Tracing the limits of epistemic agency in truth-telling about Australian settler colonialism

Abstract

The Australian state and much of the settler polity maintain an unresolved contradiction between fully acknowledging Indigenous people and upholding a system predicated on the assumption of their socio-political inferiority. This tension inflects a public sphere in which Indigenous people frequently deploy truth-telling as an epistemic strategy, albeit one that involves a balance between challenging cultivated silences and/or colonial triumphalism and the costs of repetitive epistemic labour. The landscape of communicative exchange thus outlined suggests the need for a more nuanced assessment of the decolonial potential of truth-telling about colonial violence in Australia, given a contemporary context wherein settler individuals and institutions increasingly attempt to elicit such testimony from Indigenous people. Discourse analysis of media items published in 2020 about 26 January, Australia's national day, reveals Indigenous people’s resistance against both colonial untruths and the racialised epistemic power differential enabling their circulation.

Introduction

The date of 26 January is one that routinely attracts controversy in so-called Australia ¹ due to its official designation as a holiday celebrating the virtues of a nation founded in the genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. ² The date marks the formal commencement of terrestrial dispossession of Aboriginal people on behalf of the British Crown in 1788, consummated by Captain Arthur Phillip's raising of the Union Jack at Warrane (Sydney Cove) to establish the colony of New South Wales (NSW). Celebration of the date has long been challenged by Indigenous people, which first coalesced into formalised public opposition with the 1938 Day of Mourning and Protest held to coincide with Sydney's sesquicentenary. In recent years, there has been growing support from the broader settler population resulting in annual mass Indigenous-led rallies against ‘Invasion Day’ held around the continent from the mid-2010s.

While early approaches to the national day emphasised pride in Australia's British colonial origins and settler history, over time, and particularly after the end of the White Australia Policy in the 1970s, there has been a shift towards more inclusive commemorations of the date in accordance with the nation's increasingly multicultural population and appetite for a shift away from colonial nostalgia (Pearson & O’Neill, 2009, p. 79). A prominent aspect of this shift has been an uptick in uneasy attempts across public and political discourse to positively recognise Indigenous people’s place in Australia's national narrative. Over the past decade, it has become increasingly likely that in the lead-up to 26 January, a range of Indigenous commentators will be taking up hard-fought space in mainstream and alternative media to discuss the implications of the date's commemoration for Indigenous–settler relations. Significant in this commentary are assertions about the true history of 26 January and its aftermath for Indigenous people, including how the denial of historical and ongoing colonial violence, such as land theft and political subjugation, relates to contemporary anti-Indigenous racism, both interpersonal and structural (Coe, 2022).

This article investigates how the epistemic baggage of Australian settler colonialism impacts public discursive interventions by Indigenous commentators challenging this status quo on 26 January. The narrative dominance of settler commentators born out of and reinforcing this project has a significant influence on how Indigenous commentators’ expressions of truth are received in the realm of public discourse. As identified by Johnston (2022, p. 42), this field continues to be powerfully shaped by both conservative and liberal settlers’ ‘emotional commitment to preserving a positive self-understanding … as innocent and benevolent political actors’. In the case of 26 January, such a commitment can be contextualised in relation to quotidian settler practices of discourse and dwelling that naturalise ongoing colonialism and thwart transformative engagement with the truths of colonial violence (Rifkin, 2013).

Rather than examining how truth is mobilised within formal, Indigenous-led proceedings such as the current Yoorrook Truth and Justice Commission in Victoria (see Maddison et al., 2023), where settlers are called upon as active participants in processes of truth-telling and responsive witnessing, of interest here is how truth-telling occurs within the semantically ‘messier’ sphere of media communication. This article focuses on specific instances where Indigenous media commentators deliberate over the purpose of engaging with both implicit and explicit external appeals to annually narrate the colonial truths of 26 January. In the absence of structural transformation in response to these truths, the repetitive elicitation of narratives about colonial harm is identified as a form of epistemic violence, one that is identified and resisted as such by some Indigenous commentators.

My argument here builds on insights gained from a broader discourse analysis of Australian mainstream and independent media outputs published in early 2020, investigating Indigenous and non-Indigenous commentators’ contested claims to sovereignty and political authority on 26 January (Kunjan, 2022). This study involved the qualitative analysis of 392 distinct media items published by mainstream and independent Australian media outlets between 12 January and 9 February 2020, selected due to their inclusion of commentary on 26 January and/or the 250th anniversary of Cook's 1770 claim of colonial possession. The excerpts analysed in this article were chosen from a subset of pieces, including instances of Indigenous commentators explicitly discussing the impacts of being subjected to public scrutiny and colonial untruths around 26 January. Rather than making a claim of representative sampling, therefore, the present investigation into epistemic power dynamics at play in public discourse around 26 January is guided by an interest in Indigenous commentators’ direct reflection on these matters.

