To one degree or another, ideology always involves distraction. Ensure that one narrative, psychological framework, or form of common sense is so dominant in explaining the order of things that it keeps people from looking for alternatives. In terms of the American working class’s understanding of its material struggles, those distractions have often come in the form of black and brown people turned into scapegoats by opportunistic politicians. This is in part thanks to specifically American phenomena like Jim Crow, whose legacy of perpetuating slavery’s racialized division of the workforce remains very much with us. In the framing of Trump 2.0, for instance, immigrants—not policy or modes of production—are to blame for the material issues faced by the majority of working-class Americans, seen as a parasitic drain on scarce resources. The consequence of this is a class divided. Rather than fight together against capital as a single, and hence more powerful, racially and ethnically diverse class, workers have often been coaxed into fighting against one another as status groups within the class in competition for what is perceived to be a limited pool of goods—wages, benefits, and housing, among others. All of this distracts workers, the thinking goes, from considering how the pool itself might be enlarged by more solidaristic efforts that take on capital ownership in general and its normalized hoarding of profits.

If culture has at times played an indispensable role in stoking these divisions via distraction, then few of its offerings have helped more in this ideological work than the song “Dixie.” While we tend to associate the song today with the dubious racial, not class, politics of the Confederacy, in truth the two were always inextricably intertwined. Written on the eve of the Civil War, the song’s earliest versions aided in the cultural work of leveraging racial hierarchy to distract from the emerging class consciousness of its proletarian fans. As the song moved from North to South, it would bury its racial and class references to become something even more deeply ideological: a nostalgic portrait of a leisurely land of plenty that made no mention of the work—enslaved or otherwise—that had gone into producing it.

Accounts of “Dixie’s” origins conflict, yet research suggests that the melody likely came from the playing of a family of black musicians in Ohio, which was adapted in the 1850s by Dan Emmett, a white man, for the minstrel show. By that time, the minstrel show had become hugely popular in the north, attracting vast working-class audiences eager to see acts like Christie’s Minstrels and Bryant’s Minstrels black their faces with burnt cork, strum banjos, and lampoon the degraded races by way of their garish brand of vaudevillian song and dance. Members of the learned classes were no less immune to its appeal; as a testament to the complex politics of the time, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain could also be counted as fans.

The impact of these shows on nineteenth-century popular culture is tough to overstate. This is in part because of the vast repertoire of widely known songs like “Dixie” that the shows produced. But it was also because of the way the shows helped to mediate and consolidate mid-century notions of class. It was at the minstrel show that working-class audiences could begin to understand themselves as such, positioned in opposition to the genteel elites that had begun gathering at their own exclusive theaters elsewhere about town. If that emerging class consciousness was a source of anxiety for the audience, then an important function of the minstrel show was to assuage it, deflecting attention away from class inferiority by foregrounding white racial superiority. Black characters were routinely tricked, mocked, and abused, allowing white audiences to look down on a racialized other even as their class insecurities were in many ways one and the same.

In the late 1850s, as civil war became more and more inevitable, the racism in the minstrel show came to have a double function. The prevailing political opinion in the north, best described as support for Jacksonian democracy, held that the best way to preserve the union was to leave slavery unchallenged. This was in part due to the pro-slavery position of the southern democrats, whose influence had forced the national party to adopt a similar stance. Despite the fact that much of the minstrel show’s working-class audience would go on to fight for the Union, the show itself largely espoused this pro-slavery Jacksonian position. Of the many ways it did this, downplaying the brutalities suffered by the enslaved was one of the most common. In skit after skit, masters were depicted as benevolent and plantation life as bucolic, in effect helping to make the pro-slavery position more palatable to whites eager to avoid war.

“Dixie” entered the picture precisely here. In its original form, the song would have been performed by a white man in blackface, who would have sung the lyrics in dialect:

I wish I was in land ob cotton,

Old times dar am not forgotten

Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.

The presence of dialect was consequential. It meant that, rather than expressing the nostalgia of a southern white protagonist yearning for home, as does the version of “Dixie” we know today, earlier versions of the song would have expressed the nostalgia of a free northern black person yearning to return to conditions of slavery. The song thus served as a vehicle for one of minstrelsy’s most enduring yet malicious tropes: the former slave unable to cope with his or her freedom, pining for life under a benevolent master back down on the plantation. The original “Dixie,” then, hardly repressed racism; it mocked blacks while downplaying their suffering, helping to make a slippery political position easier for northern audiences to digest.

This would all change once the song made it to the South. It did so quickly, arriving in New Orleans before Emmett’s version had even been copyrighted for the New York stage. Once there, the first thing to go was the dialect, which was dropped after members of the southern literati denounced it as lowly. The first verse would eventually become

I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten,

Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixie Land.

The ramifications of this were profound. Dropping the dialect had the effect of removing any racial and class signifiers from the song, clearing the way for white southerners themselves to assume the place of the song’s protagonists. The “land of cotton” could then become the central metaphor for the revised fantasy of the song: a bountiful domain of whiteness, free from black bodies of any sort.

Yet this fantasy extended well beyond race. By calling the dialect “lowly,” the southern literati were conflating race with class in a way that was common throughout the South. The Alabama constitution, written to accompany secession, put it plainly: “Let there be but two classes of persons here—the white and the black. Let the distinction of color only be distinction of class.” As such, by purging the dialect, the southern “Dixie” modified the way that class was repressed from the song. If the northern versions concealed the brutal working conditions of those who labored without compensation, the southern versions hid the laborers themselves, further burying the structural conditions that underwrote the planter class’s standards of living. The song could now express the implicit perspective not merely of whites but of a different class of whites, those who had to do the least laboring of all: the capitalist plantation owners themselves.

As it moved from north to south, then, “Dixie” became an even more potent instrument of class ideology. For working class whites to sing it was now hugely ironic, given that, while they weren’t enslaved in the sense that blacks were, they lived a life of labor that contrasted markedly from the plentiful life described in the first verse of the song. But this was all the more fitting. The Confederacy had been ideologically based in manipulating poor subsistence and yeoman farmers into overlooking their own class realities so that they would fight in the war on racial grounds, which, in Jefferson Davis’s view, made issues of economic class obsolete. “[Slavery],” he wrote, “raises white men to the same general level [...] it dignifies and exalts every white man by the presence of a lower race.”

Davis’s statement was as revealing as it was manipulative. Echoing the logic of the minstrel show, it implied that whites—and white men in particular—were dignified only to the extent that they robbed that dignity from others, that whiteness and white masculinity needed blackness to exist as such. It was an admission of dependency masked as a celebration of hierarchical difference. But it was just as much a confession of the deeper material truths that underwrote this white masculinity along with the more general way of life that a slaveholder like Davis surely enjoyed: a capitalist order that itself required the subjugation of others—rationalized by deeming blacks less than human, consigned to nature and not culture—to exist at all. Gender, class, and race couldn’t have been more inextricably entwined.

The end of the war made all of these forms of dependence painfully apparent. When the South lost, there was no bigger wound than the one inflicted on collective southern manhood. Defeat was humiliating to men, who had failed to prevent their way of life from being upended by outsiders. Losing the war was only part of the issue: there was also the fact the patriarchal order at home had been upended. The more privileged of the fighting men returned to wives who, in the absence of their husbands, had been forced to assume the role of both master of the slaves and provider for the household, turning normative southern gender roles on their heads. Never before had the degree to which those roles depended on the free labor of slavery, and thus on a capitalist order that required it, been so clear. In essence, men had ironically depended on the slaves to be masters. Once the slaves were freed, so was the ability to be a certain type of man.

It’s easy to see how “Dixie,” a nostalgic song about a bygone south, might have figured in here. If before the war, the song’s southern versions had been a call to arms to defend the southern way of life, the song now seemed to be a melancholic reminder that that life was now lost. For the first time in the south, the nostalgia and longing of the song’s first verse actually made sense: the south, as it was once known, was now truly “away,” as the song said it was. And so was the model of patriarchy, underwritten by a particularly vicious brand of expropriative capitalism, that had sustained it.

If “Dixie” now helped to mourn the loss of these things, it could also serve as a call to preserve what of the Old South still remained, or at least what of it southerners fantasized still remained. In the wake of the Confederate defeat, men created organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan in which the south—and white supremacy and southern patriarchy—could be continued by other means. And they attempted to redeem the patriarchy itself by treating the symbolic figures in which they saw themselves—figures like Robert E. Lee—not as fallen and emasculated but as the very embodiments of brave and honorific manhood.

