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

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Running

One of the most consistent motifs of Canyons is that of running. The act of running takes on multiple symbolic and literal meanings throughout the text. On the literal level, Brennan is obsessed with running, as for him it is a way to escape the surroundings he perceives to be dreary and depressing. However, running also has a metaphorical meaning to Brennan, as through obsessing over the skull and trying to find its origins, he begins to spend less time at home with his mother and Bill; Brennan literally runs away from his issues, but he also metaphorically runs away by distracting himself.

Coyote Runs also has a relationship to running. On the raid, the Apache people never meant to harm anybody but rather to steal horses. To that end, when they’re caught, their only recourse is to flee, which leads to Coyote Runs’s demise. Through the motif of running, Canyons demonstrates how people flee from their problems and flee from danger, but it also shows how that fleeing can lead to greater problems—avoiding one’s issues does not address them, and Brennan is only able to achieve a measure of peace once he ceases compulsively running. In Canyons, running can be shown to be a method of fleeing literal danger—capture by soldiers or by park rangers—but also a method of fleeing internal danger. Both Brennan and Coyote Runs demonstrate character growth when they stop running and confront their problems instead of fleeing from them.

The Desert

Both Brennan and Coyote Runs have similar understandings of the desert and how its harshness, strangeness, and natural beauty affect and influence their lives. When Brennan is first introduced, he’s characterized as being obsessed with running—he specifically leaves El Paso to go for runs in the desert, where he feels as if he can be more truly alone. Similarly, Coyote Runs puts a spiritual reverence on the natural world and its ability to profoundly influence his life, often invoking requests or prayers to the spirits of the natural world. Brennan’s reverence, meanwhile, takes more the form of aesthetic contemplation, though this perspective shifts following his retrieval of the skull and the beginning of Coyote Runs’s voice in his head.

The areas of Fort Bliss and El Paso are often contrasted with the stark beauty of the desert in Canyons. At one point, Brennan’s employer Stoney remarks on the hypocrisy surrounding lawn care:

Here we are in the middle of a desert […] and people spend all their money on water just to get grass to grow so they can spend even more money to get us to cut it for them so they can spend even more money on water to get it to grow again so we can cut it.… Isn’t it stupid? (25).

Lawncare, and by extension the other myriad ways in which Americans have shaped and reshaped the natural world, is positioned here as in contrast to the ways in which Indigenous communities related to and worked within nature. Though Brennan thinks watering lawns in a desert is ridiculous, just like Stoney, he still works and participates in the system which perpetuates it—an unconsidered decision until the arrival of the skull into his life along with an alternate perspective on how resources function.

Horses

Throughout Canyons but especially in the chapters centering around Coyote Runs, horses are shown to be symbols for freedom, adulthood, and escape. Early on in the novel, Coyote Runs’s friend Magpie loans him a horse when Coyote Runs asks pointedly, “I do not have a proper pony for war but it is perhaps true that I have a friend with a pony… Do I have such a friend?” (5). Though Magpie is only letting Coyote Runs borrow the pony, the consequence of such a relationship now means that Coyote Runs is able to stand on his own and defend himself with the other warriors, demonstrating his ongoing transformation into a man. When Coyote Runs participates in the mission, he’s given a horse by Sancta, to Coyote Runs’s ultimate delight, as this gift of the horse represents for him permission to be a full member of the community as well as the freedom to ride.

It’s also significant that the crime for which the soldiers pursued the Apache people was stealing horses. Just as the horses represent freedom and adult responsibility, stealing a whole herd of them at once serves to reclaim that freedom from the colonizers, who by this point had reduced the Indigenous population’s land by a significant amount. Brennan, too, when escaping from his pursuers, has memories of the smell and sound of the horses during the wild chase from Coyote Runs’s perspective, emphasizing their symbolism.