She's Tricky Like Coyote

Annie Miner Peterson, an Oregon Coast Indian Woman

by Lionel Youst

She's Tricky Like Coyote is the story of Annie Miner Peterson, who was born in an Indian village on a tidal slough along the southern Oregon Coast in 1860. The few hundred Indians who still lived on the shores of the bay at that time were rapidly being replaced by whites from other parts of the country. In the 1930s, Annie dictated her story, in Miluk Coos, to anthropologist Melville Jacobs, who translated the account into English. Though only a few pages long, the autobiography reveals a bright, outspoken, and independent woman who was raised as a traditional Indian and married five Indian men but whose adult life was spent in the white world. Supplementing the account with anthropologists' field notes, interviews with relatives, and other primary and secondary works, Lionel Youst here provides the first full-length biography of an American Indian linguistic or ethnologic informant from the northwestern states. She's Tricky Like Coyote tells, largely from Annie's perspective, the story of a working-class Indian woman of the transitional generation, of her adjustment to the collapse of her culture and its absorption into the white world, and of her role in salvaging a small part of that culture.

320 pp — ©1997