Canyons

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1990

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-19

Chapters 20-24

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Human Behavior Transcending Time and Culture

Content Warning: Canyons explores concepts such as racism, colonialism, and violence against children.

Coyote Runs and Brennan are depicted as having characteristics in common despite their lifetimes being more than a century apart. Throughout Canyons, the two protagonists exhibit both cultural and spiritual behaviors, as well as ritualized behaviors, that connect the two characters. The parallels in their lifestyles, as well as the differences, are highlighted as Brennan connects with Coyote Runs through the skull. When Coyote Runs’s life deviates greatly from Brennan’s contemporary lifestyle, Brennan is still able to empathize and connect through the skull. Brennan doesn’t reject or criticize Coyote Runs because of this cultural divide, but instead, he chooses to learn about and appreciate his experience with his 19th-century Apache “friend.”

As Brennan and the reader learn, many of the described behaviors of Coyote Runs stem from his cultural and social milieu as a member of the Apache tribe. Most of these rituals relate to the spirits, guiding them and requesting their help. For instance, when Coyote Runs receives a horse from a friend as a gift, he paints “the pony with one circle around one eye so that it could see well if they had to run at night and put tobacco on its hooves to make them fast, to show the spirits where he needed help” (16). Later, Coyote Runs coats his arrows in tobacco as well, “each time asking for the dust spirits to make them fly, make them shoot in the proper manner” (16). This ritualized behavior and belief, for Coyote Runs, gives his world structure and gives him the confidence to become a fully realized adult member of his tribe. Coyote Runs’s lifestyle is of interest to Brennan as he researches the skull and follows the voice he hears through the artifact. Though Brennan is white, and a racial and cultural divide is the driving force behind Coyote Runs’s death, Brennan remains open-minded and emotionally attached to the 14-year-old boy who unjustly died over a century prior.

Brennan also exhibits ritualized behavior and beliefs. Brennan goes running constantly in order to distract himself from his own insecurities and life. Additionally, he feels strongly as if nature should be respected, leading to his anger at the youth group children. These behaviors in particular clearly parallel the behaviors of Coyote Runs, who is thrilled about his coming-of-age raid and excited to be in the wilderness for days in an attempt to prove himself. Brennan’s obsession over running, the wilderness, and the skull itself are shown to be parts of a larger set of motivations for Brennan, as these are ways for him to distract himself from his daily life, and they give his actions a significance he otherwise feels he lacks.

In comparing these two characters and each of their rituals and behaviors, Canyons demonstrates how all humans require these sorts of beliefs in order to function and give structure to lives that fundamentally remain chaotic. Brennan’s beliefs and behaviors are not positioned as being more correct or superior to Coyote Runs; rather, Coyote Runs and Brennan highlight the similarities and differences across culture and time, emphasizing the humanity of victims of colonization.

Deep Connections to the Natural World

In Canyons, both of the protagonists, Brennan and Coyote Runs, exhibit differing, yet equally intense, connections to the natural world around them. A love for nature is among the characteristics the two boys have in common, allowing Brennan to form an emotional connection with Coyote Runs despite the vast differences in their lifestyles and cultures. In this way, humanity is further emphasized in victims of colonization, allowing the reader to identify with both characters and empathize with the plight of the Apache people.

Coyote Runs’s belief system involves the spirits of the natural world and their abilities to affect and control the events around them. Frequently, Coyote Runs prays to these spirits for guidance or intervention, and the quest for Brennan to return the skull to the medicine place hinges on the need for Coyote Runs’s remains to be interred in the correct place for spiritual reasons. Through this worldview, Coyote Runs sees natural events as portending future occurrences; for instance, when traveling south, “[o]ut below him 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). Here, Coyote Runs’s wishes are portrayed as a near physical phenomenon, able to be physically picked up and carried by dust devils, through the intervention of the spirits.

