Here's a little tid-bit about Coyote from American Indian Myths and Legends by Erdoes & Oritz
Stories about tricks and pranks, especially when played by the lowly, small, and poor on the proud, big, and rich, have delighted audiences from the dawn of storytelling. The trickster is a rebel against authority and the breaker of all taboos. He is what the best-behaved and most circumspect person may secretly wish to be. He is, especially in the western areas of North America, at the same time imp and hero--the great culture bringer who can also make mischief beyond belief, turning quickly from clown to creator and back again. In Indian America it is the Coyote who is the great trickster, and even when a tribe has another such trickster of its own, Coyote often appears as his comrade and fellow mischief-maker.
In the Plains and plateau areas, where Coyote takes center stage, most tales bear witness to his cleverness alternating with buffoonery, his lechery, his craft in cheating and destroying his enemy, and his voracious appetite and unending need to keep poaching game. Shorn of the various surface features from different cultures, Coyote and his kin represent the sheerly spontaneous in life, the pure creative spark that is our birthright as human beings and that defies fixed roles or behavior. He not only represents some primordial creativity from our earlier days, but he reminds us that such celebration of life goes on today, and he calls us to join him in the frenzy. In an ordered world of objects and labels, he represents the potency of nothingness, of chaos, of freedom--a nothingness that makes something of itself. There is great power in such a being, and it has always been duly recognized and honored by Indian people.
Coyote also reminds us of another salient element in Indian philosophy: there is laughter amid tears, and sadness tucked away in raucous tale.