What phrases often marked the beginning of Indigenous American myths?

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Mythologies of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas Haida argillite carving, c. 1890, depicting a folktale in which the Bear Mother endures a cesarean birth; in the National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Haye Center, Smithsonian Institution, New York City.

In the mythologies of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, stories are often categorized by whether they occurred during a time when the world had not yet assumed its present form. While European fairy tales typically begin with the vague phrase "once upon a time," Indigenous American myths frequently open with specific temporal markers such as "before the people came" or "when Coyote was a man."1