By “pol! icy,” we must under! stand not only the 300-plus years of law and gov! ern! men!tal action thatestab! lished cat! e! gories of human beings fit for enslave! ment and other forms of oppres! sion, but also theshared con! cep! tual and lin! guis! tic her! itage that has formed the mean! ing of race in our world and thathas worked its way into every! thing from every! day lan!guage to gov! ern! ment forms.

Andwe can account for this by con! nect! ing the dots: both African slaves and Cir! cass! ian slaves were sub! jectto sex! ual exploita! tion, even if the lat! ter were sup! pos! edly res! cued from that fate, and this is the point ofcon!tact that played so pow! er! fully on white Amer! i!cans’ imag!i!na!tion:

their out! fits wereinven!tions, hav!ing noth! ing to do with the actual cloth! ing of women from the Cau! ca!sus region.

For an Amer!i!canaudi! ence both tit! il! lated and pan! icked by the prospect of race-mixing, trans! gres! sion of the taboo couldgo only so far before being sealed with disaster

The idea of a woman being at the sex! ual mercy of her owner was not for! eign to the imag! i!na!tion of thewhite pub! lic at the time in the United States, but Pow! ers’ statue of a naked white woman alluded onlyindi! rectly (and per! haps for that rea! son in the only way then pub! licly pos! si! ble) to the fate of manyenslaved Black women

As such, Greece becamea sym! bol of repub! li! can lib! erty against cor! rupt tyranny.

And so Bar! num invented the “Cir! cass! ian Lady,” or some!times the “Cir! cass! ian Beauty,” as a sideshowper! former of a par! tic! u! lar kind. The type included a num! ber of key fea! tures: the woman must be pretty,or even beau! ti! ful, by Vic! to! rian stan!dards; she would wear exotic cloth! ing, gen! er! ally more reveal! ingthan that worn by Euro! pean and Amer!i!can woman of that era; she might dis! play strik! ing jew! elry andother orna!ments, such as strings of pearls or richly embroi! dered clothes. And the most telling fea! tureof all: the big hair.

$5000 in gold each (a vast sum in that day) for two Cir! cass! ianbeau! ties if Green! wood could suc! cess! fully infil! trate the slave mar! kets of Istan!bul to buy them with! outbeing detected as a Westerner.

The leg! end of the white “Cir! cass! ian Beauty” being sold into sex! ual slav!ery had taken on such a life ofits own that in the early 1860s P. T. Bar! num, the great Amer! i!can show! man and pro! moter of hokum,con!ceived the idea of buy! ing a Cir! cass! ian woman out of cap! tiv!ity in Turkey to exhibit in his wildly suc! -cess! ful Amer!i!can Museum in New York City.

But his off-handed val! oriza!tionof the Cir! cass! ian woman as the ideal of white! ness and the Guinean man as the anti-ideal of black! nesscould not be more evi! dent; while he holds that they form part of the same species, he clearly con! sid! ersthe Guinean man a devo! lu! tion from the Cir! cass! ian type, itself sup! pos! edly the most per! fect form of theCaucasian.

Already in his 1775 text, Blu! men!bach specif! i!cally iden! ti! fied the Cir! cass! ian women amongthe peo! ples of the Cau! ca! sus as the sin! gle most beau! ti! ful rep! re! sen! ta! tives of this pure and pri! mor!dial“Cau!casian” type: “Take, of all who bear the name of man, a man and a woman most widely dif! fer! entfrom each other; let the one be a most beau! ti! ful Cir! cass! ian woman and the other an African born inGuinea, as black and ugly as pos! si! ble”

In 1775, the Ger! man nat!u! ral!ist Johann Friedrich Blu! men!bach (1752–1840)pub! lished On the Nat!ural Vari! ety of Mankind, a work that became one of the most influ! en! tial texts inthe emerg! ing Euro! pean sci! ence of race.

It is a cru! elly ironic twist of his! tory that the “Cir! cass! ian Lady” became an invented trope of cir! -cus spec! ta! cle in the United States at pre! cisely the time that the actual Cir! cas!sians were suf! fer! ing eth! niccleans! ing in their homeland.

Cir! cas!sians, a peo! ple from the Cau! ca!sus region in whatis now mod! ern Russia

What I know now is that the woman depicted here fits the model of a kind ofper! formed per! son! al! ity dubbed the “Cir! cass! ian Lady” or the “Cir! cass! ian Beauty” in mid-19th cen! turyAmer!ica. What I learned about what is essen! tially a cir! cus iden! tity I find fas! ci! nat! ing because of what ittells us about how 19th cen! tury Amer! i!cans treated race, even the white race, as a spec! ta! cle, as a per!-formed iden! tity that might not be what it seemed.

In fact, everythingwe know about environmental historysug-gests that people have been manipulating the naturalworld on various scales for aslong as we have a record of their passing.

