This essay is a study of the various meanings of confession: as truth, judgement, law and being. It puts forwards two propositions—on truth and lie; and on social death—in its exploration of what gets excluded from the term, confession, as it applies to native life. In an original reading of truth as confession, this study also asks why native confession, in several works by Frantz Fanon, say, is deemed to be neither truthful nor merely a lying relation, but a kind of n’est pas that can never be apprehended at the point of confessing it.