Once shaped by court rituals, China’s imperial cuisine lives on today

BEIJING (AP) — Imperial cuisine encompasses the meals emperors ate daily and the feasts their courts held throughout the year.

Maria Teresa Hernandez

August 21, 2026 

AP

BEIJING (AP) — It is said that Empress Dowager Cixi once dreamed of a pastry during the final decades of imperial China.

The same treat was served to her at breakfast the following morning. Delighted, she summoned her chef and rewarded him with a silver ingot.

“It was originally called ‘minced pork pancake,’ but because it had fulfilled her dream, it later became known as ‘dream pastry,’” said Zhou Tong, a chef at Fangshan Restaurant in Beijing.

Fangshan specializes in imperial cuisine, preserving dishes like the one associated with Cixi and other culinary traditions from China’s imperial court. The restaurant was founded in 1925 by former chefs from the Qing Dynasty at Beihai Park, a garden where royals from several dynasties rested, handled government affairs and performed ritual sacrifices.

“The name Fangshan literally means ‘imitating the imperial cuisine,’” said assistant general manager Di Xin.

A handful of other Beijing restaurants also serve versions of imperial cuisine, while the Palace Museum preserves Qing-dynasty objects tied to court dining, including pastry molds.

Every meal comes with its own rules

Imperial cuisine encompasses the meals emperors ate daily and the feasts their courts held throughout the year.

Each had its own rituals. Drinking milk tea, for instance, was an important first step at Qing-dynasty banquets, said Teng Deyong, a researcher at China’s Palace Museum.

During the banquet, the emperor bestowed wine or food on princes and officials. Recipients performed rites and paid their respects to him before they ate or drank.

Aside from banquets, sacrificial rituals were held. They followed a separate system and could involve meat offerings.

“At the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity, there was the eating of sacrificial pork, which we know was one of the most important rituals of the Qing imperial court,” Teng said.

In that ritual, fatty pork was boiled without salt. After the ceremony, it was distributed among guests, and receiving the sacrificial meat was considered a great honor.

Unseasoned food also appears in earlier Chinese ritual traditions. Wandi Wang, a professor of Chinese at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said the “Book of Rites,” a classical work on rites and ceremonies, describes a meat broth known as “grand stew” that was served without seasoning during sacrificial ceremonies.

“The absence of added flavoring was itself meaningful: the unseasoned dish evoked an earlier and simpler way of cooking and thus expressed a ritual ideal of honoring antiquity and remembering cultural origins,” Wang said.

Traditional techniques keep imperial pastry-making alive

Pastries were key to imperial cuisine, and the court had an institution specialized in making them.

Sweets made at Fangshan by Zhou include Cixi’s dream pastry and a small steamed corn bun. Their recipes are rooted in the imperial court.

“When customers visit, our servers often tell them the stories behind these dishes,” Zhou said. “People enjoy them even more because they carry such meaningful history.”

He learned his pastry-making technique from a master who had also learned from a mentor. It’s a craft that has been passed from one generation to the next.

Traditional imperial methods mean cooking must be done by hand — no blenders or food processors are allowed. Ingredients like beans are pulverized using sieves and certain flours are handled in custom-made copper pots.

“A machine may be more convenient, but the texture is completely different,” Zhou said. “You lose the delicate graininess and sandy mouthfeel that handcrafted pastries are supposed to have.”

Among Fangshan’s bestselling delicacies are the pea flour cake and the red bean roll. During the busy season, customers order more than 200 of the cakes per day.

Balancing ancient cooking methods with a changing world

When he joined Fangshan as a kitchen apprentice, now-executive chef Fan Liangliang had to relearn everything he was taught at culinary school. Rather than employing techniques that allowed him to work quickly, he embraced slower processes he had never heard of.

One of them is “Nizihuo,” which Fan said involves mincing ingredients such as fish, shrimp or chicken into a smooth paste. It is then reshaped into decorative forms such as frogs, birds and flowers.

“This is one of the hallmarks of imperial cuisine,” Fan said. “Every dish had to be innovative, visually beautiful, nutritious and worthy of presentation on the imperial dining table.”

Rare ingredients such as bear paws are no longer served. Fan said adaptations are made to retain the spirit of each dish.

Chinese cuisine has long reflected cultural values, politics and ideals

A celebrated Chinese poet once wrote about cold noodles made with pagoda-tree leaves.

“The poem is not simply a description of a dish,” Wang said. “Du Fu turns the verdant, fresh, yet modest dish into an expression of his political loyalty and thwarted ambition to serve the emperor.”

She added that Chinese cuisine has historically carried meaning beyond food, reflecting broader ideas about politics, culture and aesthetics that have evolved as circumstances changed.