In this article, I use 26 January as an illustrative case to analyse asymmetric epistemic power relations in communication between Indigenous people and settlers, focusing on the way that liberal democratic ‘recognition’ places particular demands on the former when it comes to truth-telling about colonialism. First, I provide a brief overview of contested representations of 26 January as a site for colonial triumphalism or the recuperation of an inclusive settler nationalism, linking this to the role of truth-telling within and against the colonial relation. After this, and drawing on the work of Mills (1997) and Moreton-Robinson (2015) on whiteness and knowledge, I begin sketching out a theoretical framework for the article by exploring the racial hierarchy of knowing situated at the heart of the colonial relation, noting the contingency of Australia's existence on maintaining and obscuring this stratification. Obfuscation occurs in part via disingenuous practices of recognition, analysed here with reference to Coulthard's (2014) work on the insidious nature of conciliatory rhetoric mobilised by settler states to sidestep addressing the material consequences of colonisation and ongoing racism. I build on the theoretical framework thus established by integrating the work of feminist philosophers including Dotson (2012, 2014), Berenstain (2016) and Pohlhaus Jr. (2020) to interrogate how racism and colonialism inflect communication in stratified societies via processes of epistemic oppression, violence and exploitation. These theoretical interventions are then used to critically analyse external demands placed on Indigenous people to repeatedly draw settlers’ attention to the impacts of colonisation with no guarantee that this will alleviate structural oppression. By attending to a selection of Indigenous commentators’ critical responses to these demands, this article examines how epistemic exploitation operates and is resisted in contemporary Australian public discourse about truth and colonisation.

Attending to the racialised labour of truth-telling by Indigenous people is a key component of critically appraising the status quo politics of truth in Australian public discourse. This is particularly so given the range of locutionary contexts, audience responses and other potential constraints on self-determined political communication that Indigenous speakers are forced to navigate when speaking of ongoing colonial violence. It is important to underscore that there is no clear consensus among Indigenous people about the ideal role/s and mode/s of truth-telling in processes of reconfiguring relationships with settlers and the Australian state – nor should this be expected. Rather, truth-telling is deployed as an epistemic strategy towards various ends, with different Indigenous individuals and communities holding different theories of change and ideals about how best to move towards just relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Some Indigenous people choose to be involved in formal and informal truth-telling processes (from structuring to testifying), while others decline. Writing as a settler positioned within the academy, I emphasise that settler individuals and institutions must contend with the work that we are asking Indigenous people to do in telling truths about colonial violence. ³ This provocation is particularly salient for those of us in positions of relative epistemic authority within the colonial knowledge economy, requiring that we examine our theories of change when repeatedly demanding that Indigenous people narrate their experiences of oppression (see Tuck, 2009). Such an examination must necessarily lead us to resist the predatory consumption of Indigenous people’s trauma and instead lean in to responsive, action-oriented engagement with the obligations that generations of Indigenous activism have placed upon us already (see de Souza & Dreher, 2021).

Truth, history and the colonial relation

The date of 26 January 1788 marked the commencement of formal terrestrial dispossession of the Indigenous people of Australia under the authority of the British Crown. Enabled by Cook's claim over the east coast in 1770, Captain Arthur Phillip raised the Union Jack at Warrane (Sydney Cove) to inaugurate the establishment of the NSW colony, heralding the beginning of a genocidal campaign of land theft against the at least 250 sovereign nations spread across the continent. The date was initially celebrated by the colonists as First Landing Day, Foundation Day or Anniversary Day in NSW from the early 1800s, and by 1946 was recognised as a significant date across all Australian states and territories (Pearson & O’Neill, 2009, p. 76). However, it has only been uniformly commemorated as Australia's national holiday since 1994, announced as such by Labour Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1993 (Macnamara & Crawford, 2013; see also Council of Australian Governments, 1993). The choice to hold Australia's national day on the anniversary of colonial settlement is indicative of deep-rooted cultural and political investments in glorifying and naturalising its racist origins – a phenomenon that Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015, pp. 113–114) refers to as ‘white possession’.

In 1938, the 150th anniversary of the state of NSW, members of Indigenous activist groups the Aborigines Progressive Association and the Australian Aborigines League publicly called for 26 January to instead be commemorated as a Day of Mourning and Protest. Organisers used this inaugural demonstration in Sydney to demand the status of full citizenship and equal rights for Indigenous people, challenging both systemic racism and the historical revisionism characteristic of Australian nationalism (Coe, 2023). The 1938 Day of Mourning and Protest has been characterised as ‘the first significant Aboriginal political action of the 20th century’, given its unprecedented coverage in Australian media (Foley & Anderson, 2006, p. 85). Since then, 26 January has occasioned annual demonstrations and celebrations of survival by Indigenous people across the country, defying the myth of peaceful settlement and the veneration of a colony founded on genocide. The iconic Aboriginal Tent Embassy was erected on the lawns of old Parliament House on 26 January 1972, fast becoming an anchor of the land rights movement, and mobilisation in Sydney to protest the bicentennial celebrations on 26 January 1988 constituted one of the largest Indigenous-led resistance gatherings in the country till that time.