“Dixie” was essential in promoting these fantasies. Yet it would also help to steer them in a different direction. The repression of class references from the song had already helped it to serve the ideological purposes of the Confederacy during the war. Yet it would be the song’s repression of both class and race that would eventually help it to serve the South in a new way. The Lost Cause had emerged as a way for southerners to nurse their wounded pride by reclaiming ownership and definition of the South, yet in a way that conveniently left questions of slavery and chattel capitalism unmentioned. In an act of face-saving, it would insist that the Civil War had been fought to preserve southern heritage in general, not the malicious system of human bondage that made it possible. Yet in doing so, defenders of the South—of Dixie—would only echo the ideology of capitalism itself: a deeply ingrained way of life made to seem free and fair only by disavowing the expropriated labor that makes it possible. If the denizens of Dixie have “looked away” from anything over time, it is this.

When I first watched Caché around the time it came out, it struck me as an impeccably crafted, formally mind-bending, and yet merely superb thriller. I took it to be a film about surveillance, about bourgeois fragility and paranoia, and about its own ingenious narrative devices, which exploit the camera’s gaze to destabilize that of the viewer. The film was powerful but not transformative.

When I watched it again recently, it struck me as an uncannily prescient, nearly incapacitating masterpiece. It was less about surveillance or paranoia than about something much more below the surface: the repressed truths of colonialism and their inevitable and devastating return. What had changed in the intervening time was my closer proximity to a certain politics, lit up as from a flare by the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. From that more politicized vantage point, what had formerly been a film about invasive forms of seeing became a film about impotent forms of knowing. The unconscious had come to light… Continue reading at AgainstTheCurrent.org

Global warming has always had trouble being terrifying. Invisible gases trapped high in the sky have never made great villains, nor have their mundane terrestrial sources. The crisis’ timescale, measured in a degree or inch here and a part-per-million there, is in some ways literally glacial, which isn’t exactly the pace of most monsters. And the link between its causes and longer-term impacts—floods, famines, mass migrations, wars, and such—can feel intangible enough to require leaps of faith.

There is a reason, in other words, why many resort to metaphors when trying to explain or understand the problem. Global warming, we hear, is a greenhouse, a hothouse, a house in flames. It is a planetary fever, a fast-approaching meteor, a time bomb. Its oblivious victims are the proverbial slowly boiled frog. All of these have been attempts to bring a problem that in many ways exceeds the bounds of human cognition down to the level of everyday life and make it feel, as it were, closer to home.

Among the more common of these metaphors for global warming, the wildfire makes for a particularly interesting case. To be sure, wildfires can be made to symbolize just about anything that’s terrible. Bad things that spread. Bad things that happen quickly. Bad things that destroy completely and without remorse. There is also the long list of things they are said to symptomatize: human hubris or ecological neglect, the creative destruction of nature, the absence of the New Testament god as a guarantor of mercy, the presence of the Old Testament god as a punisher of sin.

But what is interesting about the wildfire as a metaphor for climate change is the way these two things relate not merely in a symbolic capacity but also more literally as cause and effect. It is common enough knowledge that the last of these is true: wildfires are undoubtedly an effect of climate change. Research has found that climate change-induced drought more than doubled the chance of the recent Canadian infernos while increasing their severity by at least 20%. Similar statistics could be offered to explain the fires in Los Angeles, Hawaii, California, Greece, and elsewhere.

It is less widely known that fires themselves contribute to warming. When a forest burns, trees that once helped to absorb carbon dioxide as a carbon sink release that carbon back into the atmosphere. In Canada in 2023, the incineration of vast tracts of boreal forest released twice as much carbon as the country produced that year through electricity generation, transportation, heavy industry, construction, and agriculture combined. Since 2020, fires have raised the country’s emissions by 50%. In California, the 2020 fire season erased all of the emissions gains the state had made over the previous sixteen years. Adding to all of this is the fact that wildfires produce soot, or black carbon, which, when spewed by the ton into the atmosphere, absorbs light and thus heat and contributes even further to warming.

But even as wildfires serve as a nexus of these feedback loops of climate change, helping to cause and being caused by it, they also serve as implausibly clear object lessons in the entire process. Like a macabre twist on Goethe’s notion of self-similarity in nature, they exist as contributing parts while also echoing the hellish whole. They do this by embodying the phenomenon of global warming at its most basic: when carbon burns out of control, ending up in the air, it disturbs human ways of life to the point of threatening ecological health and survival. Wildfires demonstrate this with little subtlety.

Yet they also echo and repeat specific phenomena that occur as a part of this larger process. For example, wildfires can worsen the weather, much as global warming does; when a blaze is intense enough, it can create massive pyrocumulonimbus clouds—hellish conflagrations of smoke, gasses, and moisture towering higher than Mt. Everest—that unleash lightning, tornados, and torrents of rain on the firescape. Then there are the feedback loops. These ultra-hot fires can also destroy native seedbanks and alter the ecology of an area to such an extent that native plant species can no longer grow in the soil, giving way to highly combustible grasses that only increase the risk of future fires. It is not unlike the way the snow melt generated by global warming results in darker ground, allowing the Earth to absorb even more solar radiation than it otherwise would, which only adds to rates of subsequent snow melt and temperature rise.

All of this together forms a darkly allegorical landscape that helps to make the otherwise intangible aspects of climate change luridly concrete. In the wildfire’s flames, we have an animated materialization of terrestrial warming and its impacts that is ominous to the point of camp. In the wildfire’s smoke, it is as though noxious CO2, methane, and other invisible greenhouse gasses had been rendered visible, draped in sooty funereal garb or dusted like fingerprints on a manhandled sky. And in the slow drift of that smoke across time zones, drawing a veil over our common sun, it is as though wildfires were mocking the borderless public nature of an atmosphere that had been co-opted as a dumping ground by private corporations. In this grim ecological theater, smoke and flame become the medium of some sort of twisted performance art, staged by one disaster to draw attention to another.

But these forays into symbol searching can be problematic. For one, they invite us to project onto non-human nature our all-too-human cries for action—the wildfire as an act of self-immolation by a grieving Mother Nature, and so on—and few good things ever came from that. It also risks aestheticizing disaster, reducing tragedy to the fodder of self-indulgent exercises in formalism. None of this really teaches us much about the real causes of the problems at hand. It’s fine, of course, to explore the ways nature repeats and doubles itself, contains and represents itself. It’s just not fine to confuse this pattern hunting for politics.

To avoid doing that, what can be more productive than reveling in the likeness we find between some things is to ask why we resist seeing it in others, even when there’s ample evidence to suggest the connection. A productive example would be the wildfire and capitalism, the real engine behind the warming that is enabling these disasters. Why might we resist seeing one in the other? What type of ideological work might be at play?

We can start to answer by considering capitalism’s own fires. We refer to things as wild when they cannot be contained or controlled and we feel like they should be, usually due to the threat they pose to human ways of life. And so we refer to fires in which the unchecked burning of carbon, in the form of trees and chaparral and grassland and houses big and small, as being wild. Yet we do not speak of capitalism’s own unchecked burning of carbon in a similar way. This is in part because the myriad fires of capitalism—beneath us in our boilers, above us in our airplanes, and around us in our power plants, lawnmowers, buses, and cars—are dispersed in a way that makes them hard to see as a singular threatening thing. What’s more, this dispersed state allows them to seem to be contained and controlled as tools serving a concrete need. From this perspective, there is nothing wild about them. So controlled are these flames that they can be made to burn in minute increments that maintain precise speeds on our highways and precise temperatures in our homes.

Yet this is deceptive. For one, fires don’t need to exist as a single mass to be wild and destructive. Individual homes in the Palisades, turned to ash by embers dispersed by Santa Anna winds, prove as much. The flame itself isn’t the problem so much as the conditions that enable it to destructively spread. Under capitalism, the wind that blows the embers, ensuring the unchecked spreading of fossil-fueled flames, is what Marx called its “mute compulsion,” the relentless pressure exerted by the economic system to grow at whatever social or environmental cost. It is not, in other words, a pressure exerted by individual capitalists as a function of their morality and thus one that could be tempered by conscience. It is a far more blind, impersonal, and transcendent pressure stemming from the structurally induced competitive mandates of the system itself, compelling producers to endlessly expand production lest they perish, and regardless of ecological limits. Nothing about this is not wild.

We also cannot say that these dispersed flames are truly contained and controlled. This would be true only to the extent that we ignored the collective damage done by the emissions that those flames invisibly produce. In this sense, they are fantastic metaphors for capitalism in general as a system that, in order to remain socially viable, must disavow and make invisible its own ineluctable destructive tendencies. We find this disavowal in the most common platitude used to defend the system: capitalism as nothing less than a playground for liberalism’s formal liberties—free workers freely entering the marketplace and freely selling their labor power to other free people in exchange for a fair wage. Freedom. Not wildness.

