Reckoning with truth globally: Decolonial possibilities

Abstract

This Special Issue interrogates the limitations and possibilities of truth within global efforts to address historical injustice. Over the past 30 years truth commissions have become ubiquitous in response to authoritarian regimes and colonial legacies. However, their ability to facilitate meaningful transformation is increasingly contested. In this editorial we explore what a decolonial reckoning, rather than reconciliation, with the past and colonial logics of power, might mean. In doing so, we argue that the liberal, modernist imaginary of justice on which many truth processes have been premised, is constraining our imagination of more radical ‘fugitive’ forms justice. Drawing from contributions from Australia and other global contexts this special issue investigates these limitations and the transformative potential of truth as a decolonial, sovereign, embodied and relational praxis. Contributors engage with the pluriversality of truth in ways that trouble the nation-state and centre the sovereignty and onto-epistemology of racialised and First Nations peoples, often excluded from transitional justice processes, thus offering pathways for radical resistance, resurgence and prefigurative transformation.

Introduction

Truth commissions have become central to global imaginaries of how to address injustice, the legacies of authoritarianism and, increasingly, the unfinished business of colonialism. The ‘right to truth’ is now an internationally accepted principle codified in international law (Orentlicher, 2005). Over 35 truth commissions have been established in contexts as diverse as Sierra Leone and Canada since the mid 1970s (Hayner, 2023). However, the ability of these processes to achieve their stated mandates and facilitate meaningful transformation remains a concern in multiple contexts (Corntassel et al., 2009; Coulthard, 2014; Daly, 2008; Gready & Robins, 2019; Jamar, 2019, 2022; Jones, 2020; Kuokkanen, 2020; Lykes & van der Merwe, 2019; Madlingozi, 2010; McEvoy & McGregor, 2008; Nagy, 2008; Palmer et al., 2012; Wallis et al., 2016; Wilson, 2001). In fact, as this Special Issue shows, the liberal, modernist imaginary of justice on which many of these processes are premised may be ‘taming’ our imagination of the possibilities for truth within more radical ‘fugitive’ forms of justice (Akomolafe, 2023). There are many layers, knots, webs, and textures to touch in truthing (knowing, telling, doing and being) which, etymologically speaking, comes from the root trustworthy, firm, or steadfast. In this sense, truth is about trust, an intrinsically relational phenomenon.

In 2020, on the 250th anniversary of the violent landing of Captain Cook on so-called Australia's shores, Teila Reid, Wiradjuri and Wailwan, lawyer, essayist and storyteller, asked whether Australia was ‘ready to Gari Yala’ [speak truth] and reckon with its past?’. This Special Issue seeks to attend to what such a ‘reckoning’ with the colonial past might mean, not only in Australia but globally, and to explore the decolonising possibilities that ‘truth’ offers for reckoning with the past. Teila Reid's (2020) call for a reckoning with the past took place in the context of a renewed national engagement with the question of truth in Australia. Recognition of the violence of colonial settlement and its contemporary legacy remains contested. As a result, truth-telling about Australia's history of colonial and contemporary violence, has been an enduring demand of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, most recently articulated in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart. The call for a constitutional voice to parliament, along with truth and treaty in the Uluru Statement seeks to address the unresolved business of political settlement in the settler colony of Australia – the only ex-British colony not to have concluded a treaty with the original inhabitants of the land (O'Sullivan, 2021). The outcome of the national Referendum on a Constitutional Voice to Parliament held in October 2023, which was significantly defeated, speaks to the ongoing challenges of this political settlement and continuing resistance to the type of reckoning with the past that Reid called for in 2020.¹

We write from our location in the settler colony of Australia as two settler scholars from South Africa and Colombia, and an Aboriginal scholar from Wakaya Country who have contended with the ‘possibilities and pitfalls’ (Maddison et al., 2023) of truth in different global contexts. These various material and subjective locations have shaped the way we engage in this Special Issue with the potential of truth for global reckonings with coloniality. What these contributions reveal are the possibilities for truth when the onto-epistemological limitations of normative transitional justice are disrupted and transgressed, creating opportunities for pluriversal imaginings of justice grounded in First Nations cosmologies.