“Preserving a culinary tradition begins with taking its history seriously,” Wang said. “Culinary heritage tells us not only how people ate in the past, but also how people in the present choose to remember and give meaning to that past.”

Chef Fan said that at the heart of Fangshan’s imperial cuisine is a fusion of Manchu and Han culinary traditions, bringing together the culture of the Qing rulers and that of China’s majority population.

“It’s not simply a collection of dishes from the two cultures,” he said. “It represents the blending of their different approaches to food into a unified cuisine.”

Some inherited techniques such as stir-frying, braising and stewing have survived. And while some ingredients have been substituted both for availability reasons and to suit modern tastes, Fan said his team’s commitment to Chinese heritage remains strong.

“When people dine at Fangshan Restaurant, I hope they experience more than just a meal,” Fan said. “They experience the weight of history.”

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AP video journalist Wu Jia contributed to this report.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Trump EPA Urged to Withdraw Rule to Let Data Centers Obtain Pollution Permits in Secret

“The result will be some of the dirtiest power sources rushed into neighborhoods without giving communities any opportunity to weigh in,” said one critic.


An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center with closed-loop cooling system on October 20, 2025 in Vernon, California.
(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Aug 25, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Critics are warning that President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is pushing through a rule that would let artificial intelligence data center builders off the hook for making public disclosures ahead of construction.

The rule, which first came to light during an EPA meeting last month, would delegate power to states over public participation in the permitting process for specific sources of air pollution, such as diesel generators that are frequently used by data centers.

According to a July report in Mother Jones, the proposed rule “could have major consequences for how ordinary people are given notice about new or expanded polluting facilities coming into their neighborhoods.”

Late last week, a coalition of more than 200 environmental groups filed objections to the rule change, which they warned would make public notice for certain polluting projects entirely optional, depending on the whims of state and local governments.

Dori Jaffe, managing attorney at Sierra Club, said on Monday that the rule change would “help data center developers evade more health standards and do so secretly.”

“We demand that the EPA rescind this attempt to further cut the public out of decisions made in their own backyards,” said Jaffe. “We deserve to have a say about developments in our community that would impact our air quality and the health of our families.”

Sheena Patel, attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted that the administration was attempting to limit public input into polluting projects at a time when opposition to AI data center construction has hit a record high among US voters.

If the rule change goes through, Patel added, “the result will be some of the dirtiest power sources rushed into neighborhoods without giving communities any opportunity to weigh in.”

Brandon Jones-Cobb, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was “beyond cruel” that the EPA seems determined to “silence front-line communities who bear the brunt of unhealthy air” generated by polluting industries.

“The agency has already turned its back on science, cut enforcement against industrial polluters and eliminated life-saving air pollution measures,” said Jones-Cobb. “Now it wants to shut the public out of decisions to build or expand facilities that expose communities to dangerous air pollution, including data centers. This EPA is so out of touch with Americans and only focuses on making polluters happy.”

In an interview with The Guardian published Tuesday, Joe Goffman, former assistant administrator for the EPA’s office of air and radiation, said the rule change would dismantle what he described as an “ironclad promise” made in the 1963 Clean Air Act to give ordinary citizens voices in where, how, and whether potential centers of air pollution are built.

“The administration is basically saying: ‘You all may have thought this was an ironclad promise, but it no longer is,’” Goffman emphasized.

Trump Regulators Issue Key Permit for Proposed $100 Million Underwater Data Center Off Maine Coast

“No one really wants it here,” said one local resident who helped gather signatures in support of blocking the data center.

Skip Johnson and his grandson, Parker Jarrett, fish for mackerel on September 15, 2023 in Eastport, Maine, which is being considered as the site of an underwater data center—alarming locals and the fishing industry.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Aug 24, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Residents of Eastport, Maine are set to attend a public hearing Monday evening on two proposed ordinances to halt the construction of large artificial intelligence data centers, with proponents of the proposals hoping the coastal city’s planning board will be able to prevent the build-out of a 27-acre, $100 million facility that a Massachusetts-based developer aims to build underwater—right near Eastport’s working waterfront.

The public hearing is being held days after President Donald Trump’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) accepted a preliminary permit for DeepGreen Holdings, LLC, the firm managed by luxury real estate development Louis Wolfson, which aims to build the facility that would be powered by tidal energy.

The 48-month permit does not allow DeepGreen to start construction, but gives approval for engineering and environmental studies needed to secure funding and officially begin the project.

DeepGreen would use ocean water to cool the heat created by the facility’s massive computer servers. The company has also proposed using ocean tides to power turbines that would generate up to 5 megawatts of electricity.

The approval came weeks after FERC asked DeepGreen to amend its application, lowering its energy output from 51 megawatts to 15 megawatts and creating scalable project phases.

