3.95
Paying respects to various spirits, intensities, gods, and ghosts gains favours from them (§3.23). Not magically or in a capitalistic sense—‘God looks out for those who are his servants’—but relationally: you improve your relations.
For adherents of the One, relations are reduced to human relations. As example, the ‘potlatch’[1] is seen as threatening (or ‘worrisome’) because it expresses social relations and human power (structured through gift relations); other-than-human relations are explained away as human ones.
But more accurately, for adherents of the One, relations are reduced to subjective/objective relations between humans and creation (even if spontaneous and without creator). To take seriously something like spirits, intensities, gods, and ghosts is already a threat, insofar as one is disturbing the core of the One: humans, ‘creation,’ objectivity.
Conversely, we give and receive from things themselves (§2.58) and, paying respects to things, we slight the One. (A meteorite crashes against the One.)
[1] See Reddekop, “Thinking Across Worlds,” p. 162–3 (fn 109) on the problems with using “potlatch” as a singular term to denote a range of different ceremonial practices. See also E. Richard Atleo (Umeek), Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), p. 3.