Why,forinstance,is the "wildernessexperience"so oftenconceivedas a formofrecreationbest enjoyedby those whoseclassprivilegesgive them the time and re-sourcesto leavetheirjobsbehindand"getawayfromit all"?Whydoesthe protectionof wildernessso oftenseemto pit urbanrecreationistsagainstruralpeoplewhoactu-allyearntheirlivingfromthe land(exceptingthosewhosell goodsandservicesto-thetouriststhemselves

To theextentthatwildernesshasservedas an importantvehicleforarticulatingdeepmoralvaluesregardingourobligationsandresponsibilitiesto the nonhumanworld,I wouldnot wantto jettisonthe contributionsit has madeto our culture'swaysof thinkingaboutnatur

Wildernessgetsus intotroubleonly if we imaginethatthisexperienceof wonderand othernessis limitedto the remotecornersof the planet,or thatit somehowde-pendson pristinelandscapeswe ourselvesdo not inhabi

This, then, is the central paradox:wildernessembodies a dualistic vision in whichthe human is entirely outside the natural.If we allow ourselvesto believe that nature,to be true, must also be wild, then our verypresence in nature representsits fall.

Wilderness fulfills the oldromantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christianvalues so as to make a new cathe-dral not in some petty human building but in God's own creation, Nature itself.

This nostalgiafora passingfrontierwayof life inevitablyimpliedambivalence,ifnot downrighthostility,towardmodernityand all thatit represente

. Thus, in the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wildernesspreservationin the United States, for if wild land had been so crucial in the makingof the nation, then surely one must save its last remnantsas monuments to the Ameri-can past-and as an insurance policy to protect its future.

. No lessimportantwas the powerful romantic attractionof primitivism,dating back at least toRousseau-the belief that the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civi-lized modern world was a return to simpler, more primitive living.

The sublime wildernesshad ceased to bea place of satanic temptation and become instead a sacredtemple, much as it contin-ues to be for those who love it today.

Yet all three men areparticipatingin the same cultural traditionand contributing to the same myth: themountain as cathedral

This was no casualstrollin the mountains,no simplesojournin the gentle lap ofnonhumannature.WhatWordsworthdescribedwas nothingless than a religiousexperience,akinto thatof the Old Testamentprophetsas theyconversedwiththeirwrathfulGod

This waswhy the earlyChristiansaintsand mysticshad often emulatedChrist'sdesert retreatas they sought to experience for themselves the visions and spiritualtesting He had endured. One might meet devils and run the riskof losing one's soulin such a place, but one might also meet God. For some that possibilitywas worthalmost any price

. Although wil-derness may todayseem to be just one environmental concern among many, it in factservesas the foundation for a long list of other such concerns that on their face seemquite remote from it. That is why its influence is so pervasiveand, potentially, soinsidious

The sources of this ratherastonishingtransformationwere many, but for the pur-poses of this essay they can be gathered under two broad headings:the sublime andthe frontier

Wilderness had once been the an-tithesis of all that was orderlyand good -it had been the darkness,one might say,onthe far side of the garden wall-and yet now it was frequentlylikened to Eden itself.

ay.To be a wildernessthen wasto be "de-serted,""savage,""desolate,""barren"-in short, a "waste,"the word's nearest syn-onym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was mostlikely to feel in its presence was "bewilderment"or terror.

I hold that everyAmerican citizen has a fight to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, andto use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this fight, the liberty of anAmerican citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman.

In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but,interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.

Americans! your republican politics, notless than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, yoursuperior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (asembodied in the two great political parties), is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate theenslavement of three millions of your countrymen.

They have taughtthat man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that tosend back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord JesusChrist; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything!

By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its mosthorrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York hasbecome as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remainsno longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power isco-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also gothe merciless slave-hunter.

Tell me citizens,WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glanceat the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than arethe people of these United States, at this very hour.

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentleshower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nationmust be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must bestartled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must beproclaimed and denounced.

I will, in the nameof humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitutionand the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, withall the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shameof America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command;and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, orwho is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and jus

Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, byasking me to speak to-day?

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am notincluded within the pale of this glorious anniversary!

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I,or those I represent, to do with your national independence?

our fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have donemuch of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy achild’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You haveno right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.

The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yetI cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.

I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of yournation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it.

Oppression makes a wise man mad

This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home,did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints,burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

The eye of the reformer ismet with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thoughtthat America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hopethat high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny?

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your NationalIndependence, and of your political freedom

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, fromwhich I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to theformer, are by no means slight

The productionofahistoricalnarrativecannotbestudied,therefore,throughamerechronologyofitssilences.

irst,factsarenevermeaningless:indeed,theybecomefactsonlybecausetheymatterinsomesense,howeverminimal.Second,factsarenotcreatedequal:theproductionoftracesisal-waysalsothecreationofsilences.