But also more deception. What this account leaves out are the unsustainable and expropriative background conditions that prefigure and enable these supposed freedoms. Workers freely sell their labor power only insofar as we forget that it is the historical theft of their land—together with the perpetuation of that disparity through the generations—that has created their need to do this in the first place. And the wages capital provides are contractual and fair only to the extent that we forget how little leverage workers have to raise them, how insufficient they are relative to the social surplus, and about all of unpaid, non-contractual labor that capitalism quietly depends on behind the scenes for its profits. Capitalism doesn’t pay for the care work, largely done by women, that nourishes and replenishes those paid workers so they can continue clocking in. It doesn’t pay to replenish or repair ecosystems after it strips them of the raw materials. It doesn’t pay to use our public atmosphere as a private dumping ground for its greenhouse gasses. And it doesn’t pay for the endless public health impacts—including those caused by climate change-fueled wildfires—that flow therefrom.

Capitalism, in short, takes vastly more than it gives. And it does so due to its structural mandate to grow as cheaply as possible for profit. What we must see is how this form of growth is inseparable from destruction, achievable only by pushing its enabling conditions—its workers, its sources of raw materials—to the breaking point. It cannot occur, in other words, without exhausting what fuels it from one moment to the next before moving on to new frontiers of expropriation. Which is to say that it resembles nothing so much as the exponentially expanding circumference of a wildfire.

But we should also consider another, related way that we use the word wild: to mean the primitive, as in the opposite of the civilized, something that is part of lowly nature and not culture. Because wildfires are so destructive and terrifying, we want to believe that they originate in a place apart from us, the civilized. To call a raging fire wild therefore allows us to distance ourselves from it and to believe that it is not somehow an extension of our own irresponsibility, oversight, or proclivities towards self-destruction. This is the ideology of the so-called natural disaster: it is entirely this thing called nature’s fault, not ours.

Yet with this, we come to a way that capitalism has avoided responsibility not only for its general wildness but also for its role in enabling actual wildfires themselves. Like humans, capitalism also wants to believe that it is above nature and the wild—that its deregulated markets and free enterprise represent the end of history, not the beginning. But it turns out that this commonplace concept of nature—nature as the opposite of the civilized and human—was largely an opportunistic invention of capitalism itself. Emerging alongside the sixteenth-century colonial expeditions of Western Europe, the concept of nature provided a convenient way of classifying certain racialized workers as less-than-human and thus less-than-deserving of a wage or compensatory care. As the scholar Jason W. Moore has written, it was and continues to be an ideological tool used to cheapen certain forms of work and rationalize inadequate compensation en route to higher returns. This was certainly true of the indigenous and enslaved peoples of the colonial and mercantile eras—deemed naturales, all but animals—and it is a legacy that has continued on with the racialized, criminally underpaid workers of the Global South. But it is also true of what we more typically think of as nature: the non-human labor done by the earth and atmosphere to produce food and raw materials and store waste. As the nutrient-depleted fields of Big Ag and our carbon-choked atmosphere attest, this is work that has, in its own way, also gone without replenishment or care. In all of these cases, capitalism has encouraged and exploited distinctions between nature and the human to justify not paying its true social costs and thus distance itself from its own self-destructive unsustainability.

What is essential to see is how this lack of care for non-human nature in particular has, in effect, created new natures that have enabled wildfires in the most literal sense. In Maui, part of what fueled the Lahana Fire was an invasive species of grass brought to the islands by nineteenth-century cattle ranchers, who prized the plant for its toleration of drought. The scale of the blazes was enabled by the fact that those combustible grasses had been allowed to take over sprawling corporate sugarcane and pineapple farms that had been left idle or abandoned due to competition with foreign markets. In the Canadian wildfires of 2023, it was tree farms, planted by corporate logging companies to fill the gashes they had left in the landscape, that burned as much as the so-called wilderness. The trees had been planted as monocultures of highly combustible Black Spruce spaced as little as six feet apart, unprotected by more fire-resistant species typically interspersed with that species in the wild. Most were planted as “carbon offsets,” a market-based approach to continued corporate ecocide that has proven to be worthless.

These disasters weren’t natural, in other words. In both cases, what burned was not some sort of primitive nature raging out of control so much as nature mediated through and through by capital. The imperative of endless accumulation had led corporations to take what they wanted from the landscape without giving back in the form of adequate replenishment and repair. They created wildfires by creating landscapes conducive to them, formed in the image of their own irrepressible wildness.

Of course, there are also more straightforward ways that capitalism’s neglect in the interest of profit has led to uncontrollable infernos. For years, the capital-soaked Los Angeles real estate lobby has recklessly pushed to expand housing into the highest-risk areas for wildfires. It has simply been more profitable, it has said, to build in an undeveloped suburban tinderbox than to do so in less fire-prone areas. Other forms of corporate malfeasance have only compounded this risk. In 2017, sixteen California wildfires were caused by faulty electrical infrastructure owned by investor-owned utility PG&E. In 2018, equipment failure on a faulty PG&E transmission tower caused the devastating Camp Fire, which leveled the town of Paradise and killed over 80 people. In 2019, downed PG&E power lines sparked the Kincade Fire in Sonoma County. And two years later, the Dixie Fire—also caused by PG&E—became the second largest wildfire in California history. In all of these cases, ratepayer money that might have gone towards better maintaining and fireproofing this infrastructure surely went to the pockets of shareholders instead.

But ultimately, this catalogue of capitalism’s wildness must lead us back to where we started: to global warming itself. With or without the help of metaphors, we will never understand this existential threat to the global working class and humanity in general without accepting that human-caused climate change is an entirely predictable feature, not a bug, of a system that is incentivized by its structural compulsions to disavow its own wildness and refuse to pay its true social costs. To paraphrase Moore, treat the atmosphere as a rent-free dumping ground for long enough and the bill will eventually come due.

Yet just because capitalism disavows its own wildness doesn’t mean we have to. And why would we? We know that capitalism is wild because we have seen 16 trillion in wealth evaporate nearly overnight in the 2008 financial crisis. We have seen the destruction of entire midwestern towns and millions of personal livelihoods due to manufacturing overcapacity and deindustrialization. And we have seen millions more consigned by capital to structural unemployment, incarceration, or a lifetime of indebtedness as a solution for managing surplus populations amid its late-stage transformations. Capitalism would maintain that these, too, are “natural disasters,” albeit of a different kind—natural as in normal, mandated by the market gods, willed by the fickle graces of the hidden hand. But as with wildfires, they aren’t natural disasters so much as examples of capitalism’s disastrous nature. They are the predictable results of a system that writes off the suffering of hundreds of millions of people as so many externalities, so many naturales, so much expendable fuel for a fire that rages only for the sake of its own continuation. If the wildfire is an object lesson in anything, it is this: blind exponential growth that is inseparable from social and ecological devastation. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we will understand the real reason the world burns.

Read “Canvassing for the Commons” at Socialist Forum here.

On January 18, the New York Times ran an opinion piece in the form of a brief exchange between the philosopher Michael Sandel and the economist Thomas Piketty on the state of post-Biden America. In summing up the piece in the introductory text, the editors write that the two thinkers’ “back-and-forth [...] builds to a surprising conclusion: that the left must reclaim a form of identity politics.”

It’s tough to imagine a more perverse reading of the exchange. The final line of the article, offered by the socialist Piketty, essentially suggests the exact opposite: “if your socioeconomic aspirations are neglected too long and too obviously,” he writes, “then at the end this can give rise to entrenched identity conflict.” What is required of the Left, Piketty clearly suggests here and throughout the rest of the article, is a renewed commitment to the socioeconomic, not to identity politics.

As the concept is used and understood on the socialist left, identity politics has typically meant a cultural politics of representation—diversity initiatives and so on—that exists at the expense of a materialist politics of redistribution. Put simply, it's a politics that does far too little to address issues related to class and more universalist social concerns. More accurately, we might say that identity politics is itself a form of class politics, but one that tends to express the class position of those who, on the one hand, are materially privileged enough not to have to think as much about class, and on the other, often have an interest in protecting that class position. That’s why for-profit, stridently anti-union corporations like the New York Times love identity politics: they get to exude a sheen of progressiveness by promoting it while doing nothing to challenge (or teach readers about) the material basis of so many identity-based forms of oppression. This is why the paper’s willful misrepresentation couldn’t be more predictable.

But what’s infinitely more interesting than this is the way the conversation between Piketty and Sandel involves its own misreadings of a sort related to this impoverished politics. Ultimately, what their back-and-forth really reveals is the way prominent thinkers can talk past each other when one of them fails to fully understand the implications of what we might call the recognition vs. redistribution debate.

The scholar Nancy Fraser has done more than any other to theorize the debate’s terms and it is worth recounting some of her argument here. (For anyone truly trying to understand the problem of identity politics in a critical yet non-dogmatic way, there is probably no better starting point that her work.)

For Fraser, recognition and redistribution constitute the two primary ways that different groups in society seek to redress injustice. Recognition, the primary mode of identity politics, is what groups seek when they are fighting to redress specifically cultural/symbolic forms of injustice. Redistribution, on the other hand, is what groups seek when they are fighting to address socioeconomic forms of injustice such as those prioritized by the traditional left.

