The sea casts the moon's full circle, shining within its spidery vessels. What rises
in dreams swims to "a celestial ocean near the Land-of-the-Dead." Earth Mother is married to Sky Snake, the Milky Way. A spider is "outlined in white dots. The poly-

chrome crayfish or lobster, the sections of its fantail clear. The bear-man, arms akimbo. The fringed wings of the condor. The lower half of a frog. Sea animals, graceful as if moving under water."

Standing on the ocean's shore in the temple of night, above I can see ancient suns that may not be anymore. In light of this irony, reading a book on rock art research,
I thought: It cannot be granted that rock art can be interpreted, because "certain rock art sites in a given region share similar motif assemblages or are stylistically equivalent," because we know that many religious symbols of indigenous people had esoteric meaning available only to those initiated into it. No matter how large
its database or powerful its computers, science cannot interpret this.

To know what is not endemically alive, what this figure or that circle meant, takes us where? We have an unconscious so that memes we inherit are already somatically there. With this in mind, archaeology, I suggest, is a scientist's quest for when a Haida woman enters the mouth of a whale, she acts as its lifeblood by her work and her gender. She helps establish her, or his, own identity, not the other's. For,

I love the earth, and always
In its darknesses I am a stranger.