For Reid (2020), reckoning with the past involves a radical disruption of the status quo, ‘abolishing the colony as we know it and revolutionising a nation built on the ancient vision and voices of our ancestors’. In this vision, reckoning with the colonial past requires a decolonial undoing of the logics of power that led to the violations that are exposed through ‘truth’. It is this relationship between truth and power, more specifically, the ongoing coloniality of power, even where formal decolonisation has taken place, that we grapple with here (Paradies, 2020; Quijano, 2000). Western universalism has perpetuated and occluded this coloniality of power in regimes of truth that subjugated multiple knowledges and ways of being (Foucault, 1977, 2016 [1980]; Moreton-Robinson, 2006, 2013). While disciplinary regimes of truth have hidden these operations of power (see Bradfield, 2024; Kunjan, 2024), ‘truth’, and in particular the subjugated truths of those whose ethico-onto-epistemological existence have been made invisible by power, offers hope for resistance, resurgence and prefigurative transformation (Park, 2020). This is resistance that not only speaks truth to power (Foucault & Pearson, 2001) on its own terms (i.e. the modernist discursive framework that has perpetuated the coloniality of power), but is an ethico-onto-epistemological praxis that mobilises action and being in resistance to power (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2017) in prefigurative forms of justice. Through the contributions from authors grappling with the challenges of truth in Australia, Colombia and the Solomon Islands, as well as transnational analyses investigating truth-telling practices in Australia and Timor-Leste, Korea and Canada, we explore what hope truth offers for realising new possibilities of emergent life, and discuss its constraints.

This Special Issue builds on a sustained engagement with the question of truth precipitated by the call for truth-telling in the Australian context and the scholarly attention that this has generated (Appleby & Davis, 2018; Davis & Williams, 2021; Mayer, 2019; McKenna, 2018, 2021; Reynolds, 2021). This was explored during a seminar series run by the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation and the Institute of Postcolonial Studies between 2020 and 2022 entitled ‘Decolonising Truth’ that included critical discussions on truth-telling in Australia, Canada, Colombia, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands (see Institute for Postcolonial Studies, 2020). The seminar series attempted to link the unfolding national conversation about truth-telling to global engagements with decolonial praxis that is concerned with the ongoing (de-)articulation of colonial power. We sought to explore a praxis of truth that delinks from hegemonic forms of Western knowledge to locate engagements with truth in onto-epistemologies that resist the disembodied universalism of Eurocentric and Western political thought, and settler logics (see Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014; Mignolo, 2009; Quijano, 2000; Rifkin, 2013). Thus far there have been few critical conversations linking the call for truth-telling in Australia within decolonial scholarship. This is despite sociology's increasing concern with First Nations knowledges and governance, and decoloniality (Kidman, 2020; Moreton-Robinson, 2006; Paradies, 2006; Prehn & Ezzy, 2020). The Special Issue draws on this international conversation with invited contributions from several of the speakers who participated in the seminar series, as well as an open call for papers.

Truth and transitional justice

Over the last 30 years, the recounting and documenting of ‘truth’ about historical injustice within the institutional framework of truth commissions, has become increasingly central to the repertoire and apparatus of transitional justice in contemporary transitions from authoritarianism or periods of civil conflict. The goal, implicit and explicit, of these transitional justice processes, is the establishment, renewal and reiteration of liberal democracy (Gready & Robins, 2019). More recently, there has been an engagement with the possibilities offered by transitional justice for political transformation in settler-colonial societies such as Canada, and now Australia. In these contexts, it has been deeply embedded in the politics of recognition within the settler colonial order. However, the contribution of these processes to redressing injustice and addressing the colonial logics of power and structural injustice that continue after liberal democracies are (re-)installed, remains disputed (Balint et al., 2014; Maddison & Shepherd, 2014; Maddison et al., 2023). This is despite the growing recognition within the transitional justice field itself of its normative bias and ambiguous outcomes. These criticisms have led to attempts to quantify the impact of transitional justice in terms of a narrowly defined set of pre-established conceptions of liberal justice that in some instances has discounted the views and preferences of communities where it is being implemented (Lühe, 2023; Menzel, 2020; Njeru & Masiya, 2021).

A central critique of transitional justice and conventional truth-telling processes is their lack of capacity to address structural harm and violence. As Foukona (2024) notes of the truth commission process in the Solomon Islands, it's focus on individual victims and perpetrators in the county's civil conflict, meant that it had a limited focus on the trauma experienced because of systemic issues related to governance and socio-economic issues, land alienation, and displacement. When such issues remain unaddressed, ‘the colonisation of truth’ (Maddison et al., 2023, p. 5) for the purpose of settler-colonial nation-building can reinscribe power and result in further harms including: (1) the establishment of official narratives that present colonialism as historically resolved (Davis, 2022; Maddison et al., 2023); (2) the construction of First Nations and minoritised people as perpetual ‘victims’ of violence – traumatised, damaged and in need of ‘repair’ or resentful ‘obstacles’ to the promises of ‘nation-building and reconciliation’ (Coulthard, 2014; Ross, 2003; Tuck, 2009; Yezer, 2008); and (3) a lack of state and civic (settler) accountability, responsibility and justice related to land restitution, material obligations, and ongoing structural violence (Arias & del Campo, 2009; Centre for Indigenous Global Futures, 2023; Maddison et al., 2023).

