When I wrote yesterday about the "deep roots" of Western science, I intended to point to a possible relation this opens up between the domain of "science" and Indigenous views of the natural world. If we follow that line of development which leads from Aristotle through Leibniz to the holistic mathematical physics based on the Principle of Least Action, we find ourselves in a position much closer to that of Native American thinkers than we might have expected.Modern science in its mechanical mode cuts off "science" from any sense of wholeness or, especially, of purpose. It wants to reduce all quality to quantity, all motion to the operation of laws which bind matter apart from any sense of goal or meaning, and sees "nature" exclusively as an object from which we stand apart as mere observers. None of these limitations apply to the physics in the holistic mode. Least Action applies to whole systems, and sees systems moving directionally toward the optimization of a quantity which applies to the system as a whole. Although this goal may be no more than the optimization of a mathematical quantity, it opens the way to thinking of systems such as organisms or ecologies as moving as wholes toward ends -- a line of thought of which the modern world is in desperate need.One more link in this line of thought: the modern computer is bridging the gap ;between "quantitative" and "qualitative" thinking. What goes in as number typically comes out on the computer screen as a graphical image readily grasped by the intuitive mind and conducive to interpretation in terms of purposes and goals. We can see how systems are moving, and where they "are going". Nothing stands in the way of reading these in terms of purposes, and that is what we do on a daily basis -- think for example of evidences of the consequences of global warming emerging from complex computer modeling. Thinking in this way in terms of whole systems, understanding their motions in terms of a mathematics of optimization, and bridging the gap between quality and quantity -- all this is yielding an approach to science at once new and old -- in a continuous thread leading from Aristotle into the age of the modern computer. If we follow that path and think of modern science in terms like these, then it seems to me the gap between a holistic science and Indigenous relations to the natural world is not as deep as it had seemed. Set aside mechanistic thinking, embrace the sense of nature as a whole of which we ourselves are part, admit goal as a category amenable to science -- and then the old gap between Indigenous, or simply hunan views of the world, and those of "western science", begins to dissolve. Thus the Cosmic Serpent project, designed to consider this relationship, begins to look much more promising than it otherwise might have.