Coyote in Terminator

The 3/2/09 episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is all about dreams vs. reality. It's titled Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep and it has a couple of Native references.

One recap summarizes how the episode begins:Midnight is the witching hour, when we’re visited by dark spirits, as Sarah narrates at episode’s outset. Lives, love, sanity, sleep are stolen by faceless demons in the still of night. “If you believe in that kind of thing,” she adds.With references to "incubus" and "sucubus," Sarah's narration is rooted in Western rather than Native lore. But as another recap explains, the story shifts to Native references:Sarah faces a thread of linear nightmares about seeing a coyote before being tazed, kidnapped, and held in the back of a truck to be interrogated and injected with something by Ed Winston, the man who shot her at the mysterious Skynet plant.

Sarah meets a suspicious nurse at the sleep clinic who she believes is doing harm to the other patients, such as her roommate Dana, who shares some of Sarah's past bad habits. Here is where the dreamcatcher appears, apparently made by a janitor named Hector with a technological coyote tattoo on the back of his neck. Is he possibly part Native? Is he the Trickster Coyote trying the subtly help Sarah cope with her situation?The coyote appears again at the end as Sarah talks about a "demon woman" who may represent her dark side. But who knows? The episode is too complex to summarize or grasp easily. Read the recaps if you want to find out more.

Hector the "coyote" doesn't do much more than his one scene, in which he explains about the dreamcatcher and his tattoo. So again the Native influence is subtle. But looking at the whole season, it seems the writers are trying to give Terminator a mystical Native vibe.

Previous Native references in the show:

Native souls in Terminator
Cabeza de Vaca in Terminator
Modoc War in Terminator

For more on the subject, see TV Shows Featuring Indians.

P.S. The second summary was written by Beth Aileen Lameman (Anishinaabe, Metis, Irish), who co-created the webcomics THE WEST WAS LOST and FALA. I guess she'd know more about Coyote than most reviewers. Interesting to see another connection between Natives, comics, and television.