The community has mobilized against the proposed data center since DeepGreen applied for the permit in February, with the Eastport City Council voting unanimously earlier this month in support of a 180-day moratorium halting all progress on the center.

The local policymakers said the moratorium would give the city time to consult with the planning board about the two citizen-led initiatives to pass new ordinances—one that would permanently ban data centers in Eastport, which the city’s legal counsel has said could be put to voters with a minor formatting change to the question, and another that would require voter approval for any new industrial or commercial development larger than 10,000 square feet in the ocean or 25,000 square feet on land.

The second ordinance was found by the legal counsel to be “unenforceable and unlawful,” as the town is not permitted to regulate elections via ordinance.

But residents, officials with the Sipayik Passamaquoddy community, and local groups like Eastport Coalition for Healthy Oceans are all pushing to stop DeepGreen and the development it incorporated a month before applying for the permit, DeepGreen Western Passage SPV, or special purpose vehicle.

DeepGreen has also applied for a permit to build an underwater data center in Cook Inlet, Alaska.

Opponents say thermal pollution from the project would be destructive to the habitat of lobsters off the coast of Eastport, which are crucial to the city’s fishing economy and working waterfront. They have also raised concerns that a data center off the coast would harm tourism as well as whales and other marine wildlife.

One local opponent, commercial fisherman and renewable energy developer Nathan Curtis, said DeepGreen carries “unmitigated risks of thermal pollution.”

The proposed data center would “require continuous ocean cooling, converting Western Passage into an unmetered industrial heat sink,” wrote Curtis in a letter to FERC before the commission issued the permit. “Continuous thermal discharge into the water column threatens local water temperatures, localized current dynamics, and critical benthic habitats that support Eastport’s commercial fisheries and working waterfront.”

Wolfson denied that the data center, which was approved for an energy output up to 15 megawatts, would harm the coastal region of Eastport.

“As a property manager and developer who has operated within coastal dynamics for 40 years, I have too much respect for working waterfronts to introduce a project that threatens them,” said Wolfson in a letter to Monitor Local.

But Eastport resident Suellen Hendrix, who was part of a local effort to gather signatures in support for the proposed ordinances, told Maine Public that locals appear unconvinced by any assurances from the data center developer.

“Everyone was behind ‘we don’t want this data center,’” Hendrix told Maine Public. “Nobody was questioning, ‘Well, we need the jobs.’ Nobody was questioning why it should be here because no one really wants it here.”



As Common Dreams reported last week, as the Trump administration and AI executives have aggressively pushed for the expansion of data centers, public support has collapsed, with 75% of respondents to a poll by Embold Research saying they would not support a data center near where they live.

“This has happened nationwide, folks, it’s nothing new,” Dwayne Tomah, a historian with the Sipayik Passamaquoddy community adjacent to Eastport, told a crowd of data center opponents at a recent rally on the town’s waterfront. “We’ve got to resist.”

If Big Tech Needs a New Power Plant, It Should Pay for the Whole Damn Thing

Pennsylvania’s new data-center rules get one principle exactly right: Innovation doesn’t include sending your infrastructure bill to everyone else.


An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center with a closed-loop cooling system is shown on October 20, 2025 in Vernon, California.
(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Joshua W.J. Brown
Aug 25, 2026

Common Dreams

There is a remarkably simple test for whether the AI boom is actually as economically transformative as its boosters say it is: Make the companies building it pay their own damn electricity bill.

Not just the meter at the server warehouse. The whole bill.

If a hyperscale data center requires a new power plant, transmission line, substation, distribution upgrade, water system, or grid-reliability backstop, put that cost on the project that caused it. If the economics still work, excellent. Build it. If they don’t, then the public has just learned something extremely important about the business model.

Pennsylvania moved sharply in that direction on August 18. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s new executive order requires data-center developers seeking state permits to meet Responsible Infrastructure Development standards. Among them: Developers must cover the cost of new generation, transmission, distribution, and related infrastructure needed for their projects without shifting those costs to households and businesses.

If the AI boom is real, it can survive a full-cost test.

The order also requires local approval, ends the use of nondisclosure agreements for data-center projects, demands energy and water reporting, and ties state tax benefits to compliance. Pennsylvania’s special counsel for energy affordability is also supposed to work with utility regulators so data centers, rather than ordinary customers, absorb the cost of reliability measures created by their demand.

This shouldn’t be treated as an anti-AI policy. It’s a pro-accounting policy.

The AI industry has been allowed to narrate electricity as though it were weather: Demand is “surging,” capacity is “tight,” the grid is “strained,” and somehow billions of dollars of wires, turbines, transformers, and land just need to appear around the technology.