It would not be wrong to say that we are in our current political conundrum largely because, over the past forty years, fights for recognition have been greatly prioritized over fights for redistribution; the working-class abandonment of the democratic party is a result of nothing if not this. Yet this absolutely does not mean that we shouldn't fight for both. The key as Fraser sees it is to realize that there are regressive and progressive versions of both fights.

Instead of simply endorsing or rejecting all of identity politics simpliciter, we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality.1

In other words, if we agree that real equality and universalism should be the ultimate horizon of our politics, we should be cautious with fights for justice that end up celebrating difference in ways that are counterproductive to this egalitarian goal. We can assess this by asking: do fights for recognition and redistribution accomplish their goals by affirming or transforming the groups in question? Fights for recognition tend to overwhelmingly do the former, affirming or even performatively creating the groups demanding it. We can think here of the way certain DEI initiatives can end up reinforcing reductive, reified, or even essentialist understandings of race and gender, implying through their tokenism that these categories are more substantive than they really are, or that they have clear-cut, biologically based boundaries that account for homogeneous group experiences. We can also see how they might stigmatize the groups involved, which only helps to further impede the goal of true universalism. Yet the goal of our politics should ultimately be to constantly deconstruct and challenge (as in a properly queer politics, for example) these categories as things that are not substantive so much as cultural constructions that are deeply relational, unstable, and historically contingent, used as tools to divide and exploit us by oppressive regimes.

Of course, fights for redistribution under neoliberalism also risk affirming rather than transcending the groups involved. We can think of the way band-aid solutions like the (nonetheless needed) expansion of the welfare state affirm class boundaries by doing little to challenge the powers that keep those boundaries in place, all while stigmatizing the poor. The alternative would be more radical forms of redistribution—those that involve redistributing wealth towards collective and public forms of ownership, for example—which would make the notion of class irrelevant altogether. As Fraser writes, referencing Marx, “the task of the proletariat [...] is not simply to cut itself a better deal, but ‘to abolish itself as a class’.” The takeaway is that the left should fight for both recognition and redistribution as long as they are versions of those fights devoted to destabilizing and challenging the boundaries that impede fights for more transcendent kinds of equality and universalism.

Fraser offers the following useful chart describing these differences:

To be sure, as Fraser notes, these distinctions between recognition and redistribution are largely analytical; in practice they tend to reinforce, imply, or relate dialectically to one another. To see how, we can finally turn back to the conversation. Early on, Piketty notes how the recession of class politics (a politics of redistribution) has, under neoliberalism, created an opening for a particularly nefarious politics of recognition to arise:

We’ve never been as rich as we are today. But because we’ve given up on some ambitious continuation of the egalitarian agenda of making the most powerful economic actors accountable to democratic control, making them contribute to the public goods we need to fund, you have this nativist discourse of blaming migrants or supposedly excessively open frontiers for our problems.

What he is essentially describing here is the way that a need for recognition by a discrete interest group originates in a failure of redistribution to what is presumably a much wider group (working-class people as a whole). The lack of economic and material support is the condition of possibility for the white working class (to give one example) coming to understand its hardships along those more restricted and divisive identity lines, whereas that self-understanding might have otherwise remained in the terms of the working class more generally. Put another way, redistribution can have a transformative effect not just on class but also, in this case, on race by preventing the conditions that encourage conflicts to be understood along racial lines. We might say that redistribution can discourage racialization. Yet its absence here sets the table for alternate, identity-based understandings rooted in much more divisive forms of social closure.

It would seem in this example, then, that redistribution is somehow more primary and important than recognition. Yet it’s not so simple. Would it not be more accurate to say that redistribution in this example functions as its own form of recognition? When workers are rewarded with higher pay, benefits, and long-term job security, is this not also a form of recognizing workers’ needs as an interest group? It would be hard to argue otherwise. But can we turn things around and say that recognition can also be a form of redistribution? It would seem not. Whereas the material benefits of redistribution always also have a symbolic value, symbolic benefits do not always have a material value.

Piketty’s interlocutor, Michael Sandel, seems to disagree. After offering an anecdote about being accused by a prickly Iowan of being a condescending coastal elite, he says, “my hunch is that any hope we may have of reducing economic inequality will depend on creating the conditions for greater equality of recognition, honor, dignity and respect.” Later on, he says a version of the same thing:

A progressive economic agenda is an important step in the right direction. But as Donald Trump returns to the White House, Democrats need a broader project of civic renewal. They need to affirm the dignity of work, especially for those without college degrees…

In other words, Sandel is insinuating here that recognition must precede redistribution. But how would this work? Why would some sort of vaguely conferred symbolic recognition ever need to be the precondition for material redistribution? It is an incoherent idea. The only way one could come to this conclusion, it seems, is to refuse to see economic redistribution as precisely a way of conferring “honor, dignity and respect.” After all, it is hard to think of anything that would affirm the dignity of work more than higher wages.

Amusingly, Piketty throws Sandel a bone, claiming that his position seems reasonable, but then proceeds to simply repeat what he had said above:

By continuing in the direction of the democratic socialist agenda promoted by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren [??], and hopefully by younger candidates in the future, I think the Democratic Party will be able to restore hope and a feeling of recognition to a larger part of the country than just Boston and San Francisco.

Once again, Piketty suggests, redistribution leads to recognition.

What remains to be determined, as per Fraser, is whether the redistributional measures mentioned throughout the piece (cancelling debt, raising wages, restoring jobs lost to globalization) aim to truly transform rather than merely affirm working class existence. We must say that they only do the latter. We are still largely on the terrain of liberal progressivism, not social democracy or democratic socialism. Discussions of student debt relief, for instance, foreclose more important discussions of the need for free colleges that would obviate the concept of debt altogether as well as the need for the means-tested policy that stigmatizes the working class as such. And while Piketty mentions the salience of working-class contempt for the elite, he doesn’t mention the importance of creating explicitly public amenities like public housing, healthcare, and utilities that would transfer ownership of essential goods—and thus control over working-class lives—out of the hands of the elite altogether.

Piketty also leaves out something else that might be the most important thing of all: the fact that the universalism aspired to by a truly redistributive agenda isn’t just about inching society towards more robust, pragmatically lived forms of equality; it’s also about discouraging forms of divisive race- or gender-based social closure that inhibit the cultivation of solidarity, which is the only real foundation for creating true mass-political power. Worker militancy, mass strikes, student occupations and sit-ins—that sort of thing. Another way to think about Fraser’s framework, then, is through the question of whether different forms of recognition and redistribution inhibit or encourage the creation of solidarity across different groups in the interest of creating mass political power.

What is certain is that, in the face of the current oligarchical capture of every facet of government, we need that power now more than ever. To be sure, we also desperately need the rights of trans and other people to be thoroughly recognized, to give but one timely example. Yet legal interventions that provide these forms of affirmative recognition will never be enough. What is also needed is a transformative politics that sees these categories themselves as reified tools that the ruling class uses to continually divide us from mass political solidarity and action while keeping us from seeing our common needs and common humanity. The New York Times will never promote anything but the most neutered take on this politics. Fraser’s work can help us to be better at seeing it as such.

From a certain perspective, there can be no such thing as a millionaire on a picket line. In the terms of labor’s fight against capital, in which the most pointed weapon is solidarity, picket lines can be composed only of workers (and, sure, their allies), regardless of how much they make. This is because strikes are as much about principles as they are about paydays, even when their demands include more wage parity between different tiers of workers. In the recent UAW strike, for instance, Tier 1 workers fought alongside their lower paid comrades for the elimination of tiers altogether precisely because those tiers divide workers while dimming their power. The point is equality on every front.

But what happens when workers who make millions do choose to act as such while on strike? The recent SAG-AFTRA walkout provided a glimpse. First, we had De Niros, Clooneys, Afflecks, and Streeps swooping in to try and end the strike with their deep-pocketed benevolence. Their suggestion, apparently offered out of frustration with the pace of bargaining, was that wealthier stars could pay more in membership dues to help cover things like health care. Not only did their discussions of the idea seemingly threaten the unified front represented by the bargaining committee, they also risked weakening the union’s position by implying that it was reasonable for basic benefits to be covered by fellow actors—critic Andy Greenwald called it a “GoFundMe for medical expenses”—and not an exploitative employer worth billions. In the end, it was a subtly patronizing and anti-solidaristic move, with rich celebs positioning themselves as white knights of wealth, saving the day with the band-aid of impatient philanthropy, not as fellow workers standing against greed in principle.

The faux pas continued. Shortly after the tentative deal was reached by the union, Alec Baldwin took to Instagram to applaud the work done by the bargaining committee and a few of his wealthy friends, but not so much that of the exhausted rank and file, which managed to maintain picket lines for 100+ days. The nods they did get were cursory. “I’m so happy that the rank and file of this business can get back to work as well,” he says at the very end, almost as an afterthought. Thanks for the scraps, Jack Doneghy.