This Special Issue contends with this global legacy to investigate what potential might be offered by a reframing of the possibilities of ‘truth’ less as an instrument of transitional justice within particular nation-states than as a means to confront, dismantle and/or transcend the coloniality of power in a multiplicity of local and transnational contexts that decentres and destabilises, rather than props up, the nation-state. Indeed, there is already a rich diversity of these types of deployments of truth, as contributions to this Special Issue demonstrate. Contributors grapple with the onto-epistemological haunting of colonialism, the pervasive traces of coloniality in the contemporary everyday by ‘living with’ and through ‘ghosts’ (Barad, 2010; Derrida, 2006). These truth practices evoke ancestors (Barolsky, 2024; Bradfield, 2024; Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024; Hughes et al., 2024; Kent et al., 2024) who attest to the truths of coloniality and the need for reparation, in ways that unsettle the triumphalist futurity of the liberal nation-state project. They make possible the return of lost futures and exiled capacities as ongoing decolonial ‘re-membering’ (Hughes et al., 2024; Kent et al., 2024) and memory activism (Noh, 2024) that does not allow ghosts to ‘die’.

This is not a reckoning with the past through a Western universalist objective truth, or an evidentiary/legalistic truth that seeks to finally to ‘prove’ the facts of the case within the constraints of a judicial and temporal mandate. Instead, this is a sentient and sensate truth, a truth that is known because it ‘burns’ (Bradfield, 2024). It concerns a fluid, emergent and less linear engagement with truth that recognises that history will not ‘end’ (Fukuyama, 1989), nor will its ‘lessons’ be learnt in one instance, site or classroom. Instead, the truths of historical oppression have to be continuously relearnt and retaught in a pedagogical praxis that engenders decolonial transformation both in the present and intergenerationally (Barolsky, 2024; Noh, 2024). These reckonings with the truths of injustice recognise the pluriversality of truth – the multiplicity of injustices that have taken place and the multiplicity of truths about this injustice to be engaged with (Bradfield, 2024). This reckoning with the truth of the past does not simply occur through the ‘telling’ of truth by individual victims in front of passive witnesses, as has been the paradigmatic form of transitional justice. Instead it is spoken ‘as Country’, revealed through and by Country (Bradfield, 2024; Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024; Kent et al., 2024). Here reckoning with the truths of injustice can be enacted with silence, signs, symbols and with celebration and negotiation (Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024; Hughes et al., 2024; Kent et al., 2024). It is embodied by victim-survivors whose lives are a living testament to experiences of violence (Barolsky, 2024; Noh, 2024) or it is represented in art, photography and other forms of creative expression (Barolsky, 2024; Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024; Hughes et al., 2024). This deployment of truths seeks to trouble the contemporary nation-state, even in its liberal form, rather than reiterate its hierarchies of power (Barolsky, 2024; Foukona, 2024; Kent et al., 2024). Therefore, it may be transnational (Hughes et al., 2024, Noh, 2024) or local (Barolsky, 2024), and transgress national borders (Berger, 2024). It supports transitions away from authoritarianism within a more radical vision of transformation, introducing ethico-onto-epistemologies that dispute the common-sense assumptions of liberal nationalism that have been at the heart of the transitional justice project since its earliest iterations (Gready & Robins, 2014).

In this context, the historical experiences of racialised people that have frequently remained outside the framework of standard transitional justice analyses, are centred and the ‘transition’ to new forms of ‘justice’ is re-shaped and unsettled through Indigenous and decolonial praxis (Corntassel et al., 2009; Davis, 2022; Davis & Williams, 2021; Mayer, 2019; McKenna, 2018, 2021; Reid, 2020; Reynolds, 2021). Indigenous and decolonial praxis is already profoundly radicalising the paradigm of transitional justice (Gready & Robins, 2019; Nagy, 2022; Park, 2020). Park (2020), drawing on a considerable body of First Nations scholarship, has argued that transitional justice in settler-colonial contexts could be radicalised by drawing on the principles of refusal, resurgence and prefiguration. Refusal involves the ‘refusal to be eliminated’, through refusing dispossession and settler colonialism and the liberal recognition of the settler state (Park, 2020, p. 14). Resurgence refers to the ‘revival of Indigenous customs, and social, legal and political orders’ that move away from the settler-colonial state as primary referent (Park, 2020, p. 16). Finally, prefiguration includes daily decolonial actions of First Nations people, communities and families (Park, 2020, p. 16). Nagy (2022) builds on this to call for a move away from transitional justice to ‘transformative justice’. Gready and Robins (2019, p. 2) argue that ‘transformative justice seeks to reform radically the politics, locus, and priorities of transitional justice’ to focus on ‘transformative change’ that addresses structural injustice and prioritises local agency and processes. Nagy (2022, p. 191) has therefore argued for ‘an Indigenised, decolonial transformative justice’ that includes grassroots First Nations resurgence, ‘settler decolonisation and allyship and structural transformations at the state and global levels’. Increasingly, also, First Nations conceptions of living systems as including the human and ‘more than human’, have led to critical engagements with the anthropocentric centering of the human in transitional justice in contexts such as Guatemala and Colombia, requiring an ‘ecocentric’ recalibration of our understanding of justice to include the land on which First Nations communities are located as the recipients of injustice and the site of reparation (Lyons, 2022; Viaene et al., 2023).