But demand isn’t weather. Somebody made a decision.

And there is another reason to force the accounting now: A lot of the supposed demand isn’t load yet. It’s proposals. Pennsylvania says more than 100 data-center projects have approached the state, while the governor says only a handful currently look viable enough to have the necessary permits. Across the country, regulators have worried about speculative projects showing up in multiple interconnection queues and inflating forecasts before anybody has proved the customer, financing, or power plan is real.

That matters because utilities build decades-long assets against forecasts. If a speculative 500-megawatt project gets counted as inevitable, everybody can end up paying for infrastructure long after the spreadsheet that justified it has disappeared.

So add another rule: Prove you’re real before the public builds around you. Put down financial security. Identify the end user. Show the power source. Accept a minimum bill that covers infrastructure reserved for you. And if you walk away, you don’t get to leave a transformer-shaped hole in everybody else’s rates.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in April that electricity consumption by data centers jumped 17% in 2025, while electricity use at AI-focused facilities rose even faster. Its 2026 outlook still sees total data-center consumption roughly doubling by 2030 and AI-focused consumption tripling.

In the United States, data centers accounted for roughly half of total electricity-demand growth in 2025, according to the IEA. The Department of Energy had already estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of US electricity in 2023 and could reach 6.7-12% by 2028.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about using that much power. Aluminum smelters use enormous amounts of electricity. Steel mills use enormous amounts of electricity. Electrifying transportation and heating will use enormous amounts of electricity too. A serious industrial society needs to know how to build power.

The illegitimate part begins when one customer’s expansion becomes everyone else’s compulsory investment.

That risk isn’t theoretical. In Virginia, the world’s largest data-center market, Reuters reported this month that Dominion’s fuel costs have risen nearly 90% in five years as data-center growth leaves the utility more exposed to expensive wholesale electricity. Across PJM, which serves 67 million people, the grid operator is now proposing rules that would put some new data centers first in line for curtailment during shortages unless they bring adequate power with them.

Good.

If an AI company wants the upside of scale, it can own the downside of scale too.

That means at least five things.

Make large-load customers pay for the incremental grid infrastructure they cause. Require financial security so households aren’t stuck with stranded assets if a project disappears. Make large-load forecasts public enough to detect speculative projects being counted multiple times. Give communities access to energy, water, and ownership information before approvals. And establish emergency curtailment rules before the emergency arrives.

This is what mature industrial policy looks like. It doesn’t worship growth, and it doesn’t panic about growth. It prices the actual machine.

The alternative is a familiar political trick: Call the upside private innovation and the downside public infrastructure.

No.

If the AI boom is real, it can survive a full-cost test.

If a company needs a new power plant, let it pay for the whole damn thing.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Joshua W.J. Brown
Joshua W.J. Brown is a Canadian writer, filmmaker, and systems builder whose work examines infrastructure, AI, political economy, and culture.
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WAIT, WHAT?!

Bessent Suggests Economic Warfare Against Iran Could ‘Blow Up the Global Financial System’

“Operation Economic Outcast will not only fail,” warned one expert, “but the economic noose that actually tightens may end up being the one wrapped around our neck.”


US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks during a press conference at the Cash Room of the Treasury Department in Washington, DC on August 24, 2026, as he announces a new set of sanctions against Iran.
(Photo by Mehmet Eser/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Aug 24, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

With the United States unable to militarily defeat Iran in President Donald Trump’s illegal US-Israeli war of choice, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday escalated the administration’s economic attacks on Tehran, warning countries and companies around the world that continuing to do business with the nation could expose them to punitive sanctions.

“Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States,” Bessent said during a news conference unveiling what the Trump administration is calling Operation Economic Outcast. “An economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”

The “economic D-Day” campaign targets five sectors—technology, gold, aviation, shipping, and digital assets—and is intended to choke off virtually every remaining source of hard currency for Iran.

Bessent warned that it is “no longer acceptable to operate in the gray spaces” of US policy. The secretary said he anticipates the announcement of sanctions against a major financial institution as soon as next week.



Asked if Chinese banks that do business with Iran would be sanctioned, Bessent replied that “no one is above the reach of US sanctions.”

While Bessent did not say which countries would likely be targeted, China, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates are Iran’s biggest trading partners.

The secretary was also asked why sanctions aren’t being imposed immediately.

“Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior,” he replied. “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

“We believe that it is important to level set and give people a cure period, but they should know that that will move very quickly and that we are serious,” Bessent added. “So we believe that a warning shot and a level set of expectations is appropriate, and if people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect—and they should expect—that they will leave the dollar system.”

Iranian officials largely scoffed at Bessent’s “economic D-Day” threat. Deputy Iranian Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi asked on social media, “Is this a victory or an admission of America’s failure!?”

