Stephen W. Enciso

Truth-telling has, in diverse contexts, been conceptualised as a vehicle for achieving reconciliation following injustice. As a social and political phenomenon, it involves the communication of narratives grounded in episodic memory. Such narratives may fail to reproduce the details of past events and may even include details that were not present in the original experience. To explore this issue, we examine the conservative backlash against the testimonies of the Stolen Generations in Australia, where perceived inaccuracies in remembering were used to discredit victim-survivor testimony. We argue that this backlash was based on epistemic and conceptual errors, relying as it did on a mischaracterisation of False Memory Syndrome (FMS) and a narrow view of memory that does not align with the current scientific understanding. We propose that a constructive view of memory is better suited to the task of truth-telling and reconciliation, and we consider how the epistemic risks associated with this view might be addressed.

The ‘right to be known’ has traditionally been interpreted from a human-centric and individualistic perspective unsuitable for resolving the environmental crises of our epoch. Given the political need to raise collective awareness about the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human worlds, we establish a dialogue between Indigenous and Western philosophies about the rights of more-than-human entities to be known and cared for. We consider a Western Australian Indigenous community’s advocacy on behalf of ‘Martuwarra’, a non-anthropocentric socio-environmental structure that encompasses the cultural ecosystem of a river (the ‘Fitzroy River’ in colonial nomenclature) and the Indigenous groups with ontologies and First Laws belonging to that ecosystem. For the First Peoples of Martuwarra, their cultural ecosystem is a custodial group agent that is the victim of an epistemic injustice. The advocacy on behalf of Martuwarra, we suggest, is an act of Indigenous truth-telling that establishes the custodial group agent’s right to be known and which seeks to entrench restorative norms of justice as part of a moral revolution. We address contractualist and other objections to our proposal and discuss the benefits of theorising the rights of custodial group agents.

ABSTRACT Truth‐telling has, in diverse contexts, been conceptualised as a vehicle for achieving reconciliation following injustice. As a social and political phenomenon, it involves the communication of narratives grounded in episodic memory. Such narratives may fail to reproduce the details of past events and may even include details that were not present in the original experience. To explore this issue, we examine the conservative backlash against the testimonies of the Stolen Generations in Australia, where perceived inaccuracies in remembering were used to discredit victim‐survivor testimony. We argue that this backlash was based on epistemic and conceptual errors, relying as it did on a mischaracterisation of False Memory Syndrome (FMS) and a narrow view of memory that does not align with the current scientific understanding. We propose that a constructive view of memory is better suited to the task of truth‐telling and reconciliation, and we consider how the epistemic risks associated with this view might be addressed.

If sovereignty means supreme authority over a given territory, then no territory can have multiple sovereigns. Australian jurisprudence is firm on this point, upholding Crown sovereignty while refusing to recognise Indigenous sovereignties. Collectively organised Indigenous polities, by contrast, do recognise Crown sovereignty. The Uluru Statement from the Heart claims that Indigenous and Crown sovereignty ‘co-exist’. What does this claim mean? On the interpretation I defend, it discloses the incommensurability of Crown sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignties. I argue that Indigenous sovereignty is a form of custodial authority over a given territory. I offer some clarifications about custodial authority and reject an anticipated objection that Indigenous sovereignty so conceived makes decolonisation impossible in any nonmetaphorical sense.

The study draws on research by Indigenous and social archaeologists, Indigenist scholars, and philosophers to expose forms of ignorance caused by racialization. Indigenous doctoral students from Ghana, Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste decided to partner with two non-Indigenous philosophers to share narratives—“storyworks” (Archibald 2008)—aimed at exposing racialized ignorance in research involving Indigenous peoples and in places marked by colonial heritage. The shared narratives focus on encounters with white ignorance as understood by political philosopher Charles Mills. According to Mills (2007, 2015), white ignorance refers to epistemic malpractices caused by white racial privilege and mechanisms of cultural transmission that perpetuate racialization. The essay begins with a critical exposition of Mills’ concept of white ignorance, which is interpreted from the perspective of the theory of distributed truth-telling. This analysis is then followed by a series of truth-telling narratives— Storyworks 1 to 6—and philosophical exegeses regarding decolonization efforts.

The ‘right to be known’ has traditionally been interpreted from a human-centric and individualistic perspective unsuitable for resolving the environmental crises of our epoch. Given the political need to raise collective awareness about the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human worlds, we establish a dialogue between Indigenous and Western philosophies about the rights of more-than-human entities to be known and cared for. We consider a Western Australian Indigenous community’s advocacy on behalf of ‘Martuwarra’, a non-anthropocentric socio-environmental structure that encompasses the cultural ecosystem of a river (the ‘Fitzroy River’ in colonial nomenclature) and the Indigenous groups with ontologies and First Laws belonging to that ecosystem. For the First Peoples of Martuwarra, their cultural ecosystem is a custodial group agent that is the victim of an epistemic injustice. The advocacy on behalf of Martuwarra, we suggest, is an act of Indigenous truth-telling that establishes the custodial group agent’s right to be known and which seeks to entrench restorative norms of justice as part of a moral revolution. We address contractualist and other objections to our proposal and discuss the benefits of theorising the rights of custodial group agents.

This article provides a philosophical response to the need for truth-telling about colonial history, focussing on the Australian context. The response consists in inviting philosophers and the public to engage in social-justice practices specified by a model called Distributed Truth-Telling (DTT), which integrates the historiography of injustices affecting Indigenous peoples with insights from social philosophy and cultural evolution theory. By contrast to official and large-scale truth commissions, distributed truth-telling is a set of non-elitist practices that weave three components: first, multisite, multiformat, and multiscale inquiries into injustices; second, remedial imaginings and reasoning about moral repair and reconciliated futures; and finally, emotions suitable for motivating agents to cooperatively plan and implement moral revolutions. Distributed truth-telling can entrench virtuous feedback loops that contribute to moral revolutions. However, vicious feedback loops associated with collective denial and biases can impair distributed truth- telling and thwart moral revolutions.