The riddle of the coyote

As a young bride, Eileen Kane went on a quest to find out why the downtrodden Native American Paiutes love coyotes and why the disadvantaged Youngstown mill families vote for the Mafia. Now, at 70, the South Galway resident has published her first book, an entertaining anthropological memoir, Trickster.
The book recounts Eileen’s experience in 1964 when she returned from her honeymoon and without husband Francis made her way to Nevada and a Paiute Reservation to learn how to be an anthropologist.
“This book should give hope to every aspiring writer,” Eileen says, “because it’s the most unlikely subject imaginable. It happened 46 years ago and yet the first publisher I sent it to accepted it.”
It was Frank McCourt who encouraged her to write. She saw him standing alone on the steps of the old Great Southern Hotel a few years ago and decided to congratulate him on his success. He asked if she wanted to write too and when she said yes, he told her to “Go for it. You can do it”. He told her not to leave it as late as he had. “Very chivalrous,” Eileen says, “since I was nearly as old as he was.”
According to Eileen, her meeting with McCourt was the “catalyst” for her writing.
“I had written a lot through the years but they were academic papers and I wanted to do some creative writing. When I saw Frank, he was just standing on the steps and he looked so innocent and benign. I don’t normally go up to strangers, which makes my fieldwork difficult, but I was really happy for him that he had this success. He was totally taken aback but he just told me to go for it,” she recalls.
When she went to the Reservation, she had intended to be the expert and saw the Indians as the subjects. They saw it differently – they were the parents. They threw out her chosen research topic and introduced her instead to their fascinating creature, the coyote, a rule-breaking, cheating, thieving, murderous trickster.
What made Eileen’s research project different from many others was that her mother got involved, sending daily letters about the latest news from her violent, Mafia-run home-town of Youngstown, Ohio, a failing steel city. To put the Youngstown of the time into context, Eileen recalls her time lecturing in Queen’s University in Belfast during the worst years of the Troubles. Belfast, she says, “pales in comparison to Youngstown”. The Paiutes waited at the post office for each new bulletin about Youngstown bombings, arrests, strikes and lay-offs.
Why do the downtrodden Paiutes love coyote? Eileen wondered. And why do the downtrodden Youngstown mill families vote for the Mafia? the Paiutes asked. Through her work and through the book, she unravels an answer.
“The Paiutes have two spirits, one is Wolf the creator and beloved and he created a perfect world and Coyote is his little brother and he is not perfect. The world made by wolf doesn’t suit Coyote’s needs. So he is always tinkering with what wolf is doing.
“There is one story that tells that Wolf had a basket of stars. He was going to arrange them neatly but he left the basket down on the ground while he went to sleep and Coyote took them and scattered them across the sky. That is the way the stars remain today. One of the things that comes out of many of the wolf and coyote stories is that the world is the way it is because a perfect world isn’t suited to coyote. This is the way it is for people. In Youngstown, the mill owners, the police and the church formed a world in which the mill workers couldn’t operate,” Eileen explains.
Another aspect of the book is the Irish connection. The Paiute people feature surnames that would be more common in Navan than Nevada – Quinn, Murphy, Conway, Conroy and Kelly.
“They had their own names at one time but they got their names from the ranchers they worked for so now they have names like Maureen Conroy. At one point, a teenage girl was explaining to me that if she married a white man she couldn’t live on the Reservation but as a white woman, if I married a Paiute, I would become Paiute. Her grandfather was a white Irish man so it was so peculiar because she could technically be an Irish citizen and I could be Paiute,” recalls Eileen.
The South Galway resident’s time on the Reservation endeared the Paiute to her.
“I am grateful to Paiute people because they have accepted me and this book and my original project in such a open hearted way. They were amongst the poorest Indians in the United States. They had plenty of reason to be angry. They were so open hearted and provided me with pictures and they are not näive but they have been so helpful. They are such nice people,” Eileen claims.
Her time with the Paiutes also encouraged her to give something back to communities. This led her to work at length to increase the participation of girls in developing countries in education. She was the chair of the first department of anthropology in Ireland at Maynooth where she taught, as well as working for various international aid bodies such as the World Bank and UNICEF.
Eileen now lives in Killeen Arann, near Ballinderreen, which she describes as “a magical community full of farmers and filmmakers and artists. People pull together here outsiders and locals in a way that you would never anticipate. It is a fantastic community to live in. I have never lived anywhere that is so supportive”.
“I think a good measure of them is that the fact that because my family is in America, I have no family in this country at all except for my husband, but I have been able to make a family out of the people of Killeen Arann, that’s exactly how they are. The whole village is like that and they’re not only good to me, they’re good to each other. I told them at my 70th birthday party that it’s hard to believe there’s a place like this in this day and age,” she adds.
Speaking to Eileen, age, one suspects, is of little importance to her. It certainly shouldn’t be an impediment to writing one’s first book.
“I wrote the book as a novel. I sent it off and within half an hour the publisher had accepted it. I wanted to sell it as a novel but they wanted to sell it as a scholarly work but it was accepted and that was the main thing,” she says.
“I would say one thing to anyone who is 70 and hoping to write a book and have it published and that is don’t let it break your heart. It is demoralising getting letters of rejection so rather than spending six or seven years sending off a manuscript and it being rejected by a publisher who most likely hasn’t even read it and you rewriting it, consider other ways of publishing.
“We are on the cusp of new ways of publishing and one of the smartest things older people could do is to sit down with a young person and ask them how are you reading things now or what medium are you using? Then they should maybe look at creating a webpage for their book. If you are older sometimes it means you have more time to publicise it. You can put on your whole book or part of it up on the site,” she explains.
In this regard, Eileen has taken her own advice and published the first two chapters of her book on her website, www.trickster.ie.
“What daunts people is sending something to a publisher and getting several letters of rejection. For the most part, publishers don’t take things except from agents and they are almost harder to get. They reject you too. It is generally accepted that it is easier to publish non-fiction works because you can send non-fiction directly to a publisher but you can’t send fiction.
“I would think if you are starting out to write, it might be no harm to get a little ahead of the curve which I intend to do, I write for pleasure and I’d like to keep up that. If you write for pleasure and want people to read your work if you put a piece onto a website and draw people in to read, you are getting what you wanted,” she outlines.
Indeed Eileen, still keen to give back, is willing to do what Frank McCourt did for her and offer advice and encouragement. Anyone looking for advice from the South Galway author can contact her on her website trickster.ie.
Acclaimed author Jennifer Johnston will launch Trickster by Eileen Kane at Claire’s Tea Rooms, Clarinbridge on Saturday, September 25.