The authors in this Special Issue have grappled with these challenges by interrogating disciplinary regimes of colonial truth (Kent et al., 2024; Kunjan, 2024), as well as charting ways in which truths can be mobilised within a decolonial praxis that reimagines the place of truth within projects of justice, self-determination and sovereignty (Barolsky, 2024; Bradfield, 2024; Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024; Hughes et al., 2024; Kent et al., 2024). This praxis poses a profound ontological, epistemological and ethical challenge to normative engagements with the truths that shore up the nation-state and has the potential to radicalise truth-telling practice. The contributions pursue these questions by drawing on several significant bodies of scholarship on epistemic violence, pluriversality and border thinking, and the decolonial possibilities offered by Indigenous sovereignty and ethico-onto-epistemology, as well as posthumanist materialist scholarship. The subsequent sections of the editorial explore how this scholarship has been utilised by the contributors to unravel the challenges and potential of decolonial praxis in truth-telling.

Ethico-onto-epistemic violence in truth-telling

There is a growing body of scholarship exploring how the liberal legalism of transitional justice processes has led to various forms of epistemic violence (Jamar, 2022) or even epistemicide (Madlingozi, 2015) through the ‘marginalisation of the knowledge system and cosmologies of the historically colonized group’ (Madlingozi, 2015). Spivak (1988) originally used the term ‘epistemic violence’ to identify the way in which the knowledges of ‘subaltern’ groups in India were silenced and dismissed in favour of Western knowledge systems. Grewal (2023, p. 2) has recently argued that this ‘epistemic violence is ‘built into the very nature of transitional justice as a global enterprise. Epistemic violence within truth-telling privileges Western ways of life and places them ‘as the only ontologically possible’ ‘whilst other culturally and cosmologically different forms of human existence are ontologized as … inferior’ (Grosfoguel, 2019, p. 214). Bradfield (2024) asks in this light, ‘whose truths are being represented?’. Kent et al. (2024), writing about practices of caring for and connection with the dead in Timor-Leste and Australia, note the epistemic violence of ‘colonial worlding’ that carves up the relational cartography of Country into discrete bounded geographies and categories of objects. The non-recognition of the complex relational harms caused by colonialism constitutes a form of violence that perpetuates colonial logics and knowledge systems through what Povinelli (2016) describes as geontopower, which works to maintain or shape a distinction between ‘Life’ (bios) and ‘NonLife’ (geos). Kent et al. argue that sophisticated understandings of different ways of being in the world are required to ensure that this epistemological and ontological violence is not perpetuated through truth-telling. Kunjan (2024) utilises the work of Dotson (2014) on ‘epistemic exploitation’ to examine how truth-telling within an Australian politics of recognition and reconciliation can function in terms of an extractivist logic (Simpson, 2013) that relies on the epistemic labour (Berenstain, 2016) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who are continually required to attest to the violence of colonialism. This constrains First Nations epistemic agency without the possibility of meaningful transformation in ways that consolidate the futurity of the settler-colonial nation-state. In this context, ‘Bearing witness to Indigenous peoples’ testimonies of colonial violence becomes – consciously or not – co-opted into a process of settler catharsis and legitimation both of the settler self and the Australian nation’ (Kunjan, 2024). This ‘carnivalesque’ witnessing, does, ‘little or nothing to rectify the suffering and loss experienced by Aboriginal people’ (Birch, 2021).

Internationally, state-mandated truth-telling processes have also been critiqued for epistemic violence that seeks to impose official histories and ‘truths’ that eliminate or obscure the state's responsibility for violence (see e.g. in Latin America in Arias & del Campo, 2009; Feldman, 2021; Wills Obregón, 2022). More recent truth-telling processes that have privileged First Nations self-determination (e.g. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission – TRC), or ethnic/intersectional/racial or territorial approaches (e.g. in Colombia) have also been critiqued for reproducing epistemic violence (e.g. Coulthard, 2014; Londoño, 2024) by failing to engage with the structural implications of pluriversal cosmologies for the transitional justice project (Jamar, 2022). Epistemic violence is also manifest in logics that posit colonialism as a structural moment in the past, which relies on linear conceptions of time and delineates bounded geographies where colonial violence or conflicts occur (Corntassel et al., 2009; Coulthard, 2014; Davis, 2022; Londoño, 2024; Maddison et al., 2023; Smith, 1999). Illustrative of this is the limited periodisation of conflicts in contexts such as Colombia, which obscures the impact and endurance of coloniality. Londoño (2024) demonstrates that the periodisation of the conflict in Colombia, by the recently concluded truth commission, has reproduced silences in peace and historical education regarding the connections of the armed conflict to colonial violence and structural racism against Black people in Colombia.