Demonstrations on 26 January continue into the present day as vital sites of Indigenous refusal of settler colonial nationalism, while also celebrating Indigenous survival and resurgence. Gumbaynggirr historian and veteran land rights activist Gary Foley (2007, p. 122) points to the significance of consistent, public and resistant reframing of 26 January by many Indigenous people as ‘Invasion Day’ since 1938, against settler celebrations of ‘Australia Day’. Foley (2007, p. 122) also emphasises the importance of Indigenous people’s symbolic appropriation of 26 January as an assertion of sovereignty as well as an enduring legacy of the first Day of Mourning (see also Coe, 2022). This redefinition speaks to both the continuity of Indigenous resistance over time and to the grounding of these protests in a concrete claim to truth, a political claim that directly challenges the authority of the Australian settler state. In recent years, sustained resistance against exclusionary nationalism on 26 January has resulted in shifts in the public sphere, such as an increasing number of local councils across the country changing their practices of commemoration to include acknowledgement of Indigenous people and the traumatic nature of the date (Busbridge, 2023; Mascarenhas, 2023).

In 2017, the notion of truth-telling about Indigenous–settler relations was further invigorated in Australian public discourse through the release of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The statement emerged from a series of Indigenous-led regional dialogues coordinated by the Referendum Council, a body established by government with bipartisan endorsement in 2015. It called for the establishment of a legislated Indigenous Voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission to oversee treaty making grounded in a robust process of truth-telling about Australia's colonial history. ⁴ Emphasising the sequence of ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’, the statement received significant airtime in mainstream media and political discussion about Indigenous–settler relations, as well as significant distortion regarding its aims (Norman, 2019). Despite then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's rejection of the Voice proposal, the Uluru Statement's emphasis on truth-telling tapped into a vein of public sentiment building on decades of largely state-led initiatives designed to achieve some form of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people (Birch, 2007, p. 112; Nicoll, 2002, paragraphs 8–10). Public discussion about the role of truth-telling in shifting Indigenous–settler relations further intensified through the federal Labour government's 2022 election commitment to establishing a constitutional Voice to Parliament via a referendum vote. However, as became increasingly clear during the ultimately unsuccessful referendum campaign, references to truth in Australian public discourse continue to be far from uniform in their import. Mainstream media coverage prioritised appeals about the implications of truth-telling voiced by both the liberal ‘Yes’ and reactionary conservative ‘No’ campaigns, while sidelining and misrepresenting alternative articulations of truth and justice forwarded by a subset of Indigenous commentators and groups critical of the process (McQuire, 2023a, 2023b).

Despite increasing public awareness about the realities of Australian settler colonialism via both the street-based pedagogy of protests and the selective inclusion of regular Indigenous commentators in Australian media, the scope and content of truth-telling on this issue remains constrained within mainstream political discourse. As explored by Thomas et al. (2019), the nature of settler individuals and institutions’ engagements with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ diverse political aspirations are frequently determined by the desires and priorities of the former rather than the latter. Further, as scholars including Maddison et al. (2023) have identified, notions of ‘truth’ and ‘truth-telling’ are inherently ambiguous – Indigenous people’s testimony to and settlers’ acknowledgement of colonial violence is not an automatic guarantee of radical reparative or redistributive outcomes. Instead, the authors note that any consideration of the potential for truth-telling to substantially transform status quo colonial relations must hold both normative and critical approaches to truth in view. These approaches respectively identify the cautious possibility for truth-telling to positively transform Indigenous–settler relations, and on the other hand to rehabilitate the legitimacy of the settler state (Maddison et al., 2023). Further, these approaches cleave along the lines of what Nicoll (2002, paragraph 9) has characterised as reconciliation with versus reconciliation to, respectively referring to mutually determined versus settler-dominated attempts to reconfigure Indigenous–settler political relations.

Critical analyses of the role of truth in political discourse, particularly in contexts characterised by unresolved political conflict, indicate that appeals to truth-telling may be quite differently conceived both between Indigenous people and settlers, and within these groups (see, for example, Little, 2020). This is not to suggest that truth-telling is an inappropriate strategy to include in processes of political transformation, but rather to contextualise its use within a profoundly unequal arena of communication. Appleby and Davis (2018, p. 508) emphasise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people involved in the Regional Dialogues leading up to the development of the Uluru Statement were under no illusion that truth-telling alone would ‘reset the relationship between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians’. Participants were firm in their understanding of truth-telling as a key factor in facilitating the transformation of this relationship, but equally clear that mere acknowledgement and symbolism by settler Australia would be insufficient to achieve this goal. However, as will be discussed in the following section, what counts as a legitimate expression of ‘truth’ is underpinned by the operation of a colonial hierarchy of knowledge fundamental to the existence of the Australian settler state. Truth-telling is relational, and as such, it is worth critically attending to what structurally empowered parties in colonial relation understand the purpose of truth-telling to be.