There is so much in Baldwin’s four-minute video that is telling, but nothing more so than the fact that he hardly utters the word “we” once. What this suggests, of course, is that he in no way identifies as a worker, insulated by his millions from the ramifications of the fight. But there is also a jarring lack of acknowledgement of any kind of collective agency in general. What he acknowledges instead are individuals, and mostly famous ones, which, from the self-important celebrity’s perspective, makes sense: the job of the actor-individual is to convince people of things, and famous actors, rarefied beings that they are, are people who do this particularly well. Why wouldn’t this game of persuasion extend to the bargaining table? In this worldview, a picket line becomes the merest community theater in which the actor hoi polloi convinces itself it is convincing others while the real work is done by the real talent on the bargaining stage. Success is a matter of shrewd individual acumen. Solidarity, mutuality, and collective power have little place in this narrative.

We have to assume that, on some level, celebrities realize that their wealth and worth derive as much from that very hoi polloi as it does from their own labor; without the extras and other smaller parts on the call sheets, there would be no one to play against, set their supposed greatness into relief, give them their singular power. But instances like these raise doubts. Just as people fetishize celebrities, celebrities surely also fetishize themselves, convincing themselves that their value is entirely inherent and self-produced. The Marxist philosopher György Lukács called this reified consciousness. And what better to misunderstand the solidaristic spirit of a strike, premised on the idea that value and victory alike can only be collectively produced, than that?

It is possible, though, to get carried away with this mockery of celebrity cluelessness. While it is true that fame and fortune are inherently deradicalizing, isolating stars from the masses like Citizen Kane at Xanadu; and while it is also true that they insulate from the need to be literate in types of power that do not involve caché or dollar signs, we also have to contend with the limited availability of those notions of power in our impoverished political discourse. What does not even occur to well-meaning progressives as an option cannot be advocated for as a strategy. That goes for all of us. This is not to apologize for the celebrity class so much as to remain committed to targeting the real villain. The language of solidarity, of the social, of the “we,” of labor militancy and the power that flows therefrom—there is perhaps no greater conceptual casualty of capitalism and its neoliberal turn in the political imaginary than these things.

What is critical to realize, however, is that what once helped as much as anything to propagate that leftist language was—what else?—labor strikes. During the heyday of unions, labor militancy provided important mirrors in which everyday people could see and understand themselves as collective and collectively powerful beings, not just impotently atomized individuals who could do little more to change the world than recycle and vote. With the disciplining of labor and decline of unions over the past forty years, those mirrors have cracked, and the empowering imago they offered has as well.

But luckily, these mirrors show signs of repair. What the recent resurgence in labor actions and victories offer, insofar as we talk and teach each other about them, is precisely new ways to rediscover the “we” and its place in winning things—even for the clueless glitterati. After all, the celebrity millionaire-as-worker can benefit from political education just like the rest of us.

What that education should make clear is simple: what won the SAG-AFTRA deal, just as it has won landmark deals of various sorts for writers, UAW workers, UPS drivers, and others of late, was not the benevolence of millionaires, nor their convincing A-list performances in bargaining rooms; it was not caché nor cash; it was workers organizing to shut down production of a capitalist enterprise to get what they deserved. That organized money will never be a match for organized people is the lesson for high society and hoi polloi alike.

https://mronline.org/2022/12/25/all-is-calm-all-is-bright-christmas-climate-change-and-the-dialectics-of-winter/

The Mall in Washington D.C. can feel like a graveyard, particularly when the political mood turns south. During less turbulent times, the buildings and monuments there seem to be at least nominally animated by the ideals they represent, possessed of life in spite of their stony stillness. But during bad times, those same structures can feel dead, as though that animated spirit had abandoned them, transformed into allegories of transience. Architecture’s stillness comes to seem less like its essence and more like a tragic result. Alabaster buildings become bone.

That feeling of deadness on the Mall has always been most pronounced during the protests and marches that it perennially hosts. This might seem counterintuitive given the rivers of impassioned life that tend to define those events. But stillness is, after all, meaningless without movement. As protesters ebbed down the avenues during a recent march, it was they who gave architecture its inertia. Buildings became inept politicians, arms folded and watching from the curb. Neoclassical symmetry has never seemed so self-satisfied.

In a way, this is unfair. It is the unavoidable fate of architecture to be other than the life it shelters. Yet it often doesn’t help itself. On the Mall, monuments often seem to celebrate their own mass as much as living memory. Domes press down like dead weights on arrays of columns, as though to drive them deep into the earth. Low-slung temples of bureaucracy spread their weight over long city blocks, like iron plates covering potholes in the road. If there is beauty here, it is often heavy.

There is also the issue of isolation. The Mall’s buildings and memorials largely stand oblivious to one another, as though history itself were merely episodic, without connective tissue between people and events. It makes for a plodding geography: Here is where we celebrate George Washington. Here is where we remember Vietnam. Here is where we walk in a circle to think about World War II. In each case, the burden of meaning creation falls on solitary stone shoulders, only adding to the sense of weight.

Yet two relatively recent museums, both devoted to underrepresented peoples, are exceptions that activate and enliven this landscape in important ways. One is the Museum of African American History and Culture, whose isolation on the mall feels appropriate. As an act of wry reappropriation, it is separate and defiantly unequal, inhabiting a solitude that redoubles its symbolic function: a place to tell an alternate narrative, free from the gaze of the hegemon. In its design, which is based on the tiered headpieces of Yoruba sculpture, it is the crown of another king. In its dark color, it is a rejection of Washington’s white neoclassical officialdom. In every way, it is an architecture of repudiation. And yet that repudiation is also a gift: if before the Mall’s whiteness was invisible in its ubiquity, it now reads as a choice.

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is something else entirely. Located on the more crowded southeast corner of the mall, the building can’t help but be read and understood in the context of its neighbors. Not that this is always easy to do. On the easternmost perimeter, tall trees, cattails, marsh marigolds, and other plants tangle into a miniature wetland that shut out the rest of the Mall while recalling what the terrain would have been like for Chesapeake Bay natives prior to European settlement. Canoes would have been made from the cypress trees, a sign tells visitors. Dolphins would have played along the waterway shores. The leafy landscaping resurrects the past while keeping out much of the present.

Or at least to a point. Directly in front of the museum, the top of a white dome breaches the trees, peering over the canopy like a watchman. The museum peers back, pointed at the dome like a needle to some questionable north. The building, of course, is the U.S. Capitol, and the tension it creates with the NMAI is palpable. It is as though two centuries of colonial power struggles had been frozen in stone.

To be sure, the NMAI is no masterpiece. The sides and rear of the building feel woefully underdesigned compared to the curvilinear dynamism of the front, which itself comes off as a bit garish. But underwhelming aesthetics do not preclude potent symbolism. Take the building's walls, for instance. Built almost entirely from rugged Kasota limestone, the museum’s earthy beige exterior dialogues uncomfortably with the white of the capitol and the rest of Washington—a tobacco-tinged tooth in an otherwise pearly mouth. It doesn’t repudiate white, as does the deep bronze of the Museum of African American History, so much as give it a certain volatility. Beige is white’s almost, not its other, a proximity that makes both colors seem nervous around one another, distrustful of one another, as though aware of how little it might take to become the other. White sullies into beige. Beige empties into white. Or whatever your metaphor might be for assimilation.

The unease between the buildings runs deep. The original capitol dome was completed in 1826, only two years after the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was established as part of the War Department to oversee government dealings with the natives. Its first major action would be to help engineer the Indian Removal Act of 1830, championed by Andrew Jackson, which would result in the displacement of over 46,000 American Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River. On the thousand-mile Trail of Tears alone, 4,000 out of 15,000 Cherokees died.

In 1868, just two years after the redesigned capitol dome was completed, the BIA sent General Sherman to southern Wyoming to goad the Sioux into signing the second Laramie Treaty, which promised North Dakota’s Black Hills to the tribes along with the rest of the Great Sioux Reservation. It would be under the same dome that congress would pass the Agreement of 1877, which would officially break that treaty and take the Black Hills back.

Subsequent policies created at the capitol would help to reduce the native population to a third of what it had been at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to say nothing of prior colonial decimation. The BIA has since admitted to those wrongs. In a speech given to mark the agency’s 175th anniversary, then-Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Gover apologized on its behalf: “I stand before you as the leader of an institution that in the past has committed acts so terrible that they infect, diminish, and destroy the lives of Indian people decades later, generations later,” he remarked. “Ethnic cleansing,” he had called it earlier.

The NMAI was to be the centerpiece of federal action that finally addressed all of this. The product of decades of planning by native activists and politicians, the museum was initiated over thirty years ago with the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act and finally opened in 2005. The standards it set for itself were daunting. In order to correct centuries of misrepresentation in museums, it would create exhibits that represented Indian culture as vibrantly alive, not as a primitive anachronism. It was to be overseen by indigenous curators rather than non-native academics. It would strive for a unified, pantribal account of Indian life. And it was to recognize that political boundaries are not cultural boundaries by giving voice to indigenous tribes across the continent.