At some stage, for reasons thatare themselves historical, most often spurred by controversy, col-lectivities experience the need toimpose a test of credibilityoncertain events and narratives because it matters to them whetherthese events are true or false, whether these stories are fact orfiction,

Intheheated contextofthisdebate,advocatesonbothsidesarequestioningfactualstatements,theaccuracyofwhichmatteredtofewhalfacenturyago.“Facts,”bothtrivialorprominentinrelativeisolation,arequestionedorheraldedbyeachcamp.

Aslongastheconver-sationinvolvesEuropeanstalkingaboutdeadIndians,thedebateismerelyacademic.

Thatsuchrulesarenotthesameinalltimesandallplaceshasledmanyscholarstosuggestthatsomesocieties(non-Western,ofcourse)donot differentiatebetweenfictionandhistory.

Withinthatviewpoint,historybecomesoneamongmanytypesofnarrativeswithnoparticularorceeexceptforitspretenseoftruth.?

Withinthat viewpoint, power is unproblematic, irrelevant to the con-struction of the narrative as such. At best, history is a story aboutpower, a story about those who won.

ThehistoryofFrancestartswithMichelet.”Themeaningoftheword“history”hasunam-biguouslyshiftedfromthesociohistorical processtoourknowl-edgeofthatprocess.Thesentenceaffirmsthatthefirstsignificantnarrativeabout FrancewastheonewrittenbyJulesMichelet.

Humanbeings participateinhistorybothasactorsooanarra-tors.Theinherentambivalenceofthewordhistoryinmanymodernlanguages,includingEnglish, suggeststhisdual—pation.

WhatIhopetodoistoshowhowmuchroomthereistolookattheproductionofhistoryoutsideofthedichotomiesthatthesepositions suggest andreproduce.

Notonlycanhistorymeaneitherthesociohistorical processorourknowledgeofthatprocess,buttheboundarybetweenthetwomeaningsisoften quitefluid

WiththebattlecryofSan Jacinto,Houston’smenreversedformorethanacenturythevictory SantaAnnathoughthehadgainedinSanAntonio.

Now,three yearsafterSantaAnnafirstgainedpowerinindependentMexico,afewEnglish-speakingsquatters occu-piedtheplace,refusingtosurrendertohissuperiorforce.LuckilyforSantaAnna,theSquatters wereoutnumbered—atmost189potentialfighters—andthestructureitselfwasweak.Thecon-questwouldbe easy,orsothoughtSantaAnna.

But surely the wounded Taliban soldier Regarding the Pain of Others 73 begging for his life whose fate was pictured prominently in The New York Times also had a wife, children, parents, sisters and brothers, some of whom may one day come across the three color photographs of their husband, fa- ther, son, brother being slaughtered—if they have not al- ready seen them.

These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outra- geous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward—that is, poor—parts of the world.

It is easier to think of the enemy as just a savage who kills, then holds up the head of his prey for all to see.

What can be shown, what should not be shown—few issues arouse more pub- lic clamor.

And television news, with its much larger audience and there- fore greater responsiveness to pressures from advertisers, operates under even stricter, for the most part self-policed constraints on what is “proper” to air.

In the era of tele-controlled warfare against innumer- able enemies of American power, policies about what is to be seen and not seen by the public are still being worked out.

The terms for allowing the use of cameras at the front for nonmilitary purposes have become much stricter as war has become an activity prosecuted with increasingly exact optical devices for tracking the enemy.

War- making and picture-taking are congruent activities: “It is Regarding the Pain of Others 67 the same intelligence, whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter,” wrote Jiinger, “that labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail.”*

This was bound to have consequences: mainstream media are not in the business of making people feel queasy about the struggles for which they are being mo- bilized, much less of disseminating propaganda against waging wat.

British indignation upon hearing of this latest Boer out- rage was keen, if stiffly expressed: to have made public such pictures, declared Amateur Photographer, “serves no useful purpose and appeals to the morbid side of human nature solely.”

Taken by an unknown Boer photographer ten days after the British defeat, which had cost the lives of thirteen hundred of their soldiers, it gives an intrusive view down a long shallow trench packed with unburied bodies. What is particularly aggressive about the image is the absence of a landscape.

Yet the Times reporter cannot resist the melodrama that mere words supply (the “dripping bodies” ready for “the gaping trenches”), while reprehending the intolerable realism of the image.

bodies, are of those who seem most foreign, therefore least likely to be known. With subjects closer to home, the photographer is expected to be more discreet.

And the viewer is in the same position as the lackey behind the camera; the experience is sickening.

T o catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do, and pictures taken by photographers out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.

