In modern Native American culture, a “trickster” trope often appears in myths, oral traditions, recorded narratives, ceremonies, and historical accounts, although its purpose and role in society is ambiguous. To the First Peoples who owned the myths, these stories had educational, moral, and spiritual purposes that explained the natural phenomena of their environments, their histories and backgrounds, and their cultural lifeways. Anthropologist Paul Radin noted that “few myths have so wide a distribution as the . . . The Trickster. . . they belong to the oldest expression of mankind.” Radin suggested that the trickster myth-figure “is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negotiator . . . He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.”Despite Radin's assertion that few other myths have continued with their basic content unchanged, this is generally not the case with the recorded trickster myths. In fact, as I will explain, many of the written trickster accounts have changed, changes that can be traced to the early contact accounts and descriptions recorded by the Europeans. In order to make sense of the modern trickster concept, and to determine if the missionaries and colonizers altered these myth-figures (whether inadvertently or not), I have sought the earliest forms of trickster, the tribal-specific, proto-trickster, human-animal myth-figures, and personified spirits that were collected by outsiders during early contact periods. Moving away from theories that erroneously categorize these myth-figures and personified spirits into cross-cultural modern trickster, devil, Creator, and Great Spirit classification systems, I will present a clear representation of First Peoples’ actual beliefs.