The accomplishment, were it to be achieved, would not be small. Sioux activist Vine Deloria is said to have remarked that a museum on the National Mall would be the most significant achievement for Native Americans in a century. Tribal members treated it as such: Over 25,000 indigenous people representing more than five hundred Indian nations came to the opening on September 25, 2005. It was the largest gathering of tribes in modern history.

Yet change comes hard. That the second largest gathering of native tribes in modern history happened eleven years later but for a much less celebratory reason proved that irony would remain alive and well on the National Mall. The gathering happened far from Washington, some forty miles south of Bismarck, out on the North Dakota plains. Despite the freezing temperatures, representatives from over 250 Indian nations showed up with the intention of digging in and staying for a while. Their reason? To show solidarity with their Standing Rock Sioux brethren, who had found themselves at odds with a pipeline company intent on moving oil across the Missouri River.

The vicissitudes of the project’s fate ever since have, of course, been dizzying. President Obama shut down the pipeline only for President Trump to revive it and make it operational. In March of 2020, a court ruled that the Army Corps had failed to adequately consider the pipeline’s potential impacts on drinking water, ordering the flow of oil to be stopped while the Corps prepared a new assessment. But while the assessment is being prepared, court stays and actions by the Biden Administration have allowed the oil to flow yet again.

In the wake of these changes of fate, many will look to the NMAI’s stoic visage in relation to the capital and find some measure of native resilience. Others will see a different, much darker form of persistence. Either way, there is something about the inertial permanence of these buildings and their unsettling relationship that calls on us to never forget the turbulent history shared between them, one that, as we will see, is written in stone.

Borders

If you were to visualize the map of North and South Dakota, you might imagine two stacked rectangles with perpendicular borders, save for the eastern edge formed by the Red River. From a certain perspective, this would be a mistake. A more accurate representation would be two rectangles with several holes cut out, including one straddling the states’ central shared boundary. That hole would be the Standing Rock reservation, which begins at the Cannonball River and extends 3,572 square miles to the south.

The exact nature of Native American sovereignty is slippery, at least from a legal standpoint. American Indians are explicitly mentioned only three times in the U.S. Constitution, and only once in regard to political jurisdiction. “The Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes,” reads Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3. Here, the tribes aren’t separate nations, but nor are they separate states, and are to be regulated by nothing less elusive than “commerce.” It would be up to the Supreme Court to provide some clarity: tribes had an aboriginal right to land, yet they shared the title to that land with the U.S. government (Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, 1831); or later: tribes weren’t quite foreign nations but were instead “domestic, dependant nations” whose relationship to the U.S. was that of a “ward to its guardian” (Worcester vs. Georgia, 1832).

Those ambiguities of native sovereignty persist to this day. Yet visit the website of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and you’ll read only that the relationship between tribes and the United States is “one between sovereigns, i.e., between a government and a government”—a half truth at best.

Matters are much clearer for the Sioux. Like most other indigenous groups, they refer to themselves as a nation, and not without the pride that typically attends that designation. Anyone could have sensed it during their fight against the pipeline. Despite the fact that few followers of that fight would emerge with a substantive understanding of what Standing Rock actually was or had been, and despite the fact that fewer still could speak to the exact nature of what, aside from water, was being violated by the pipeline, all could agree that, whatever Standing Rock was, it at least seemed to embody its name: an unwavering entity, determined to defend its 3,572-square-mile hole in the middle of the Dakotas from corporate encroachment.

Yet this reading also has its problems. If maps illuminate a particular spatial present, they are also acts of erasure, able to show what is only at the expense of what was. And what was in the case of Standing Rock was a vast former dominion of which the current territory is but the slightest colonial crumb.

Until 1851, Sioux territory had no boundaries apart from the unspoken borders formed by hostile tribes and hunting grounds. In 1849, when gold was discovered in California and elsewhere, this began to change. More non-natives entered Sioux hunting grounds than ever before, disturbing the distribution of the buffalo and causing conflict. In 1851, a short-lived solution was found in the Laramie Treaty, according to which the Sioux—insofar as they signed it, but not insofar as they understood it—agreed to live within roughly specified areas while allowing prospectors and others safe passage along designated roads.

When more gold was found in the early 1860s, this time at the headwaters of the Missouri River, the inundation by fortune seekers commenced. More promises were broken, more fighting broke out, and in 1868 another Laramie treaty was signed. This time, real boundaries were drawn: the Sioux would agree to live and hunt within a curtailed territory—the Great Sioux Reservation, 25 million acres that included the present-day Standing Rock territory—while once again allowing the army and others safe passage along specific roads. In exchange, the Sioux would receive both government protection and regular rations.

Benevolent though all of this might seem, it was the beginning of a federal policy that would seek to induce the very dependency the government would later use to justify its patronizing sovereignty over the Indians. As part of the treaty, it was stipulated that the Army would build an agency near the center of the reservation, which would house a government agent while serving as a distribution point for rations. As the treaty put it, the agent

shall reside among [the Sioux], and keep an office open at all times for the purpose of prompt and diligent inquiry into such matters of complaint by and against the Indians as may be presented for investigation under the provisions of their treaty stipulations, as also for the faithful discharge of other duties enjoined on him by law.

In truth, however, the agency—then known as the Grand River agency—was largely there to surveil the Sioux and facilitate containment in the event of future government intervention. In 1873, the agency was moved up the river to be nearer to Fort Yates, so that the latter could provide military support in the event of a conflagration. The building sat high up on a plateau, near bands of Cottonwood trees and a ferry landing on the Missouri. On December 22, 1874, it was renamed the Standing Rock Agency.

The Standing Rock reservation proper would come into being over the next fifteen years, which would see some of the most storied events in Plains history: General Custer’s treaty-breaking search for gold in the Sioux’s Black Hills, and the subsequent Battle of Little Bighorn, which he would lose decisively; Congress’s failed attempts to coax the Sioux into selling those hills, and its successful attempt, in 1877, at stealing them back; the murder of Crazy Horse; the murder of Spotted Tail; the murder of Sitting Bull.

All of these wounds would ultimately lead to a bigger one. In 1888, an Army commission arrived at the Standing Rock Agency to goad the beaten-down Lakota and Dakota into signing away most of what remained of their land. It succeeded. Nine million acres of Sioux territory would be ceded to white homesteading. Six smaller reservations, one of which would become the Standing Rock Reservation, were all that would remain.

From the very beginning, then, Standing Rock was a consolation. To refer to it in its earliest days was to refer not to Sioux territory proper but to the government outpost established to surveil it. It was to also refer indirectly to the surrounding forts run by the very military that, in the guise of the Army Corps, would one day allow the Dakota Access Pipeline to pass through Sioux ancestral land. When Standing Rock eventually became a reservation, the name would stand for land taken, not given. Rather than serve as an affirmation of native sovereignty, it would represent the scraps of colonial spoils—a hole in the middle of the Dakotas, yet inverted: the scantest presence, defined as much by the new absence that surrounded it as by itself.

Fittingly, the land occupied by the National Museum of the American Indian is also a consolation of sorts. The plot was the very last one remaining on the National Mall, and it was offered to native leaders only after plans for a Museum of Man, and then a combined Native and African American history museum, fell through. In a landscape devoted to national memory, the last plot available went to the first people here.

That the plot happened to be in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol is all the more appropriate, evoking a history of government-native surveillance that dates at least to the time of the Standing Rock agency, built to feign benevolence out on the North Dakota plains. As for the NMAI as a whole, we might read it as another reservation of sorts: a space of cultural efflorescence that is also one of containment, situated under the watchful gaze of white men on a hill.

The Gaze

Domes, though, are deceptive. Regardless of where one stands in relation to them, they always look as though they’re looking at the viewer, whether as the surveilled or as something else. Yet take a step away from the trees shielding the NMAI from the rest of the capitol and it becomes clear that the museum’s gaze isn’t actually reciprocated. While the museum faces the capitol, the capitol faces just past the museum, straight down the center of the Mall.

That general direction is west, which is fitting for a building that is essentially a monument to Manifest Destiny. It’s also fitting that it would look past the NMAI, since what lay under or beyond the Indians was, for the colonial imagination, always more important than the Indians themselves. The original planning mastermind of Washington D.C., Charles Pierre L’Enfant, had that colonial worldview in mind when he wrote to George Washington that the capitol “should be drawn on such a Scale as to leave room for that aggrandisement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote.”

The capitol, in other words, was to be built with a future of conquest in mind. As it turned out, the original building was still inadequate and had to grow as the country grew, introjecting something of the territorial plentitude that would eventually extend all the way to the Pacific. Architects regularly added new chambers to accommodate the representatives of new states as they were added to the union. The dome would grow, too, replaced in 1866 by a grander version of the original.