“You say Iran’s military capability has been ‘dismantled,’ 100% of its military factories ‘destroyed,’ and its nuclear program ‘buried’; but for this very Iran, the ‘largest financial assault in history’ and the mobilization of ‘all US institutions and authorities’ have been necessary!” he mocked.

While Trump has said the war is “over” or nearly over dozens of times, Iran currently appears to have the upper hand, as shipping has overwhelmingly avoided the US-supported route through the Strait of Hormuz, with most vessels using a course set by Tehran or avoiding the waterway altogether.

Trump’s war on Iran is proving costly not only in Iranian lives and US taxpayer dollars, but in the increasingly strained budgets of American families. Disruptions to oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have pushed gasoline prices above $4 a gallon nationally—roughly a dollar more than a year ago. Trump has dismissed Americans’ concerns about high fuel prices, saying $4 is “not very high” and vowing to “never apologize” for the economic pain his actions are inflicting.

That pain doesn’t stop at the pump. More expensive gasoline and diesel ripple through the economy, raising the cost of transporting food and other goods while keeping inflation elevated.

The pain is far worse for the people of Iran. Trump administration’s escalation comes as Iran’s currency, the rial, has plunged to record lows amid an economic crisis largely caused by the war and years of preceding US-led sanctions.

However, the administration’s effort to force every country to choose between trading with Iran and maintaining access to the US-dominated financial system could have consequences far beyond Tehran.

At a Monday press conference in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that sanctions “lead to escalation” that “serves no one’s interests.”

“China calls on parties to act rationally and with restraint and avoid taking any measures that may further escalate tensions or deal a blow to global economic growth and financial stability,” he continued.

The Chinese government “will closely watch relevant developments and do what is necessary to protect our legitimate rights and interests,” Lin added.

Operation Economic Outcast drew worldwide derision.

“President Trump, the ultimate gambler in geopolitics, is poised to double down on a bad hand on Iran yet again,” National Iranian American Council policy director Ryan Costello said in a statement.

“We’ve been down the maximum pressure road with Iran many times,” he noted. “What we’ve learned is that President Trump can impose extensive economic pain on Iran, but ordinary Iranians overwhelmingly bear the cost. The ruling elite in Iran remains largely insulated, while Tehran has repeatedly refused to capitulate to Washington’s demands.”

“Trump’s gamble is that this time, amid the destruction of war, and with the reinforcement of a blockade, time is on his side and ultimately Iran will be forced to concede defeat,” Costello added. “President Trump has proven unable and unwilling to stop his gambling on Iran that risks further undermining US and regional security and the global economy.”

Sina Toossi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy, said on social media that Operation Economic Outcast “is as much psychological warfare as economic warfare: Project Iran’s isolation as inevitable, convince markets Hormuz is being overcome, and amplify economic anxiety inside Iran.”

“But the bravado masks a basic problem,” he asserted. “The military option failed to compel Tehran, Iran still possesses substantial escalation dominance over the Arab Persian Gulf states, and ‘severing every economic lifeline’ requires countries like China to enforce a US strategy they openly reject.”

Washington “is effectively betting it can achieve through intensified economic strangulation what six months of war could not,” Toossi added. “And it is demanding unprecedented international compliance at a moment when US relations with much of the world are becoming much more coercive and transactional. The capacity to hurt Iran is clear. The path from pain to capitulation or collapse is not.”

Alan Eyre, a former State Department Iran specialist and current Middle East Institute distinguished fellow, argued that “the problem with Operation Economic Outcast is it continues the trend of making the US an economic outcast.”

Stockbroker and financial commentator Peter Schiff said on X that “because Trump failed to achieve his objective in Iran using military force, he has pivoted to using economic sanctions instead.”

“However, Operation Economic Outcast will not only fail,” he added, “but the economic noose that actually tightens may end up being the one wrapped around our neck.”

Looking up: Hunting stars and nebulae from the peaks of the French Alps

French astronaut Sophie Adenot made history this month as the first French woman to perform a spacewalk. Back on Earth, space enthusiasts across France are finding their own ways to reach for the stars. In a five-part series this week, RFI meets some of them. First up is astrophotographer Aude Nowak, who climbs high into the French Alps to capture stars, nebulae and the Milky Way.


Issued on: 24/08/2026 - RFI

Nowak has moved out of photographing property and into 

the higher ground of mountains and stars. © Baptiste Coulon / RFI

Nowak has been an astrophotographer for eight years. She began by photographing property before gradually swapping apartments for mountains and stars.

RFI joined Nowak in Chamonix, between Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi, as she prepared to spend another night under the stars.

“Bring good shoes and warm clothes,” Nowak had told RFI several days earlier.

