Many literary critics describe Native American written poetry as inspired by oral tradition (namely storytelling). This seems a vacuous claim unless one can set out the features of the oral genre (tradition) and the written form, and establish a baseline for comparative purposes. It is not enough to claim that poetry is storytelling based on oral tradition; rather, they should have more specific criteria. The aim of this article is to examine a set or genre of Navajo poetry as an emergent literary tradition, employing linguistic and tropic devices that create poetic identities. The author focuses on a set of poems concerning Coyote that have links to oral tradition and investigates how each poem connects with and diverts from that tradition. The author also investigates the codes or languages used in these poems and the language ideologies that motivate such decisions as which language and which mode of expression is appropriate. (Contains 108 notes.)