We draw on the concept of ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad, 2007) and decolonial Indigenous scholarship that has critiqued the rigid division between epistemology (ways of knowing), ontology (ways of being) and ethics in Western thought (Coulthard, 2014; Grosfoguel, 2016, 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2013; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010; Simpson, 2013, 2017) to extend our understanding of the entangled and constitutive nature of the ‘violence’ of transitional justice as a profound problem of ethics that is not only discursive and epistemic but also ontological and axiological. Decolonisation of these entanglements is consequently not simply metaphorical (Strakosch & Macoun, 2020; Tuck & Wayne Yang, 2012) but material, structural and ontological, and requires an ethics of ‘response-ability’ to all beings (Barad, 2007, 2010; Haraway, 2008, p. 88). It necessitates extending beyond traditional Western constructs of agency, subjectivity and materiality (Bignall et al., 2016; Brigg, 2018; Kent et al., 2024) and drawing on the relational philosophies of First Nations societies that are, as Kent et al. in this issue note, increasingly being recognised in Western forms of the critical posthumanities (Rigney & Bignall, 2019). Barad (2007: 90) develops the concept of ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology' to articulate the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology in a quantum world that is ‘intra-actively’ co-constituted by the human and more than human. Kent et al. note that this conceptual framework shares many synergies with First Nations philosophies of relationality and connection between all systems, including the human and more than human. The conceptual and hierarchical separation between systems of knowledge (epistemology), ‘ways of being’ (ontology) and ‘ways of doing’ (axiology) that has characterised Western coloniality have done much damage to First Nations (and arguably all) communities globally. Kunjan (2024) notes how the violence that occurs as a result of distorted representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian commercial media is not only epistemic but is ‘directly connected to and indeed facilitates material processes of land theft, corporeal harm and political injustice against Indigenous peoples’.

Thus, in many transitional justice processes as currently constituted, the ‘subaltern’ are not only precluded from ‘speaking’ (Spivak, 1988) but also from being and doing in a normative framework that has created extremely narrow conditions of intelligibility. This framework is restricted to the human subject of Western modernity – the discursively constituted speaking individual (implicitly male) who exists in masterful relationship to the non-human world. This excludes, flattens and assimilates First Nations cosmologies, meanings and ways of being in many of the contexts in which transitional justice mechanisms are applied. Kent et al. (2024) explore the way in which the conception of a discursive speaking subject telling a narrative of past harms excludes the dead as agents of truth and reparation in First Nations cosmologies in Australia and Timor-Leste. They describe the relational webs with the more-than-human world between those who have died and those who live. Emmerton et al., also writes of how the spirits of the departed are ‘happy’ when the Kalkatung-u people visit Battle Mountain, the site of a massacre and significant resistance by the Kalkatung-u peoples. Emmerton's memorial painting of the massacre at this site facilitates connection with these ancestors by allowing the event to enter collective consciousness so that people – past, present and future, can engage with this violation. These relationships with the dead and with the future in truth-telling demonstrate the way First Nations ethico-onto-epistemologies are contesting the conventional temporalities of transitional justice truth-telling. In the Australian context, truth practice draws from a normativity grounded in local place and ontologies that emphasise reciprocity and connection to Country (Barolsky, 2024) and a kincentric orientation (Bradfield, 2024). However, such ethico-onto-epistemologies are not intelligible in the legal discursive framework of transitional justice. The consequence of these exclusions is a structural problem located in the terms of transitional justice itself. The result is that transitional justice ‘simultaneously discounts colonial legacies while reproducing colonial categories’ (Grewal, 2023). Its universal liberal conceptual and instrumental repertoire, is not simply insensitive to local context and historical legacies but occludes or appropriates the onto-epistemological environments in which it is applied. It becomes another disciplinary regime of truth (Foucault, 1977).

Pluriversality and border -thinking in decolonising truth-telling

The concepts of pluriversality (Bradfield, 2024) and border thinking (Bradfield, 2024; Berger, 2024) have emerged as important themes in several of the contributions and seminar dialogues, primarily in response to onto-epistemological violence. These contributions speak to how decolonising truth processes is potentially connected to the project of pluriversality. Articulated initially by the Zapatistas in Mexico, pluriversality is represented through the metaphor of a ‘world in which many worlds fit’, which theorists such as Mignolo (2018) and Escobar (2018) have further developed in their scholarship. Mignolo (2011) has outlined what he describes as a ‘universal’ project of pluriversalism that seeks to de-universalise the dominance of Western onto-epistemology globally to ‘sense’ the world as pluriversally constituted. This is a challenge that many scholars and activists have wrestled with extensively over the history of anti-colonial struggle. A pluriversal world is a world in which multiple cosmologies are deeply entangled and interconnected (Mignolo, 2018) rather than discretely articulated as in liberal understandings of pluralism. The critical and difficult decolonial task is disentangling these cosmologies from the logics of coloniality that continually privilege Western knowledge systems. Mignolo, building on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa on borderlands, offers the border as a methodology, or praxis for thinking, sensing and understanding the entanglements of the pluriverse, a way of ‘dwelling’ in its interstices that is not simply ‘mental or rational’, but embodied and experiential. This is the challenge of the pluriverse as praxis, which escapes easy definition – a praxis that seeks to create a world in which, as Icaza Garza (2023) outlines, ‘multiplicity, co-contemporaneity, and the overlapping of our worlds is possible’.

