Most Navajo coyote tales begin with the deceptively simple statement Ma'll joldlooshi la eeya, which is the Navajo rhetorical equivalent of "Once upon a time," although it cultural implications are far more complex.
Ma'll is Coyote, the central character in a great range of stories told primarily in the wintertime by Navajo parents to their families. So potentially powerful are these stories and their main character that their performance is dictated by larger, universal forces: The stories are told between the first killing frost in autumn and the first thunderstorm in spring. The name Ma'll is actually the personification of a whole genre of animals - the canine family - and is said by some Navajos to be based on the word ma', which describes the way dogs poke their noses into everything. The suffix -ii suggests an action repeated at random, without pattern or restriction; Coyote is often referred to in translations as "Curious Coyote" or "Impetuous Coyote."
Along with most four-footed animals, Ma'ii belongs to a Navajo category called naaldllooshii (those who trot on all fours), in contrast to naat'a'ii (those who fly) and talhtl aa hinaanii (those who swim in the water). Movement distinguishes these animal classes; thus the terms are closer to English verbs than to nouns. The naadlooshii have several subcategories, depending on how they trot (rabbits, for example, are na'at'i'ii, staggerers"); usually a particular animal who is actively trotting will be described with the verb yildlooshi, but Coyote is special: His trotting, which is thought to be loaded with possibility, randomness, even danger, is always called joldlooshi. I know of no other animal whose movements are described with this verb; clearly, there must be something distinctive in Ma'ii's movements.
Indeed, there is something intensely important about movement itself for the Navajo, although the Western mind is reduced to gelatin in trying to think about it: Anthropologist Gary Witherspoon, working for years with Navajo intellectuals, discovered by submitting his data to the computer that there are 356,200 distinct conjugations for the single verb "to go" in Navajo. (There are relatively few conjugations for "to be," indicating that for the Navajos going is of greater interest than being somewhere.) In the present discussion of Coyote stories, it will be well to bear in mind both the intensity of Navajo movement and the comparatively inarticulate verb system of English. An elderly Navajo man once said to me dryly, "You know, I tried to learn English for a couple of years, but then I found out there wasn't anything important you could say in that language - so I gave it up."
In the rest of the opening phrase, there is a problem with tense or with time, for English distinguishes between present and past action differently than does Navajo, in which past and present can overlap or coexist. La suggests past action, while eeya suggests simultaneously that the past action is being viewed in the present. We might try to phrase it: "Coyote is trotting aimlessly (having always done so)," or "Coyote is/was trotting along, and as we look in on him now, he is still doing it." All of these convey somewhat the idea without the economy and poetic ambiguity of the Navajo verbs, which allow the listener to experience the time of the ongoing mythic world superimposed on the every day world. Coyote exists in both worlds simultaneously, and this immediacy lends a power to the stories that is quite different from the comfortable (for us) phrase
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