ABSTRACT
Coyote and Monster are familiar people to the Nez Perce, and their story is central to Nez Perce culture. The use of Coyote and Monster in this work is not a Nez Perce understanding, but an application by the author. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Anglo-American historians recreated and reshaped Pacific Northwest history, emphasizing such topics as the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Whitman Massacre. As an alternative presentation, the story of Coyote and Monster might be used as a narrative device to emplot and understand the contact and conflict experienced between Nez Perce and Anglo-American communities in a way that does not depend on frameworks established by Anglo-American academics or popular imaginations.2