The contributions here, grapple with how truth-telling might contribute to the construction of pluriversality and the ways in which a praxis of border ‘dwelling’ – thinking, doing and being at the messy interstices of the pluriverse occurs. Could these interstitial spaces create the context in which settler-colonial habits of thought and action, as well as hegemonic truths, could be confronted and challenged, as one contributor, Bradfield, asks in the Australian context? Or could they help us engage in truth-telling that seeks to understand the complex configuration of settler colonialism articulated in the intersections between the ‘internal’ frontiers that exclude Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from the Australian white nation-state (Moreton-Robinson, 2007) and the external boundaries against the migrant other? Berger (2024) explores the intersections of the ‘border-industrial’ complex through the literary border-crossing of former Manus Island detainee Barooz Boochani's novel, No Friend but the Mountain. Berger examines how Boochani's novel seeks to expose anti-colonial truths through his creative rendition of Manus Island as a heterotopic space that both mirrors and creates opportunities to contest the ‘white possessive’ settler-colonial formation of the contemporary Australian nation-state. Noh draws attention to the pluriversality of colonial history through an analysis of ‘non-Western’ Japanese imperialism and ongoing efforts by the Japanese state to silence the truth-telling of Korean women kept as sexual slaves during the Second World War. The activism of victim-survivors and their descendants to ensure recognition of this violation has been both intergenerational and transnational, crossing multiple borders, literal and metaphoric.

However, the reality of this pluriversal praxis in truth-telling, as in many other decolonial endeavours, is complex. It requires a move away from settler-colonial aspirations towards a definitive reconciliation that declares the colonial order post-colonial without a fundamental reordering of social relations (Barolsky, 2024; Kunjan, 2024). Instead, it involves living with uncertainty, contingency and potential incommensurability between worldviews (Moreton-Robinson, 2021; Bradfield, 2024) within relationships of reciprocity and sovereign recognition (Barolsky, 2024). Bradfield (2024) argues that a ‘decolonising consciousness’ informed by border -thinking, agonistic pluralism, and kincentric orientations can help settler-colonial citizens develop the capacity to centre Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander truths and navigate a pluriversal universe in which Eurocentric truths are no longer hegemonic. Agonistic pluralism allows the non-Indigenous subject to cultivate ‘multi-epistemic literacy’ that facilitates a conscious and reflexive relationship to Indigenous onto-epistemology and the ‘burning truth’ of violent colonial occupation.

First nations ethico-onto-epistemologies and sovereign truth-telling

First Nations ethico-onto-epistemologies are transforming and radicalising transitional justice, as well as instantiating and modelling significantly new ways of addressing coloniality. These types of engagement with truth introduce ontologies that dispute the common-sense assumptions of liberal nationalism that have been central to the transitional justice project. Instead, truth is co-constituted as an ongoing and relational process of becoming that includes the human and more than human, the living and the ancestral, and is deeply connected to Country (Barolsky 2024; Bradfield 2024; Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024; Kent et al., 2024). These types of truth-telling draw on a reflexive praxis that eschews the binary between theory and practice (Simpson, 2017) and makes it possible for truth to dwell in an onto-epistemic borderland that is both discursive and embodied, liminal and ambiguous, emergent and revelatory, sacred and profane. This is truth-telling without the aspiration for reconciliation, conclusion or consensus so characteristic of liberal transitional justice processes. The instantiation of Indigenous ethico-onto-epistemologies – ways of knowing, being and doing within the process of truth-telling itself, is profoundly pedagogical, teaching First Nations ‘ways of being’ by inviting non-Indigenous individuals to share these spaces (Barolsky, 2024). This truth-telling therefore functions as a living critique of the ongoing coloniality of modernity, prefiguring new ways of being and doing. It creates place-based contexts where Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjectivities can be troubled through a pedagogy of discomfort that is cognitive, emotive, experiential and self-reflexive (Barolsky, 2024).

