, and culture. Coyote was change incarnate. And as his descendants, we carry that same power of transformation. Colonizers tried to remake us in their image or kill us—physically, legally, and culturally— countless times by countless means. But every time we came back, not as whitewashed primordial cultural goo, but as ourselves— as distinct peoples with prior and rightful claims to these lands carrying in our culture, memory, and blood the knowledge of how to live well upon them. To survive, we remade ourselves and the world around us in whatever way we could—often, and especially, by getting into trouble like Coyote, who broke that fishing weir, or my pé7e Zeke, who, amidst a genocidal apocalypse, almost single-handedly repopulated the Coyote People all up and down the Fraser River watershed; or my dad, who narrowly escaped the incinerator and many other brushes with death to bring the NoiseCat name and family back from the Land of the Dead.

*

In late May 1808, in this era of mass death, incipient invasion, and earth-shattering transformation, three birchbark canoes carrying a party of two dozen white men and two Indigenous translators came barreling down the Fraser River just after the spring floods, when the river was roaring in freshet. At their helm was a stubborn, barrel-chested, and heavy-browed 32-year-old Scotsman born in the colony of New York named Simon Fraser. He planned to follow the wild, unnavigable river that would eventually bear his name all the way to the Pacific. It was a preposterous mission. After he announced his intentions to the Coyote People, one of Fraser’s men fired off a swivel gun mounted on one of the canoes in an attempt to shock and awe the Natives. But the gun backfired, and the gunner was wounded. It was an appropriately slapstick entrance for this foolish voyage of discovery. Understandably, some of our ancestors went, “Coyote? Is that you?”

Though not all. Fraser’s identity was hotly debated. Some among the Nlaka’pamux said Fraser must be Coyote returning at the End Times. Others, like St’at’imc, said Fraser and his party were more likely cannibals. They were hungry, dangerous, and consumed many dogs. Still others, like the Coast Salish, said Fraser and his party were transformers, like the ones who shaped the world in the beginning. These ideas are reflected in the words the Coyote People use for white people. “Semé7,” the most common, comes from the root “sem,” meaning “to tell stories.” The word for Frenchman, “Stspetékwllúy,” comes from the word for narratives about tricksters, transformers, and supernatural events: tspetékwll.

Although not all Coyote People believed Fraser was Coyote, there was a common understanding, reflected in our words, that the incursions of colonists were world-changing events marking a new epoch for our people and planet. Some European explorers and historians have trumpeted these historical, linguistic, and ethnographic facts as evidence that Natives believed Europeans were gods. But that’s an arrogant Eurocentric way of looking at things. Because in our accounts, supernatural beings—especially tricksters like Coyote—were often out for themselves and up to no good even while their actions were of incredible consequence. And in all these ways, Fraser fit the bill.

*

Simon Fraser’s father, a Roman Catholic Scottish Highlander, settled in Mapletown, New York, in 1774. A British loyalist, the elder Fraser fought for the Crown during the American Revolution and was taken prisoner in 1777. Held in an American jail for 13 months, he died a prisoner of war. His widow lost the family farm and fled to Canada, where Simon’s modest upbringing included just two years of formal education. As a teen, Fraser went to work at the North West Company in Montreal, a fur-trading outfit increasingly manned by Scots. Fraser, a capable frontiersman and trader, was named partner by 25.

But the North West Company’s business was far from thriving. The larger Hudson’s Bay Company controlled forts and shipping ports on Hudson’s Bay, pushing the North West Company out toward the Rockies. The North West Company set up operations in the Peace River Country in what is now northwestern Alberta, where the land was rich in furs. But the overland route between Athabasca and Montreal was long and costly. To better compete, the North West Company was actively looking for alternative trading corridors and especially a navigable river route to the Pacific.

Fraser was the second Nor’Wester and Scottish explorer to visit the relatively calm upper stretch of the river that would bear his name. The first was Sir Alexander Mackenzie. When Mackenzie came through searching for a pathway to the sea, the Natives told him he shouldn’t take the river. To the south, it was impassable. (Any child raised on “Coyote and His Son” knew how dangerous our rivers and waterways could be.) And if, somehow, the river didn’t kill him, the warlike downriver Natives would.

