Lisandro Mendez's "Coyote and Deer": On Reciprocity, Narrative Structures, and Interactions

Abstract

The people who are now referred to as the Lipan Apache once hunted and gathered in Texas and Northern Mexico. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century their numbers had been largely reduced by the extermination policies of the governments of Texas, Mexico, and the United States. Today the Lipan Apaches' language is one of many indigenous languages that are on the brink of, if not already beyond, extinction. Knowledge of the language and past practices of this group of Southern Athapaskan-speaking people is primarily found through the linguistic work of Harry Hoijer and from the ethnographic work of Morris Opler.' While Opler contributed an important collection of English-only Lipan Apache myths and legends, only Hoijer has published a Lipan Apache text in the Lipan Apache language.2 The purpose