Inside the rotunda, a narrative of this conquest unfolds through art. Gigantic history paintings, commissioned throughout the nineteenth century, transform the cavernous space into a site of nationalist self-fashioning. They show founding documents being signed, flags being planted, wigs being worn, wars being won. There are declarations, discoveries, and baptisms. And there is the godhead George Washington, looking down on it all from the rotunda’s apex, resting on his cloud.

There are also occasionally American Indians. And in almost every instance, and as with the NMAI and the Capitol, they look upon the conqueror without their gaze being returned.

In William Henry Powell’s Discovery of the Mississippi (1853), the explorer Hernando De Soto sits on his horse near the banks of the river, with nothing between him and the shore but a band of natives. The Indians face De Soto, cowering slightly as they offer peace. De Soto looks just past them, as do his twenty-some-odd soldiers. A small group of them raises a crucifix in the foreground.

In John Vanderlyn’s Landing of Columbus (1846), the explorer strides ashore with his entourage, sword in one hand, Spanish flag in the other. A band of naked Indians looks on timidly from behind the trees as Columbus gazes up to God. A parrot sits on a branch, no less apathetic or oblivious.

And in the frieze painted by Constatino Brumidi depicting the history of the nation in a band encircling the rotunda, another Columbus disembarks the Santa Maria as a group of Indians huddle curiously to the side. The colonizer leans slightly forward, conferring a sense of power over the tallest native who, in a parallel diagonal, leans back. They look directly at Columbus, who once again looks elsewhere.

It would have been common for indigenous people to see these images. Throughout the nineteenth century, as Indian lands were being stolen and curtailed, tribal delegations travelled to Washington with increasing frequency, often meeting with the president himself in order to try to improve the treaty terms offered to them on the plains. They cut their hair, traded buckskin for white button-down shirts, posed for pictures, and stayed in hotels. When visiting the rotunda, they would have looked at themselves looking and seen a familiar gaze that went unreturned.

On December 18, 1889, one such delegation arrived in Washington from Standing Rock. Only weeks before, the depleted Sioux had been intimidated into signing away the Great Sioux Reservation, and they were in D.C. because their rations had also been cut. Meanwhile, back at the Standing Rock agency, the government agent assigned to the reservation would look west. “The white man,” he recalled in his memoirs, was “not standing still. Nothing could deter him from going forward, and if, in the march of civilization, a people was blotted out, it would not be the first time that the same march had proved remorseless.”

Property

Walking around the museum’s trapezoidal perimeter, rimmed with native plants and wetland trappings, there’s a sense of reprieve from Washington’s rational geometries. The building itself has no right angles or straight lines, rising instead like a wind-sculpted mesa, baked in the sun. Skylights, overhangs, and curvilinear forms ease the transition from inside to outside, emphasizing native connections to nature. There is a sense that even the grid itself is shunned.

With this comes a feeling of permeability, as though something is being shared, even if it isn’t exactly clear what. Upstairs, in an exhibit on treaties, visitors are reminded of how foreign the notion of land as commodity was to most tribes. What was in the rectangle was more important than the rectangle itself. The right to land was defined by use, not title. Lived place was celebrated more than owned space.

Rectangular structures like the capitol, on the other hand, echo the grid, repeating it redundantly, as though to leave no doubts about the abstract property rights granted thereby. As a result, their message is as much about a certain way of thinking about and claiming land as it is about any particular architectural style. Owned space is celebrated more than lived place.

Though the capitol itself isn’t technically on the grid, it has long had an important relationship to it. In the late eighteenth century, when the city was still a ten-square-mile plot of bucolic farmland, L’Enfant proposed that the new district be divided into a grid whose center would be a “Congress House” high on a hill. The building would be a visual anchor, serving as both a reference point within the rationalized geography of the city and a reminder of the new federal reality to which the new city owed its existence.

But the grid and capitol would come to be linked in more symbolic and consequential ways as well. In the eyes of Thomas Jefferson, who helped design the original building, the architecture of the capitol was to convey some sense of the radical democracy the country had been founded upon. For Jefferson, that democracy went hand in hand with self-sufficient individualism as a form of independence; in the manner of the grid, with its designated plots for all, each was to have and tend to his own.

Jefferson’s obsession with bootstraps individualism was directly related to the war, which had been fought to end the dependence on, and subservience to, the British throne. What Jefferson envisioned for the new country was instead a society of unfettered individuals who ruled and supported themselves, and who expressed this self-sovereignty primarily through agriculture. Private property would be the basis of a noble individual autonomy, made more virtuous by way of the plow. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” he wrote.

Yet as sensible as Jefferson’s democratic individualism might have seemed, it would also contribute to the Plains Indians’ undoing, helping to influence the next hundred years of Indian policy. It would spell particular doom for the Lakota and Dakota, who went where the buffalo went and had no use for fenced-in parcels of land. At the policy’s root was an almost evangelical faith in the ability of private property to civilize, and the related association of communal living with savagery. “The common field is the seat of barbarism; the separate farm the door to civilization,” the Sioux agent wrote in 1858. Righteous Christian reformers, together with land-lusting homesteaders, speculators, and railroad companies, agreed, lobbying tirelessly for what remained of Indian country to be further broken up into farms. In 1885, Senator Henry Dawes, echoing common misunderstandings of the nature of Indian ownership, wrote that

they have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common [...] and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.

Two years later, with the passage of the Dawes Act, that “selfishness” was imposed on the plains. Indigenous lands were broken up into allotments to be used by individual Indians for farming. Boys under 18 would receive 40 acres, men over 18 would receive 60 acres, and heads of families would receive 160.

The Dawes Act hardly had the desired effect. At Standing Rock, the land left for the Sioux to farm was poor at best. And so rather than create self-sufficiency among natives, the act only increased the very dependence on the government that agriculture, in the Jeffersonian frame, was intended to prevent. The grid had come to the reservations.

Inside the museum, a placard explains the Lakota concept of mitakuye oyasin: “everything is connected, interrelated, and dependent in order to exist.” By “dependent,” this doesn’t mean “needy and reliant,” which might have been how Jefferson would have understood it. It means “dependent” as in indebted to things beyond themselves. It’s an ontological claim: we are what we are only via our connectedness to other things, which means that we should also see ourselves as indebted to those things. “To the white peoples,” writes the scholar Robert Bunge, “land is ground; to the Lakota, land is earth... the mother of all that lives, the source of life itself—a living, breathing entity—quite literally a person.”

But a plot of land cannot be a person. At the opening of the museum, Colorado senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, of the Cheyenne Nation, acknowledged as much. “[Indigenous people formed] communities inhabited by farmers and doctors, teachers and craftsmen, housewives and soldiers, priests and astronomers, who with all their collective wisdom could not have known that earth mother would someday be called real estate.”

Water

A river can be a boundary, of the grid or otherwise. But a river can also imply a certain boundlessness in the movement it manifests and the sustenance it offers forth. At the river, there is edge, limit, precipice. In the river, there is flux, renewal, change.

Political boundaries offer no such sustenance. They do not contain their opposite, as does the river, moving and flowing despite themselves. They are lines in the abstract geometric sense—in theory, infinitely thin and thus incapable of offering anything but their own juridical nature. They are lines delineating space, not place.

When the eastern boundary of the Great Sioux Reservation was set at the Missouri River in 1868, it was not because the Sioux had wanted it that way. But it was at least a political boundary that coincided with a natural one—a boundary that could also be a bounty, both of sustenance and of spirit. Water for the Sioux was essential not only for its capacity to sustain life on the arid plains, but also as a spiritual substance to which they, in the spirit of Mitakuye Oyasin, saw themselves as connected and indebted. If Sioux lands were to be bounded on the East by the Missouri River, they could at least say that their territorial and spiritual origins were one.

When the Great Sioux Reservation was broken up in 1889, the river became the easternmost border of smaller reservations, including Standing Rock. Many know this today because, from August 2016 to January 2017, the river was in the news as the main entity threatened by the pipeline—one lineal bounty encroached upon by another. What was lost on most followers of the story was that the river was, like the Standing Rock reservation itself, already a consolation prize of sorts, given to the Sioux in the late nineteenth century as so much else was being taken away. Yet what was further lost was the fact that, almost sixty years prior to the DAPL fight, the Missouri River had itself been made to deprive the Sioux of their rightful property, and by the same entity that would later grant the easements allowing the pipeline to violate the river.

In 1959, the Army Corps of Engineers seized control of the Missouri River shoreline to begin construction on the Oahe Dam, just north of Pierre, South Dakota. It did so mere months after the Standing Rock Sioux had ratified their 1959 constitution, which spoke, in its very first sentence, of the spiritual importance of water before reaffirming that the eastern border of the reservation was the middle of the river.