Getting the pictures she wants means travelling far and, above all, climbing high. The destination for this trip was Brévent, an imposing rocky summit 2,500 metres above sea level.

Reaching it required two cable-car rides followed by a good hour's walk along a winding, rocky and sometimes slippery route. Patches of snow were still lingering in June, while a marmot and three ibex appeared untroubled by the group's presence.

Hunting light in darkness

Nowak had scouted the location the day before and knew exactly where she wanted to pitch her tent. It faced Mont Blanc, which she calls “the king”, although its summit was still hidden in cloud.

“I’m going to sleep before and after taking the pictures,” she said.

At 11pm, after three hours of sleep, her alarm sounded as the night sky came into view. The sky had cleared completely, revealing the Great Bear constellation as well as Venus and Jupiter to the naked eye.

Nowak sets up camp facing Mont Blanc, where she spent the night photographing stars, nebulae and the Milky Way. © Baptiste Coulon / RFI

Nowak had other targets in mind. She wanted to photograph the Lagoon Nebula and the Milky Way between the Aiguille du Midi, Mont Maudit and Mont Blanc.

Wearing a down jacket and head torch, she set up her tripod and camera. The nebula is invisible to the naked eye from there, but the camera can capture its colours in the dark. An app on her phone showed her where to point the lens.

After a few minutes, the Lagoon Nebula appeared behind the mountain. Around 20 shots were needed to produce the image she wanted of the red cloud of dust and gas.

“It’s magnificent,” Nowak murmured.

Capturing such colourful images requires a modified camera and a long exposure, usually around 30 seconds, to collect as much light as possible in the dark.

But with the Earth turning, just 30 seconds is enough to shift the image, leaving the stars blurred.

To counter this, Nowak placed an equatorial mount beneath her camera. “It’s a small motorised device that rotates the camera to follow the Earth’s rotation exactly,” she explained.

The device allows her to keep the stars sharp in her images.

In complete darkness, Aude Nowak uses specialised apps and test shots to pinpoint the celestial objects she wants to photograph. © Baptiste Coulon / RFI

Astrophotography requires both persistence and luck. Spending several nights in a row high in the mountains, in temperatures of only a few degrees, takes determination. The weather also has to be on your side.

“That’s the real challenge of astrophotography,” Nowak said.

Some images can be captured on only a few days each year. “If the weather is bad, you have to wait until the following year or the year after that,” she said.

Nowak had waited two years to take the photographs she captured that night.

“The first time I tried, the weather was too bad, unlike what the weather app forecast. Coming back down from the mountain with nothing is heartbreaking.”

'Mountains are my world'

Another challenge is light in the sky from objects other than stars.

“Satellites in particular leave trails on the images,” Nowak said, adding that she had seen their numbers increase in recent years.

Image-processing software can remove the trails fairly easily, but it does not always work. And yet “removing them manually on the computer is painstaking work".

Aude Nowak's photograph “Wonderful Life” shows the heart of the Milky Way above Mont Blanc, with the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae visible at the top left. © Aude Nowak

Despite the difficult climbs, unpredictable weather and cost of cable cars and parking, Nowak is attached to her working environment.

“Mountains are my world. I know the history of mountaineering. So when I see peaks, I see routes, stories of mountaineers. Combining that with the sky speaks to me. I find it moving,” she said.

Seeking out difficult-to-reach places is part of the attraction.

“I like going after things that aren’t easily accessible. It’s part of my personality. I like bringing back a little piece of the beauty of the universe for people who don’t all have access to these places.”

Although every month is different and climbing into the mountains costs money, Nowak said she makes a living from her passion. Her photographs rarely remain on her camera's memory card for long. They are printed in large formats, exhibited and, in some cases, sold.

She also values meeting and talking to the people who see her work.

“What motivates me is understanding why they buy my work and how my images make them feel. I think that’s wonderful,” she said.

Cette seconde capture, nommée par Aude Nowak « Wonderful life », montre le cœur de la Voie lactée au-dessus du Mont-Blanc, ainsi que la nébuleuse de la Lagune et la nébuleuse Trifide en haut à gauche de l'image. © Aude Nowak

Halfway to 82 peaks

Nowak does not believe she will tire of photographing mountains and stars, partly because she has yet to complete the challenge she set herself.

Her goal is to photograph celestial objects from every Alpine summit above 4,000 metres. There are exactly 82 of them across France, Switzerland and Italy.

“I must have done about half of them,” she said with a laugh.

This article has been adpated from the original version in French by Baptiste Coulon

Monsters, Coyotes and Other Native Tales of Resistance

Jan Haaken

August 21, 2026

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Part II, read Part I here.

