In 1868 the office of the Surgeon General put out an order asking Army doctors to gather Native skulls so the size of them could be studied. A grief that any family on earth would know on sight was treated, on the other side of the counter, as a research opportunity. The dead became holdings. An ancestor became an object that a stranger could keep, study, and decline to return. I anchor the book in the Pawnee because their story shows you the whole machine in one place. These were a people who read their own lives in the stars. The Skidi band, the Wolf people, built their earth lodges as small models of the heavens, with four posts for the four stars that hold up the corners of the sky, and they watched the Pleiades come through the smoke hole to know when to plant.

The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the word recant without hearing what is buried inside it. It comes from the Latin for singing again. To recant is to sing your own song over, backward, in front of the people who marched you to the microphone. A confession of error that someone else wrote. An apology the speaker does not mean, in a room where everyone knows he does not mean it. The act has a sound, and the sound is a voice saying the opposite of what its owner believes, out loud, so the saying can be witnessed. Once you start listening for that sound, you hear it everywhere.

I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian galleries. The mask is approximately three thousand eight hundred years old, made in southern Iraq during the Old Babylonian period. Its face was made to terrify. The hair tangles into serpentine coils across the brow. The grin is bared, with one tooth chipped on the left side. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness. Time has cracked the surface of the clay in seven places that I have counted. That mask was paid for. Someone took silver from a temple administrator's hand and walked it across the city to a workshop, where a craftsman took clay and pigment and several days of his working life and converted them into a monster.

The monster was a job.

The figure left the workshop on the back of a delivery cart, settled by an invoice that the temple's accountants logged in their cuneiform ledgers. We do not know who the patron was. The artisan is also anonymous to us. The tablets that recorded the rate structures of the Old Babylonian craft economy survive in archives in London and Chicago and Berlin, and those tablets establish that the transaction happened, even though the specific contract for this specific mask has not survived.