However, even though Coyote Runs’s connection to the natural world is filtered through a spiritual perspective, he still shows an ability to manipulate nature to his own desires. Unlike the colonizers, the Apache people in the novel work with nature, as opposed to against it, but still manipulate its use. For instance, handholds have been dug into the rock, allowing passage out of the canyon, and Coyote Runs’s inability to get to this path contributes to his early death. Just as the spirits can be requested for guidance, so too can people change the world around them. The difference between the white colonizers and the Indigenous peoples as shown in Canyons is not so much a matter of action, though those do differ, but one of attitude, toward what is allowed or disallowed in relation to nature.

Brennan also exhibits a connection to the natural world. Brennan is consistently characterized as an obsessive runner who frequently leaves the city limits to run for long stretches through the hot desert. When Brennan considers his own reasons for running, he thinks, “It is all I need to do—to run is all there is. When I am running it is all, everything. Nothing matters. Not the father that I do not know or the mother that does not know me or the school that I hate or money or not money—all of that disappears when I run” (10). For Brennan, running is a way of modifying his own internal state—he’s able to disappear within himself when out running in nature. Brennan’s love for nature is also emphasized during the camping trip, when he longs to enjoy the world around him and is annoyed by the youth group children disrespecting the natural world. As Brennan becomes more familiar with Coyote Runs’s beliefs and thought patterns, he begins to connect in a more spiritual way with the natural world around him. Eventually, he’s even able to recognize the patterns in a cliff face representing hundreds-of-years-old handholds, allowing him to escape his pursuers. In the world of Canyons, the natural world is to be worked with, rather than pushed against, which makes a person as oblivious as Brennan’s pursuers.

Violence as a Part of Colonization

Throughout Canyons, the colonization of white people on the lands of the Indigenous population of the Americas is shown to inevitably result in violence. However, the violence is not indiscriminate, but is rather concentrated in the colonizers’ hands, directed at the local population. Brennan himself is struck by this notion when he discovers that the response of the soldiers to raids by the Apache people was always considerably more violent than the raids themselves. The headlines that Brennan recognizes have wordings such as “Twenty soldiers attacked a marauding band of Apaches in a running battle… [n]o soldiers were injured though several Apaches were seen to have been hit” (135) or “A roaming patrol of twenty soldiers attacked a band of wild Apaches. After a brisk exchange of fire several Indians were hit though no soldiers received wounds” (135). This is also reinforced by the events of Chapter 9, in which the Apache people manage to steal horses without hurting anyone but gain casualties while trying to escape. In Canyons, the only thing impossible for Coyote Runs and Brennan to escape is violence itself; while attempting to put the skull into its rightful resting place, Brennan is forced to push past his pursuers and flee from them, mimicking Coyote Runs’s panicked flight.

Canyons additionally recalls the way in which the media and literature of the American West was used to propagandize and reinforce the violence committed on the Indigenous peoples. The newspaper articles are shown to be poorly written and biased in favor of the white colonizers, with the headlines frequently containing phrases such as “Indian Fright! Ranchers Flee! Citizens Terrorized!” (136). This sort of language would incite violence, as people who have been taught to dehumanize others are more likely to commit violence toward them. In Canyons, the violence of the white colonizers and soldiers toward the Indigenous peoples is shown to be enmeshed with the structure and motivational factors of their expansionist society, demonstrated through the propaganda of putatively neutral newspapers articles.

Violence, however pervasive, is also shown as avoidable. At the beginning of the novel, Brennan contains a number of resentful and angry thoughts, and though he never acts violently, he does not always treat people with kindness. However, at the end of the book, Brennan manages to successfully complete his goal, but he also gains the support of his mother in doing so, allowing him to flee his pursuers. Brennan’s mother’s change of heart comes as a response to her son’s convictions surrounding the skull and the necessity of his actions. This also shows that Brennan has learned about the injustice of the violence on the Apache people, and he is able to transcend this cultural difference and empathize with the humanity in everyone instead of relying on violence or hatred. In Canyons, the path past violence must be through empathy, understanding, and compassion.