In Necessity: Climate Resistance and the Thin Green Line, Chief Don Sampson tells a story written by beloved Umatilla storyteller Edith Motanic, “The Monster Who Comes Up the River.” He explains how the monster in this folk tale symbolizes the insatiable appetites of colonial powers that devour Native lands and how the wily coyote, spirit of Indian resistance, tricks the monster and ultimately outwits him. Chief Sampson adds that there is a moral to this contest between the monster and coyote and it concerns competing forces within the human spirit. We all carry the capacity for good and for evil. Indigenous people can become selfish betrayers of their own people.

The Windigo legend circulates similarly among First Nations Peoples. According to Shawn Smallman, author of Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, the image of the windigo beast “was a means of defining moral social behavior, which could serve as a warning against greed and selfishness.” This cannibalistic forest beast takes over the spirits of victims and turns them into other windigos. Driven by insatiable hunger, the beast appears as a towering, emaciated figure emanating the odor of decaying flesh and arousing feelings of intimate horror.

For many Indigenous scholars and cultural critics, the Native cannon of windigo folklore unfolds historically alongside settler colonialism and reflects as much the anxieties of the colonizers as it does the fears of the colonized. From the late 19th through the mid twentieth centuries, Christian missionaries, white trappers, traders and anthropologists reported what came to be termed windigo psychosis, a mental disorder where the sufferer holds the delusional belief that he is possessed with the evil spirit of the windigo monster and is driven to acts of cannibalism. While a few cases of cannibalism have been documented historically, they generally occur in famine or other extreme conditions of scarcity.

Windigoism and the Psychiatric Gaza

Fascination with windigo psychosis among Western psychiatrists and anthropologists led to a hotly debated controversy in the 1980s over the historical validity of the phenomenon. The challenge for these white experts, including American psychiatrists, was to identify and diagnose cases where the person is driven by madness to acts of actual cannibalism. Scholars in the 1960s began to look more carefully at the case material on which this diagnostic picture was formed. In 1981, anthropologist Lou Marano looked back on reports that circulated in psychiatry of psychosis-induced cannibalism among First Nations peoples. “In the vast majority of cases in which the Indians employ the term there is no psychosis by either Algonkian or European criteria, much less a psychosis involving murder and cannibalism,” Marano concludes. “Unfortunately, anthropologists zeroed in on the bizarre, the grotesque, and the macabre in Landes’s reports rather than on their inconsistencies and their second-hand nature.”

The term windigoism is used very broadly among First Nations and Native peoples, Marano points out, for states associated with “going mad.” Among the Ojibwe, “almost driven to windigo” refers to madness that arises from life-threateningly harsh conditions. The term is invoked with considerable sympathy as it expresses despair and distress of people who are separated from the group or lost. To white anthropologists and psychiatrists, the search for evidence of actual cannibalism in the reports they collected blinded them to the social symbolic meaning of the story. Scholars documenting the phenomenon agree, however, that tales of windigoism circulate among the Cree, one of the largest groups of First Nations and Indigenous peoples in North America, living mostly in Canada from Quebec to Alberta. Missionary settlers among the Cree were a common source of these stories, imposing their own cure of Christian conversion on sufferers.

Decolonizing Family Memory

My mother grew up in Norway Valley, Alberta–an area of Norwegian settlers straddling a Cree Reserve. Working with Tara Houska and other Native activists fighting pipelines transporting oil from the Tar Sands fields in Alberta, led me to revisit my own family history. What do we owe to Indigenous people as descendants of white settlers? In Canada, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), operating from 2008-2015, was one form of recognition and place for reparations. Based on legal settlement between Residential Schools Survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit representatives and the parties responsible for creation and operation of the schools, the federal government and the church bodies, the TRC opened space for uncovering repressed memories of Native suffering–repressed in white colonial narratives but also among Indigenous people themselves.

For those of us who are conscious of the debts we share as descendents of white settlers, disturbing conflicts arise over how we pass on our own family stories of hardship. As a clinical psychologist, I hold a longstanding interest in family stories passed from one generation to the next and in working through family mythologies. One debt we owe to Indigenous peoples, including the Palestinians, is that they have helped us to understand the historical inter-dependencies of the oppressors and the oppressed. And we have learned how oppressed people can become the oppressor, as we see in the brutal subjugation of Palestinians by Jewish Israelis.

My mother worked as a maid for a wealthy family in Bellingham as a young woman in the 1930s before she married my father. She had many stories about growing up dirt poor in Northern Alberta. Her parents, like many rural poor people, were drawn to Spirit-filled Pentecostalism. Their faith was forged by the hell-fire preachers at revival meetings, those seasonal gatherings of believers and backsliders in tents on the prairies.

