Canyons

Canyons features alternating perspectives every chapter for the first nine chapters. Though the novel ends with the character of Brennan, it begins with Coyote Runs, demonstrating his centrality to the emotional arc of the story. Coyote Runs and Brennan are portrayed as having some similar characteristics; both boys are independent and athletic, with Coyote Runs accompanying his raiding party with competency and Brennan obsessively running for miles at a time. Both boys value nature and are also shown to be sensitive and intelligent. This similarity in characteristics and personality is shown, later on, to be a factor in why the two boys become so connected with each other. Coyote Runs’s life, cut short too soon, allows Brennan to relate to empathize with him more fully.

Both Coyote Runs and Brennan are introduced as outsiders to the dominant culture they live within. Coyote Runs is forced to live on the margins, raiding settlements in order to survive, due to the violence and oppression by United States authorities and colonizers. Though Brennan’s situation is less dire, he’s still positioned as an outsider, the introverted and intelligent child of a single mother whose best friend is his biology teacher. Both boys’ outsider status helps their characteristics reflect and contrast each other, as they face many of the same challenges until Coyote Runs is eventually killed. For instance, both boys desire to gain the respect of the people who they admire; for Brennan, that person is Homesley, whereas to Coyote Runs, those people are Sancta and Magpie. Both boys, too, are eventually accepted by those whose approval they desire, as Coyote Runs helps successfully navigate the raid on Fort Bliss, and Brennan demonstrates his commitment to discovery through his search for the identity of the mysterious skull.

These introductory chapters also introduce the theme of Human Behavior Transcending Time and Culture through the similarities between the boys and the differences that Brennan is able to empathize with. Their behaviors are sometimes culturally specific or spiritual, such as when Coyote Runs and his fellow raiders rub tobacco on their arrows to help their flight through the air. These beliefs provide the plot basis for the novel, as Coyote Runs’s desire for his remains to be interred in the medicine place leads to Brennan’s quest. Brennan also demonstrates ritual behavior, obsessively going on long runs and feeling a deep spiritual connection to the land during his camping trip with Bill and his mother. Just as Coyote Runs makes sense of his world and his personal situation through rituals and ritualized behavior, Brennan navigates his own world of social complexities and insecurities using comforting ritual behavior. However, in the world of Canyons, the spiritual interacts directly with the physical; Brennan is led directly to the correct spot to leave Coyote Runs’s skull purely through instructions from the Apache teenager’s spirit. Because of Brennan’s open-mindedness and empathy, he forms a strong connection with Coyote Runs despite the many lifetimes that separate their worlds.

Throughout the early portion of the novel, Coyote Runs and Brennan both exhibit Deep Connections to the Natural World. When Brennan first encounters the canyonlands where Coyote Runs had been killed, he thinks that “[t]o say it was beautiful… seeing [the cliffs] shoot up over him, was just not enough. The beauty seemed to come almost from inside his mind, so that he saw the cliffs and canyon walls as if he had almost painted them” (38). The beauty of nature, here, is an internal state that Brennan accesses through his experience of nature, rather than an externally imposed force. Similarly, Coyote Runs prays for success on his mission, during which “to the east in a dry lake bed the wind swirled and picked up a column of dust and carried it heavenward, carried it to the spirits, carried his wishes high and away, as high and away as the hawk, as the dust, and he knew it would be all right” (15). Just as Brennan’s deep connection to the beauty he sees comes from an internal place he cannot access through logic, Coyote Runs’s connection is mediated through his belief in the spirits and how they can affect his life. Brennan sees the beauty of nature as a corrective to the ugliness he runs past in El Paso every day; Coyote Runs sees it as evidence of a spiritual world and a good omen. Both of them understand this beauty in nature to give meaning and structure to their chaotic and difficult lives.