Mackenzie listened. He followed an overland grease trail used by the Dakelh or “Carrier” Indians west. A grease trail is an Indigenous trade route so named because it was used to trade valuable, nutrient-rich oil rendered from eulachon, a sardine-like fish that spawns in and returns to river systems on the Northwest Coast. The Dakelh are called “Carrier” in English because they were a trading nation that carried grease and other goods from the coast to the interior and vice versa. Following Indigenous guidance, Mackenzie made it to the coastal territories of the Nuxalk near present-day Bella Coola, British Columbia, becoming the first European to cross the continent north of Mexico. Though Mackenzie’s route was too difficult for the North West Company’s purposes, his journey came a full 12 years before Lewis and Clark’s easier southerly crossing. The Americans reached the Pacific near present-day Portland, Oregon—a metropolis. Bella Coola, by contrast, remains a remote community reachable only via a dangerous switchbacked dirt road, small plane, or infrequent ferry. On a rock overlooking Dean Channel in Nuxalk territory, Mackenzie used a mixture of red vermillion and grease to memorialize his victory in this colonial-era space race. “Alex Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.” (Take that, America.)

Unlike Mackenzie, Fraser did not listen. When he encountered the Secwépemc at Chimney Creek, the Coyote People told Fraser that if he wanted a river route to the ocean, he should leave the Fraser River and travel overland four or five days by horse to the river now known as the Thompson. From there, he could ride the gentler Thompson to an area near present-day Kamloops, British Columbia, then portage to Okanagan Lake, which feeds into the Columbia, the same river Lewis and Clark took to the Pacific. Against this advice, which he received at least twice according to his own journals, Fraser chose to travel the river that now bears his name. Though the Coyote People told him otherwise, Fraser believed the Fraser River was the Columbia. He survived the journey out of sheer luck and because, on many occasions, the Coyote People saved his ass.

The first and most helpful was the Secwépemc chief Cllecwúsem from Soda Creek, whose name means “to wear a mask” because the chief wore a face covering to protect himself from Fraser and his men. Whether this mask was a carved wooden face shield like the ones worn in ceremonial dances, a woven head covering like those donned by healers, or a precolonial KN95 has been lost to time. I suspect, however, the mask had something to do with Cllecwúsem’s spiritual power and political influence. The chief was well-loved. His brother gave Fraser a beautiful, well-dressed deer hide and beaver pelt, and asked the voyager to take care of his kin in return. While Fraser’s party canoed the Fraser Canyon rapids, losing a canoe on their first day south of Chimney Creek, Cllecwúsem rode ahead. The chief was known and respected up and down the river that fed and gave birth to the Coyote People. Through political and spiritual gravitas, Cllecwúsem negotiated safe passage for Fraser all the way through Secwépemc territory and into St’at’imc country.

The St’at’imc were far more suspicious of Fraser and his men than the Secwépemc. To this day, they still refer to Fraser’s party as “the Drifters.” One St’at’imc who met the Nor’Westers near present-day Lillooet said he had seen white men in “great canoes” on the coast before. He mimicked a naval officer, strutting with hands on hips. “This is the way they go,” Fraser quotes the St’at’imc in his journal. Others believed Fraser and his men weren’t white men at all. Since they seemed to prefer eating dogs over the plentiful Indigenous staple, salmon, they must be enemies or even cannibals in disguise. Fraser’s meeting with the St’at’imc turned heated, but the “Old Chief,” as Fraser called Cllecwúsem in his journal, held sway. This may have been because, according to oral history, Cllecwúsem’s pipe came from downriver. A pipe is a powerful spiritual and diplomatic tool. It connects the smoker’s breath to the Spirit World and was traditionally used to make agreements connecting people, villages, and nations to one another. I speculate that Cllecwúsem’s pipe signified his spiritual connection to and power within downriver St’at’imc country—commanding respect, granting him certain chiefly rights, and maybe even saving Fraser’s hide. Because despite palpable animosity, which nearly ended in violence according to Fraser’s journal, the Nor’Westers’ voyage continued.

Thus, the first treacherous leg of Fraser’s journey is actually a story of Cllecwúsem’s prowess—not Fraser’s. While it is unknown whether Cllecwúsem believed Fraser was Coyote or some other supernatural being, the chief had the forethought to talk to Fraser about building a fort at Alexandria in his territory, a long-term strategy to enrich and empower his people and himself. After Cllecwúsem departed upriver, Fraser and his men missed the “Old Chief.” “Here we are, in a strange country, surrounded with dangers, and difficulties, among numberless tribes of savages, who never saw the face of a white man,” Fraser wrote. “Our situation is critical and highly unpleasant; however we shall endeavor to make the best of it; what cannot be cured, must be endured.” Upon his return upriver, Fraser gave Cllecwúsem the finest gift he gave anyone on his voyage: a gun.