Yet that border itself would, in a sense, be made to encroach on Sioux land. When the Oahe Dam was completed, it would flood 56,000 acres of Standing Rock territory. 90% of the reservation’s timbered area was lost, as were wildlife resources, gardens and wild fruit trees, and the area’s most valuable rangeland. 900 families had to be relocated. No public works project in the country’s history had destroyed more land. According to Deloria Jr., it was the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the U.S.

The water that ended up flooding the Standing Rock Reservation would ultimately become Lake Oahe, which was ironic given that, in the Dakota language, oahe means “a place to stand.” Yet only a figurative uprightness was intended: the lake was named after the Oahe Mission, a Christian boarding school established in 1874 to bring the Sioux to Jesus.

During the fight over DAPL, then, it was as much Lake Oahe as the Missouri River proper that the Standing Rock Sioux were fighting to protect. Yet because the shoreline was still controlled by the Army, the Sioux had to fight insult from a position of injury, forced to ask permission from the government to protest on their own ancestral land. The government acquiesced, but not without offering a reminder and some advice: “Among our many diverse missions is managing and conserving our natural resources,” a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers proclaimed. “I want to encourage [the protesters] who are using the permitted area to be good stewards and help us to protect these valuable resources.” Mere months later, the same Army Corps would allow 500,000 barrels of oil per day to begin flowing beneath the river.

There would be one more occasion for the Missouri River to be turned against the Sioux. On November 20, 2016, police would use water cannons against the water protectors to push back their advance, soaking them in the middle of the sub-zero night. Memories of the Lake Oahe flooding would inhere in the drenching: a wellspring once again weaponized even as it continued to stand for life.

In the 1990s, when the NMAI was being planned, a committee traveled around the continent soliciting opinions from indigenous leaders on the larger themes such a museum should cover and convey. One of the most common answers was the indigenous respect for water. Today, that respect manifests itself in the waterfall that spills over rocks on the museum’s north side, and also in the reconstructed estuary wetlands that occlude most of the capitol from view.

Yet well over a century before the museum was built, the fate of Native Americans in relation to water was already written in the rotunda of the capitol dome, in those paintings in which the native gaze goes unreturned. In almost every canvas, water is a central character, yet one that serves not as a bounty but as a boundary that has either just been breached or is about to be. Explorers stand on shorelines, ready to plant their flags. The water itself is of no interest to them, except to the extent that it and those dependent on it are in the way of getting to the other side.

Bones

We go to museums to learn about things like colonialism and the closing of the frontier. We trust that history taught through objects means objectivity, and that the provenance of the objects themselves is beyond reproach. Yet what we forget is that museums, too, have benefited from breached boundaries and even encouraged them in turn. Historically, it is to the museums that have gone the spoils, and few institutions have done more to consolidate the colonial imagination than they.

For decades at museums across the country, it was customary to find Native Americans and their artifacts depicted or displayed in the vicinity of dinosaurs, implying that indigenous peoples were not only less than human but also extinct. It was equally common to find them arrayed in a continuum ranging from the savage to the civilized, reinforcing racist ideology and helping to justify the national project of pushing ever further west; barbarism, as it were, had to make way for “progress.” Museums made Native Americans seem like a bygone curiosity, and all under the guise of public enlightenment.

There were also the bones. In 1839, in support of a government effort to justify colonial expansion through science, the anthropologist Samuel Morton wrote an article suggesting that American Indian crania were on average five cubic inches smaller than “Caucasian” crania, supposedly proving differences in intelligence. Similar studies followed, resulting in a craze for Indian skulls, which could be sold to the government for cash. Graves were robbed and burial sites pilfered, with the spoils going to places like the Army Medical Museum at the behest of no less than the surgeon general himself. As many as two thousand of those skulls, together with countless other Indian remains, would eventually find their way to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, of which NMAI is a part.

For years, Native American groups had requested that the Smithsonian return these and other human remains, funerary objects, and sacred items it had long held in its collections. Their reasons had as much to do with propriety as with property: for the Lakota, the spirit was thought to survive after death, and were it not properly cared for, it would begin to wander. Thirty-one years ago, in 1989, the tribes got their wish. With the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act, Congress initiated the process of repatriating thousands of objects to the tribes while also promising them a place to put them—the NMAI—on the National Mall.

This was important. Objects are not just the things that museums use to teach. Accumulated largely through dispossession, they have traditionally been the source of museums’ cultural power. Where the objects have gone, so too has the authority to talk about them and their history. With its objects returned, the native curators at NMAI could now be the one to control those stories.

There is poetic justice here. If the NMAI emerged in conjunction with a return of the native dead, then we could say that Standing Rock and other plains reservations emerged in conjunction with their relinquishment of those dead. For much of their history, the Lakota, Yanktonais, and other tribes buried their own on the plains. When, in 1889, the government dissolved the Great Sioux Reservation, creating the six smaller reservations we know today, any of the Sioux who’d been buried outside of reservation lines would have been stranded. The deceased were once again left for dead.

There was a brief moment on the reservation when none of this mattered. By the 1890s, word had spread among the Sioux of a new religion, the Ghost Dance, whose guiding belief was that the Indian dead would one day come back to inhabit the earth. Among them would be a Jesus-like messiah, who, having been crucified by the whites, would reappear for the Indians alone.

Take this message to my red children and tell it to them as I say it. I have neglected the Indians for many moons, but I will make them my people now if they obey me in this message. The earth is getting old, and I will make it new for my chosen people, the Indians, who are to inhabit it, and among them will be all those of their ancestors who have died, their fathers, mothers, brothers, cousins and wives…

The messianism would be short lived: any momentum the Ghost Dance had would be snuffed out on December 29, 1890, at the massacre at Wounded Knee.

But history would continue to find other ways to keep the Sioux from reinhabiting the Earth. On September 3, 2016, to clear the way for DAPL, workers from Energy Transfer Partners bulldozed a plot of land thought to contain a number of the Sioux dead, along with prayer rings, cairns, and other sacred artifacts. It was done on a holiday weekend, just a day after tribal experts filed papers identifying the archeological importance of the site. The government had yet to intervene.

Epilogue

It is tempting to believe that when we walk the National Mall, we move through some sort of extruded manifestation of the national consciousness. In this fantasy, the symbolic seat of that consciousness is the capitol, resting at the eastern end like a head. Nothing of the nation’s past is, in this scenario, forgotten. History hangs before the conscience of congress like a momento mori, influencing its every step, commanding at least part of its gaze.

But a more fitting metaphor for the mall—at least during dark times—would be more impersonal, more bureaucratic. In this interpretation, the Mall is, from the perspective of the capitol, a kind of administered scene governed by the division of labor. Here, remembering is outsourced—someone else’s problem to deal with. The individual monuments and museums aren’t so much chapters of the national past as buildings made by the capitol to remember history so that it, and maybe anyone else, doesn’t have to.

The native activist Suzan Shown Harjo had hoped that the NMAI’s relationship to the capitol would be different. In helping to plan the building, she remembered envisioning a “cultural center that would stand in the face of Congress so that policymakers in the U.S. Capitol would have to look us in the eyes when they made decisions about our lives.” But that was never to be. The capitol has long been a building that only looked as though it was looking, and foundational perspectives—be they westward or colonial—have proven tough to reorient.

If it is difficult to imagine things otherwise, it is because the persistence of our buildings can’t help but evoke the permanence of the past. It has proven to be that way even after modifications. On Veterans Day, in November of 2022, a new addition was added to the museum grounds—the National Native American Veterans Memorial, built to honor Native Americans who fought alongside U.S. troops in military combat. To construct the monument, space had to be made amid the trees, many of which had helped to do the work of blocking the capitol from view while recreating the Chesapeake Bay environs as they were before contact with the colonizers, to say nothing of the cavalry. While the new monument offered welcomed recognition of native service, native land had, in a sense, been ceded again: an area originally intended to celebrate the Indians’ prelapsarian separateness gave ground to a monument that celebrated their assimilation.

Traditionally, this is what the capitol has wanted: to see Native Americans not as U.S. citizens with an asterisk, with one foot in U.S. sovereignty and the other in a separate nationhood, but as fully folded into the national project. It has preferred that the monuments and memorials on the National Mall be, like it, marble and white. Yet the NMAI’s gift to the National Mall is that, whatever its architectural merits or failings, it will forever be a part that cannot resolve into the national whole without leaving a remainder, complicating the dialectics of this symbolically charged space.

But why a gift exactly? Because it is a refusal of ideological closure and forgetting at a time when these things seem to be as tempting as ever. In South Dakota, by the end of 2020, Native Americans had accounted for 14% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths while representing just 1% of the population. At Standing Rock, enough tribal elders died from the virus that the survival of the Lakota language was and continues to be threatened. And this is to say nothing of the violence—symbolic and otherwise—of the pipeline. The possibility still remains, in other words, that an entire people could be “blotted out.” But that remains, as it were, to be seen.