There's one thing about the houses of the white people I don't like. That's the water that comes out of the pipe. They take the water from the creek and they squeeze it till it runs through the pipe into their houses. Then after they've used the water they send it out another pipe to the river. This is not how the Indians lived. It hurts the water to be squeezed hard like that and sent through the pipe. It's dark inside there and the water can't see anything. Then the white people fill the water with their dirt, and make the water travel in the pipe with the dirt. The water doesn't like that. It's better to live the way the Indians used to.

The water likes to be outside just like us Indians. In the summer if you go to the creeks you can hear the water singing. This is because it's happy to be running through the country. In the evening in the summer when the sun goes down then the moon comes up. This is in the late summer. When the moon comes up like that over the trees then the voice of the water changes. The trees get darker and the water keeps singing. The creek sings medicine songs then. It makes moon medicine. The singing of the water is cool and silver like the moon. The voice of the water is like the moon then. It slides up into the sky and goes to the moon.

When the moon comes up it looks down to the earth. It hears the water singing there and it pulls the voice of the water up into the sky. The voice of the water travels to the moon and goes inside it. This way the moon gets power and stays cool. The heat that the sun put into the water in the day travels back to the moon.

At breakup the moon is there too. When the moon sees that the river is getting ready for breakup it decides to help. It pulls hard on the ice to break it up. This is why the ice is all in little sticks before breakup. The moon has been pulling on it. But the moon doesn't just pull on the ice. It sends power down under the water to help the water push. In the winter when the sun can't see the water the water gets power from the moon. They used to say the water was clearer in the winter because the moon was there. In the summer the sun goes into the water and makes dirt there. But in the winter just the moon goes into the water and makes it cool and clear.

But the white people take the water out of the creek and squeeze it. There is a waterfall up the creek where the white people get their water from. This is a special place for the medicine men. The medicine men used to go there to talk to the spirits that came from the sky world. It's a very powerful place. There are two falls. In the upper one lives the spirit of the falls. This spirit is a giant trout that lives in a cave at the back of the falls over by the left hand side. The medicine men used to swim beneath the waterfall there. Then they went into the trout's cave and ate with him.

Once you get inside it's another country in there, and the trout spirit lives in a house made out of birch trees. The birch trees are still growing but they're all bent over each other to make a house. Trout spirit lives under the trees.

The medicine men used to visit trout spirit to learn things. He taught them a lot about how to move around in the sky world and what to look for. His house is in the sky world. But sometimes the medicine men just went to the falls to meet the spirits who came there from far away. Those falls are a meeting place for all kinds of spirits. Today the spirits don't like to come there so much because they can hear the water crying from being squeezed by the white people. That's just one of the bad things the white people are doing in this country.

Another thing I don't like about the white man's houses is those toilets. It makes me weak to use those things. When you pass water or dirt that is your spirit going out of you to the earth. Your life is in the water. When you pass water on the ground it's like you're talking to the earth. You're sending your power into the earth. This is our way of giving the earth power. But if you put your water into the toilet then it gets squeezed by the pipes. This hurts you. When I passed water into the toilet I felt bad. I could feel the pipes squeezing the power out of me. I could feel it here below my stomach. I could feel myself getting weak. It's a good thing I didn't do that too much. It's bad for the Indians to live the way the white people do.

The lights in the houses aren't as bad as the pipes. When you push the little handle it makes the light. I don't know how this happens. When you make the light then you can see good. But things don't look the same as they do from the sun. When you make the light inside the house the light pushes out the sun. The sun tries to come inside the house but the white man's light pushes it out. It seems like the things in the house are dying because they can't get the power from the sun. The light takes away the power. That's why it's bad for the people to stay in the houses too much. But the light isn't bad. It makes it easy for the people to live inside the houses. I wouldn't mind to have the light in my house. I'm getting old now. That would be good for me in the winter.

Well you asked me to tell about the houses. That's about all I've got to say about the houses. The houses that the medicine men go to up in the sky world are different from the white man's houses. They don't need the lights and they don't have the pipes. Everything is shining up there. It's bright up there. It's a good place to live up there in the sky world.that developed in response to this other principle of perception would be a science of the living imagination. It wouldn't be an objective science any more than being hungry need be an objective experience; it is the business of first-hand living to be hungry and to eat. The other objective science isn't required for the immediate act, any more than animals require science to eat. But the Indians and Eskimos were really a part of North America and had a language to express that truth. Their magico-religious language was based not on illusion but on the knowledge that was taken into the psyche through open sensual contact. It's as if the white man's senses are closed up and like Houston he receives only a faint, filtered shadow of what cold is, what the Eskimo knew. When an Eskimo shaman talked about a bear he was also talking about some inward presence of bearhood he had received into himself. But there was nothing metaphysical about the essence, any more than there was about those men in the print shop; they quite simply felt warmer. When the shaman says the bear spirit is in him he means something closer to "I smell a bear," than to anything we would mean by spiritual contact. Shamanism is remote from ESP or psychic phenomenon.

Having failed to really settle in North America the white man has had to exterminate the Indians, at least their deep connection with the continent. For no reminders of that profound consciousness have been allowed to disturb the development of western civilization here. We have progressed unhalted into a void, wherein we are so remote from the physical presence of the earth that we are unconscious of it. It's as if there is a full-grown lion in the room and we don't know about it. The Eskimo says, "Look, a lion!," and James Houston replies: "A fascinating idea, but the ink remains stiff." What does it have to do with ink? It's certainly not a theory, idea, or hypothesis. In fact the belief that everything is alive is no more a piece of theoretical science, in a primitive attempt to explain the universe, than is the statement that one is profoundly moved by a sunset. But the primitive man not only was moved by the sunset he received it so richly and fully into himself that he was a participant in the event. Eskimos did not contemplate nature, they took part in nature. Nature was external to them in a way not so unsimilar to the externality of the hands.