One beloved family story passed on from my mother unfolded around her own brave and adventurous mother, Ma, following her older brother Ole who had gone before her, leaving Norway in 1906 to arrive in New York City. She then traveled to northern Minnesota where she secured a job as a cook in a hotel. Eight years after marrying my grandfather, Pa, a Norwegian farmer and carpenter, the couple migrated with their four young children to an area at the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, not far from what are now the tar sands oil fields. My grandpa had seen a post in their town, a railway hub in Minnesota, that announced land grants for white settlers by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. White settlers served as paramilitary sites protecting the rails going through Indian country. My grandparents had seven more children in a cabin that was built by Pa at Frog Lake–an area of Scandinavian settlers that became Norway Valley. The settlement straddled the Reserve of Frog Lake Nation–a band of Cree. My mother liked to tell us stories about her brothers running away from the lashings of Pa and how the brothers found sanctuary from his abuse among the Cree.

Of the many pioneer stories about family hardships that were passed on in my family, the story that put Frog Lake in Canadian history books was not among them. In 1885, twenty-three years before my grandparents arrived at Frog Lake, the largest violent resistance to white settlers in Canadian history took place. The Frog Lake Massacre, or what the Cree call the Frog Lake Rebellion, was organized by a band of Cree that had settled in the area but had not yet accepted the government’s reserve site. In resisting treaty demands and the decimation of buffalo that had left the Cree people in a state of near starvation, Chief Big Bear and Wandering Spirit, the war chief of the band, organized a campaign to seize weapons and food supplies, targeting the Hudson Bay Company post. Cree men attacked and killed nine whites in the small settlement of Frog Lake. Eight Natives, including Wandering Spirit, were hanged on Nov. 27, 1885 in the largest mass hanging in Canada’s history.

My mother and her siblings are now dead and I have no way of knowing what they knew of this history, although a commemorative grave in their town honors the white settlers who were killed. Local records from the region suggest that the massacre was a formative cultural memory for whites as well as for Indigenous people: “After the Indian uprising of 1885 twenty-five years passed before the influx of white settlers began to move into the area…Because of the wide-spread publicity that stemmed from the rebellion, Frog Lake was the place to which the pioneers came.” My grandparents were among those pioneers, encouraged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to settle in Frog Lake alongside the Reserve as part of a larger program of Indian pacification.

Solomon (Sa-we-pah-u) Delver, a Cree member whose family story is recorded along with that of my grandparents in Frog Lake, recalls another legacy of the era.

When I was a very small boy, I don’t know how old I was, I was sent to the Roman Catholic Residential School at Onion Lake. I was there for twelve years. My dad had sent me there to learn to understand the language of the white people. It was hard for me to be brought up as an orphan. I stayed with the nuns; they told me I am really a Roman Catholic which is how I was brought up. I used to ask a blessing before every meal I had. I used to go to Church in the evenings and in the mornings to the service in the Chapel before breakfast. I remember all these things when I was in the Residential School. It was hard far away from home, but it was the only way in which I could understand the White men.

Delver explains how his father sent him to the residential school to learn the language of white people. Yet laws passed in Canada made removal of Native children from their families and severing ties with their cultures mandatory. There were 25 residential schools in the province of Alberta and many were open until the last of the schools closed in the 1990s. The network of boarding schools was established by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs after the Indian Act of 1876 and administered by Christian churches, primarily the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church. Smaller denominations ran Residential Schools as well although their religious oppression may have taken more subtle forms. The Doctrine of Discovery, the papal edict of the late 15th century subsequently incorporated into international law that provided religious authority for European conquest of the continent, was a guiding worldview, supported by a series of Supreme Court decisions in the US and Canada, that justified claims on Native lands.

Solidarity and Survival

In my deeper understanding of my mother’s stories and my own familial work of “decolonizing history,” I still find a place for one of my mother’s favorite memories of the Cree. She liked to tell the story of being sent to fetch fish from an ice trap at the age of 10 and getting lost in thick fog in trying to find her way home. She remembered releasing the reins of her horse, knowing that the animal would know the way. In the fog surrounding her, she realized that she was passing through the Cree Reserve and closer than she had ever been to the Indians. The story ended with Mom’s girlhood astonishment: “After I passed through, I realized that they were not going to hurt me. The Cree Indians were actually good people.”

The monstrous violence inflicted on the Cree by white settlers never found a place in her family stories. Nor was there a place for recognizing Indigenous peoples’ own right to resist their colonizers. It is up to us, as descendants of those settlers, to join in the ongoing work of Indigenous resistance. As ravenous industries devour more of life, land and the planet itself, our collective survival lies in that shared struggle.

This is the second piece of a four-part series. These can be read along with other weekly commentary on her Substack page.

Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist and documentary filmmaker.