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.