The contributions to this Special Issue show that there are already a plethora of First Nations approaches to truth-telling, working against the eliminatory logic of coloniality through the reassertion and reclamation of a heterogeneous presence on Country and via everyday truth practices of First peoples. Such practices are woven through with kin, memory, and Country (Hughes et al., 2024) and are dispersed, multiple, substantive, sacred, political, and affective. In some cases, destabilising the notion of citizens and nation-states themselves (Kent et al., 2024). Berger (2024) asks if truth can ‘exist beyond words …’. The contributions here show that this is clearly so, in that truth arises in and out of gesture, song, tone and bodily expression, as well as through the representational and visceral aspects of art such as painting (Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024) and photography (Hughes et al., 2024). Emmerton's painting Battle Mountain discussed in the article by Emmerton and colleagues (2024), acts as a memorial evoking the violence of colonialism, represented with red lines and bleached skulls. The spiritual connection to Indigenous ancestors who gave their lives in the battle are suggested by gold. The visual record of middle-class First Nations lives on Country, recorded in family photographs by Ngarrindjeri people in South Australia and the Qu’Appelle Valley Métis of Saskatchewan, Canada explored by Hughes et al. (2024) also articulates powerful truths about the continued sovereignty and self-determination of First Nations people in the ‘shadow’ of their racialised and stereotyped representation in the settler colony. The visual depictions of First Nations in Emmerton's work and the photography Hughes et al. document are therefore important assertions of self-determination and sovereign truth-telling. As McGregor (2019, p. 37–43) cited in Emmerton et al., argues, ‘telling our own stories in our own ways and forms is an important form of resistance’.

Critically, therefore, this truth-telling is a reassertion of the sovereignty of First Nations and other subjugated ethico-onto-epistemologies in contexts of continuing coloniality. This sovereign truth praxis seeks to refute colonial erasures of thought, being and practice. Barolsky explores this in her discussion of community truth-telling in Australia as an embodiment of the ‘truth’ of continuing sovereignty, which refuses the onto-epistemological division of knowing, being and doing that has characterised discursive forms of transitional justice. These truth practices are profoundly relational and holistic. They address multiple aspects of harm and reparation, and prefigure new forms of life and relationality. Kent et al. explore the repatriation and the reburial of the remains of ancestors as an act of sovereign healing that restores relationality and connectivity to Country in Timor-Leste and Australia. These ancestors or ‘Old People’ embody the truth of sovereign relationships severed by colonial violence and structural racism. Simultaneously they personify the possibility of repair of injured Country through return and reburial and the resettling of the unsettled spirits of those who died a ‘bad’ death (Kent et al., 2024). Hughes et al.'s exploration of archives of family photography in Ngarrindjeri and Qu’Appelle Valley Métis families in Australia and Canada understand these representations in terms of the concept of ‘visual sovereignty’, which facilitates self-representation, self-determination, and resistance against the universalising visual stereotypes of the colonial gaze through which First Nations people have conventionally been reflected and misrepresented. They argue that these vernacular photographs provide an evidentiary resource for truth-telling, disrupting and displacing assumed settler historical narratives by documenting First Nations presence and land use in ways that are self-governing and reflect relationality. This family photography existed in sharp contradistinction to the portrayal of First Nations peoples in the popular press and scientific discourse in the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors understand their own research practice as a process of sovereign embodiment, a ‘re-membering’ and reclamation through driving, walking, mapping and conversations on Country. Emmerton's painting Battle Mountain Memorial similarly commemorates the failure to extinguish the continuing sovereignty of the Kalkatung-u people in Queensland. Emmerton and Giselsson argue that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art can be a valuable method of decolonial truth-telling, acting as a powerful counterpoint to the silencing of Indigenous voices and knowledge within colonial histories and narratives.

The Special Issue's contributions and our discussions thus demonstrate how First Nations onto-epistemology has a very different relationship to truth than the evidentiary approach to truth adopted by many formal truth commissions. Discovering truth is not merely an empirical endeavour but a profoundly moral and sacred task. These inviolate and sacred ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) precepts for right relations are informed by Country in its broadest sense, the relations inhered in an agential and sentient natural world. As Ed McGaa, Eagle Man argues, ‘Nature is very, very truthful’ (Topa & Narvaez, 2022, p. 121).

In this kincentric universe (Bradfield, 2024) of relationality with all aspects of the cosmos, Country ‘holds its own truths’, most importantly the truths of the continuing sovereignty of multiple First Nations communities that settler colonialism has sought to homogenise and erase (Barolsky, 2024). Unlike Western cosmology, which is founded on a belief in the superiority of human truth, this understanding of truth is grounded in ‘nature's truth’ (Topa & Narvaez, 2022, p. 121; Bradfield, 2024). Instead of the absolutism of human truth claims, which attempt to invoke a final knowledge of history produced through the truth process, in First Nations ethico-onto-epistemology it is recognised that truth is a ‘multifaceted gem’ (Four Arrows, 2020, p. 41). It is also ‘mysterious’ (Topa & Narvaez, 2022)-multiple truths coexist with truths that are as yet unknown (Bradfield, 2024; Barolsky, 2024). There is no claim to final, definitive knowledge. Rather truth is co-constituted through sacred, ethical communication in which ‘words are understood as sacred vibrations that continue to vibrate out into the universe’ and the ‘idea of intentionally speaking untruthfully’ is unthinkable (Topa & Narvaez, 2022, p. 128). Truth calls for ‘passionate, disciplined dialogue in order to come close to understanding it’ (Four Arrows, 2020, p. 40). ‘True words’ transform the world by combining reflection and action in praxis (Freire, 2005, p. 87). Thus, immersed within an animate universe, ‘truth-telling is an ongoing process of becoming’ that embraces, and entangles with the more-than-human in a constant dance of renewal and regeneration (Emmerton & Giselsson, 2024; Kent et al., 2024).