*

At ƛ’q’əmcín (Kumsheen), a town now known as Lytton at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, some 1,200 people gathered to greet Fraser, who some believed was Coyote, and his party, who they saw as his helpers: Sun, Moon, Morning Star, Diver, Arrow-Armed Person, and Kokwe’la (a supernatural transformer who takes the guise of a root vegetable). Lytton is the place where the Nlaka’pamux say Coyote’s son crashed to earth after returning from the Sky World. It’s just downriver from the place where the Secwépemc say the witches’ weir stood and where geologists say there was once a great ice dam at the end of the last ice age. Because of Lytton’s centrality at the junction of two great rivers, the Nlaka’pamux consider it to be the center of the world. (I also have a great-great-great-grandmother from there.)

At the center of the world, Fraser shook hands with all 1,200 of the Coyote People gathered around. The chief from Lytton gave a long speech. He pointed to the sun, the four directions, and back at Fraser, according to the Nor’Wester’s journal. Then he brought forward his father, a blind elder, so Fraser could touch the man. The Nlaka’pamux offered the travelers a feast of salmon, berries, and roots. Fraser requested dogs for his men. After dinner, the Coyote People danced through the night, as their neighbors along the Columbia River had when they met the North West Company explorer David Thompson in 1807.

Fraser and his party departed the next day and ran into trouble a few miles downriver when a canoe capsized and broke apart. A North West Company employee named D’Alaire, who the Nlaka’pamux remember as Moon, was carried three miles by the current before dragging himself onto the banks and up a cliff. There, after searching for hours, Fraser, or Coyote as the Nlaka’pamux say, finally found him.

*

After Fraser passed through the remaining territories of the Coyote People in the Fraser River Canyon and entered the delta lands of the Coast Salish, his luck turned. By then, he’d wrecked about a half-dozen canoes and probably as many pairs of shoes. Running low on supplies and trade goods, he turned to piracy.

At a village not far from where Pé7e Zeke was sent to St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in present-day Mission, British Columbia, Fraser robbed a chief of his best canoe. And for good measure, he seems also to have taken the chief captive as a human shield and prisoner diplomat for the remainder of his dash to the sea. Though the Coast Salish were wealthy and lived in enormous Big Houses— some even 1,500 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 18 feet high, hewn from cedar trees as much as 30 feet in circumference, they lived under near-constant threat from northern raiding nations like the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingit, and Haida. Northern raiders routinely sent fearsome war parties down the coast in huge canoes to pillage and take slaves. Some Coast Salish believed Fraser and his men were transformers. Others saw the Scotsman and his party as yet more maritime invaders. Paddling a pilfered canoe, Fraser barely made it past the village of Musqueam in present-day Vancouver before the Coast Salish turned the Nor’Westers around and pursued them back upriver until they returned the stolen vessel to its rightful owner.

By then, Fraser had other problems. Speaking on behalf of the crew, two of his men petitioned to abandon the river in favor of an overland route back home, like the one the Coyote People originally advised. According to Fraser’s own account, some even suggested they stay with the Coyote People rather than go home. “This journey did not meet the needs of the Company and will never be of any advantage to them,” wrote Jules Quesnel, Fraser’s clerk, in a letter to a friend in Montreal.

Fraser reached the coast, though he never paddled into the Strait of Georgia or the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He glimpsed the tops of the mountains on Vancouver Island but could not see the open ocean. And he never made it past the spot where the silty Fraser River water meets the blue sea. In the eyes of the North West Company, the journey was an utter failure. The Fraser River was unnavigable, just as the Coyote People had said. A latitudinal measurement taken near Musqueam confirmed another fact the Coyote People told Fraser: this river was not the Columbia.

Fraser was no triumphal explorer. He was a foolish river pirate whose obstinance almost killed him and many others. The name “Fraser River” thus commemorates the epic misadventure of a lost wanderer not so different from Coyote. Because the trickster was not just a mythological being. He was also a worldview, philosophy, storytelling style, and tradition.

For the Coyote People, the reappearance of Coyote in the guise of Fraser was ominous and profound. It meant the world was ending—because for us, it was. But it also meant that our departed ancestors and everything they carried—their names, their ways, their lands, and their worlds—were coming back. And they are. ♦

Excerpted from WE SURVIVED THE NIGHT by Julian Brave NoiseCat. Published by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright © 2025 by Julian Brave NoiseCat. All rights reserved.