Canyons

The end of Canyons demonstrates the completed arcs of both primary protagonists, Coyote Runs and Brennan. Each have, in their own way, completed the task that they had set out to do at the beginning of the novel. Coyote Runs has been laid to rest in the sacred medicine place, while Brennan has gained greater empathy and further perspective on his own life. However, Brennan is the only character at the end who exhibits any sort of direct agency over the text. Brennan is the person whose decisions and actions affect and influence the direction of the story, while Coyote Runs, who at the point has been deceased for more than a hundred years, can only influence Brennan through memories, thoughts, and conveyed experiences.

This sort of narrative weight, centering around Brennan as the child of generations of colonization, also reflects more broadly the society in which it’s set. Both Brennan and Coyote Runs’s arcs can be seen as reflecting white colonizers and the fate of the Indigenous population respectively. Coyote Runs’s specific intentions—to be a part of the raiding party and therefore become a man in the eyes of his tribe, with his own horse—are cut short by the violence enacted on him, a pointless revenge by the colonizers that highlights Violence as a Part of Colonization. Brennan, on the other hand, has no sort of structural force holding him back in the same way. Brennan is portrayed as the opposite of Coyote Runs in a number of respects. Even though Brennan has much more support in his life than Coyote Runs—he is a part of the dominant culture of his region, he has a mother who loves him, regular work, and a teacher who has decided to become his mentor—he still exhibits a certain distance from his own life, going on hours-long runs every day in order to distract himself. However, Brennan eventually comes to realize his own attitude toward his life as destructive, through the influence of Coyote Runs’s voice.

The character of Coyote Runs can be seen as being a synecdoche for the entire population of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, whose self-determination was cut short and shattered by the imperialist designs of the burgeoning American empire. Brennan, too, can function as a sort of synecdoche for his own, contemporary society. Divorced by time from the people who had committed the atrocities on the American frontier, Brennan contains the instinctual revulsion toward the violence committed toward the Indigenous shared by most other white Americans, despite his own status in life being determined from the consequences of that previous violence. However, Brennan is allowed the self-determination that was previously denied to Coyote Runs. At the end of the novel, both Coyote Runs and Brennan flee from adults pursuing them through the same canyon. However, while Coyote Runs is trapped behind a boulder and killed, Brennan manages to escape the pursuit and accomplish his goals, but only through the support offered to him by Coyote Runs’s skull (who informs him, for instance, of the hidden handholds allowing him to ascend the walls of the canyon). Similarly, the white colonizers of the American West were allowed a self-determination for how they decided to live their lives that was denied to the Indigenous peoples asking for the same rights.

The conclusion to Canyons is not entirely devoted to lamenting the unfairness of treatment between peoples, however. Brennan is able to break through the bounds of his previously restrictive life to gain an intense emotional and spiritual connection with Coyote Runs. At the end of the novel, the realization that Brennan comes to is not so much more fully understanding himself (though he does reach some of those conclusions) but rather more fully empathizing with and fully grasping the life of Coyote Runs. As Brennan places the skull into the medicine place, he realizes that “it was that [Coyote Runs] came to sit and learn things and know things. This was how he lived. How he was. Until they killed him. The ancient ones are here, are always here in the medicine place.… I understand, Brennan thought” (182). Brennan’s empathy has become strong enough that he’s able to connect with a teenager separated by both time and space. This allows Brennan to become a more empathetic person overall, becoming, in the text, more generous toward both his mother and Bill. Canyons, then, is emphasizing not the differences between people, but the similarities. Even in a culture consumed with violence and enacting that violence on children of other cultures, the basic human impulse of understanding is able to break through Brennan’s defenses and connect him, in both mind and spirit, to Coyote Runs, fulfilling the dream that Coyote Runs was ultimately unable to fulfill himself.