Truth emerges through ceremonies that are participatory, revelatory, and emergent (thinking-together) rather than representative, ‘assertional’ and definitive (Barmaki, 2022, p. 42). This creates a context for conversation that surfaces truth, without persuasion or convincing. Rather, the truth is revealed through ritual and ceremony (Barmaki, 2022). Instead of conventional, static memorials, there is a living, ongoing engagement with truth (Barolsky, 2024). Emmerton and Giselsson (2024), in their discussion of Emmerton's painting memorialising a massacre at Battle Mountain, engages with the complexity of the truths around this event that is both a significant massacre of Kalkatung-u people in 1884, at the same time as it symbolises resistance and continued survival. This co-constituted truth is, for example, in the context of Cree cosmology, the counterpart to Western conceptions of ‘justice’ (Barmaki, 2022, p. 42). In this setting wrongdoing is addressed pedagogically, through moral re-education, what Cree Elders describe as ‘teaching gently’ (Barmaki, 2022, p. 42). Barolsky (2024) discusses similar pedagogic practices in Australian truth-telling, where non-Indigenous Australians are ‘invited in’ to spaces of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty and cultural authority to understand the truths of colonial history. The cultural context which allows for truth to be privileged in First Nations cultures are strong social norms and practices of honesty, openness, vulnerability, authenticity, and compassion (Barmaki, 2022). Here the truth-teller is deeply connected to the listener (Kent et al., 2024).

Finally, it is understood that our world is sacred, all is perceived and observed by the living cosmos/creator with detrimental consequences for our wellbeing if we contribute to an imbalanced existence. In discerning truth First Nations peoples strive to listen to this sacred wisdom, the council of all beings; to, for example, Bunjil, the ancestor-creator, to Waa the trickster and, more generally, to a multitude of (in)human (but not inhumane) ancestors, apparitions, spirits, beings, eidolons, and entities from across multiple spatio-temporalities.

Conclusion: Decolonial possibilities in truth-telling

What then are the decolonial possibilities of truth-telling? How can it contribute to the meaningful disruption of the logics of power that contribute to ongoing coloniality? In this editorial, we have sketched the ethico-onto-epistemic violence that normative forms of transitional justice have led to in contexts around the globe, foreclosing substantive transformation even as these possibilities are opened up. In this sense there is a danger that truth-telling within transitional justice reiterates the disciplinary regimes of truth that Foucault critiqued and in this way, perpetuates, rather than ameliorates, the damage of coloniality. On the other hand, it is evident that the transitional justice field is increasingly recognising some of its normative limitations and the potential silencing of truths this may create and has made efforts to expand the scope and nature of its engagements with truth, both in practice and conceptually. However, it is unclear whether truth-telling as a global enterprise, tied to the nation-state as currently constituted within the paradigm of transitional justice can be reconceptualised and recalibrated in ways that fundamentally alter its terms of engagement with the truths of colonial and settler-colonial oppression.

At the same time, what the contributions make clear is the radical possibilities that emerge when some of the ethico-onto-epistemological limitations of conventional transitional justice are opened up and transgressed. Even more significantly, what these contributions show are the multiple engagements with decoloniality that are already ongoing. It is this praxis that offers hope for prefigurative transformation and the imagining and realisation of ‘fugitive’ forms of justice, sovereignty and self-determination. In this opening up, a multiplicity of new actors are invited in to participate in truth praxis, including ancestors and Creators. Engagement with truth and what it reveals about legacies of oppression and colonialism therefore becomes a sacred task. While civil or criminal prosecution may be required for some perpetrators of violence, those who benefit from systems of oppression more broadly are also invited to participate in transformative reflexive praxis that allows them to engage with their own complicity and develop new modalities of living with pluriversality and indeterminacy. These self-determining, creative, expressions of sovereign truths are profoundly relational and holistic, embracing the human and ‘more than’ human, seeking to recognise damage, as well as heal it. They are ongoing and processual, endeavouring to deepen transformation over time, from generation to generation, rather than attempting to metaphorically ‘conclude’ a chapter of history in a mandated period. They do not simply ‘tell’ truth but also embody and practice it. Deep listening, as relational practice, is as important as the demonstration and ‘telling’ of truth. As a result, truth is co-constituted within relations of respect, recognition and autonomy, rather than ‘proved’ in a contest of ‘facts’ that assigns hierarchical value to history's truths. Truth is therefore, as its etymological roots suggest, fundamentally a question of trust.