By 1977, his efforts bore fruit when the Haudenosaunee andother Indigenous delegates returned to Geneva to address theUnited Nations, asserting their status as sovereign nations.Their work helped establish the UN Permanent Forum onIndigenous Issues (UNPFII) and contributed to the eventualadoption of UNDRIP in 2007.

Marshall's decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) codified theDoctrine of Christian Discovery into U.S. law. His rulingbecame the foundation of federal Indian law, establishing thatonly European‐descended governments could hold title over theland. Marshall ruled that Indigenous peoples held only a “rightof occupancy” to their lands, while ultimate title vested in thediscovering European nation and, subsequently, the U.S. gov-ernment.

Nation filed a land rights case in 2005, U.S. federalcourts dismissed it in 2010, ruling that addressing these his-toric wrongs would be “too disruptive” to the present‐dayproperty system. This decision exemplified the persistentapplication of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which haslong justified the denial of Indigenous land rights under U.S.law (Onondaga Nation 2005).

ndigenous peoples have been systematically excludedfrom the very freedoms they helped shape, and their influenceremains largely unrecognized in mainstream historical narra-tives

ackson's actions signaled that judicial de-cisions alone could not protect Indigenous nations fromcolonial‐settler encroachment.

Whileaddressed to the Indigenous inhabitants of Turtle Island/AbayaYala its intended audience and function as was granting pre-emptory absolution for the sins (atrocities) about to becommitted by the colonizers

hese papal bulls provided divine sanction for conquest and ajustification for converting human beings into souls and theninto human capital for development. The souls of theoppressed were rendered as less than, and even the convertedwere perpetually seen as less than.

Its theological and legal un-derpinnings were already present, though not yet fully codified.Identifying the DoCD's origins is challenging—some scholarstrace it back to Constantine's Christian empire, as Cornel Westsuggests, while others locate its roots in the broader expansionof Christendom, as outlined in Basic Call to Consciousness(West 2008; Barreiro et al. 2005).

These demarcationlines reflect the Treaty of Tordesillas (2018), which carved up theworld between Portugal and the Crown of Castile and Aragon(Spain), thus marking the domains for the eurochristian imag-ined right of possession and domination

Renaming places in European tongues severed these connec-tions, imposing a eurochristian worldview and Christian terri-torial claims. Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl, the Gulf of Mexico, and theGulf of America may all share a particular body of water as theirreferent, but their ontologies are vastly different (Fig-ueroa 2014).

These texts created an enduring frame-work of domination, intertwining theology and law to sanctifyconquest, enslavement and extraction (Newcomb 2008;Wolfchild 2015).

European Monarchs, havingdepleted their coffers during the Crusades, shifted their colonialfocus to the Canary Islands (ca. 1436), where they testedconquest strategies: slaughtering or forcibly converting Indige-nous peoples, breaking promises of protection, and usingChristianization as a pretext for enslavement (Miller 2019;Miller et al. 2010).

Columbus' arrivalis often framed as the dawn of exploration, but in reality, itmarked the beginning of genocide, justified in the name of God.

he Doctrine of Discovery, or more accurately, the Doctrineof Christian Discovery (DoCD), has long served as a ligamentconnecting Christianity and colonization, not just in theAmericas but across Africa, Oceania, and beyond. Rooted in a15th‐century theological and legal framework, it justifiedenslavement, exploitation, and extraction (Newcomb 2008;Wolfchild 2015).

Our gift was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers.Heart berries, indeed.

She’d kindly explain how to cook unfamiliar items and pull out thesweetest pineapple she’d been saving under the table. Once she evenhad strawberries.

The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store,red and gray striped, are warm and cozy. I might feel grateful for thesheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting ma-chine. I hope so. But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as acommodity, as private property. There is no bond beyond the politelyexchanged “thank yous” with the clerk. I have paid for them and ourreciprocity ended the minute I handed her the money. The exchangeends once parity has been established, an equal exchange.

From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” isdeemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. Butin the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that itcreates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at itsroot, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to bea “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundleof responsibilities” attached.

Her final gifts, our most revered plants, grew from her body.The strawberry arose from her heart. In Potawatomi, the strawberry isode min, the heart berry. We recognize them as the leaders of the ber-ries, the first to bear fruit.

He expects sellers to graciously give him what heneeds, but sometimes they don’t. The guy at the booth thinks he’s beingshaken down by an elder. “Hey, you can’t get something for nothin’,”he says. But that is exactly the point. A gift is something for nothing,except that certain obligations are attached

. A gift comes to you through no action of yourown, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning.

I dreamed not long ago of that market with all its vivid textures.

Hyde reminds us that in agift economy, one’s freely given gifts cannot be made into someone else’scapital.

What I mean of course is that our human relationship with straw-berries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human percep-tion that makes the world a gift.

you don’t feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that a lifehas been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return—thatfood may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly isfull. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam traywrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance atlife was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.