The spectres of conservative symbolic recognition and liberal centrist appeals to reconciliation continue to loom large in political discourse about truth and colonisation in Australia. Little (2020, p. 47) describes the Australian settler political class's normative orientation towards truth in relation to the Uluru Statement, leading to the prioritisation of a teleological approach towards broad political consensus and ultimately reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Paramount in this approach is a failure to comprehend Indigenous–settler relations as ‘inherently conflictual’, resulting in the structural violence of colonisation being downplayed by settler actors and institutions in an attempt to achieve an ideal future outcome (Little, 2020, p. 47). This avoidance of conflict in pursuit of a peaceful and orderly shift in Indigenous–settler relations is consistent with what Coulthard (2014, p. 40) has identified as a colonial or liberal politics of recognition. Such a politics is geared towards ‘reconciling Indigenous peoples’ assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity-related claims’, subsuming Indigenous peoples’ political concerns under inclusionary liberal nationalism (Coulthard, 2014, p. 151).

In his analysis of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coulthard (2014, p. 127) outlines how processes of truth-telling that are constrained by liberal recognition serve to position Indigenous people as ‘the primary object of repair, not the colonial relationship’. Truths about colonial harms are thus elicited from Indigenous people with an explicit orientation towards forgiveness and mutuality, reproducing the colonial relation through a performance of state contrition. Corntassel and Holder (2008), writing across both the Canadian and Australian contexts, have also highlighted the detrimental nature of temporal and material restrictions imposed by settler states on process of truth-telling about colonialism, which actively undermine possibilities for transformative justice for Indigenous people. Additionally, as Barolsky (2022, p. 3) has identified, in Australia state-driven processes of recognition and reconciliation have functioned to preserve the same political community and the identities of coloniser and colonised, rather than making space for their transformation. The concerns raised by these authors gesture towards the necessity of critical engagement with the semantic ambiguity of truth-telling in mainstream political conversations about Australian colonialism and Indigenous–settler relations, and its racialised epistemic basis.

Racialised un/knowing

Attending to the persistence of a colonial hierarchy of knowledge in Australia is foundational to the present analysis of status quo epistemic power relations between Indigenous people and settlers. British colonisation of the continent was facilitated by Enlightenment ideals of the universal (white, male, cis, abled, and propertied) subject, against which the Indigenous ‘Other’ was cast as lawless, propertyless and un-knowing (Moreton-Robinson, 2004, pp. 76–78). Processes of land theft and genocide expanded inland from satellite colonies around Australia's coastline informed by settler imaginaries of Indigenous people as ‘white epistemological possessions’ rather than wilful sovereigns in their own right (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 114). With racialised knowledge already circulating prior to Cook's departure from England, Indigenous people were readily configured as objects of white knowing (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 110).

Caribbean political philosopher Charles Wade Mills has analysed the emergence of racialised epistemic and political relations under global white supremacy in his seminal text The Racial Contract. Mills (1997, p. 13) explores the establishment of the racial contract as reliant on a hierarchy of being that affords different value to white and non-white life and cognition, such that the full personhood of the former and degrees of partial personhood afforded to various non-white peoples becomes mapped onto their assumed political capacities. This facilitates the operation of whiteness as ‘an epistemological a priori’, that is, ‘a way of knowing and being that is predicated on superiority, which becomes normalised and forms part of one's taken-for-granted knowledge’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2004, pp. 75–76). In the Australian settler state, Moreton-Robinson (2015, p. 54) further notes the role of white possession in producing the racial contract ‘as a regulatory ideal’, referring to the normative power of this political system. The socio-discursive operation of white possession allows for a subtextual circulation of the terms of the racial contract as part of a shared stock of common knowledge in the Australian polity (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, pp. 113–114). This enables, constrains and disciplines subjects within the polity, implicating white and non-white settlers and Indigenous people in different ways (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 54). Present-day logics of colonial capitalism continue to rely on and reinforce the epistemic hierarchy of the racial contract, albeit with conditional access to this privileged status of knowledge-producer extended to other groups over time.

The construction of an unequal and racially stratified epistemic field has a bearing not only on the development of knowledge but on the cultivation of ignorance in political relations. Mills (1997, p. 18) expands on the power relations inherent in racial contracts underpinning Western liberal democratic states, identifying that these contracts are based upon an ‘epistemology of ignorance’, an epistemic condition which ‘precludes [white] self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities’ experienced by non-white persons. Mills identifies that this ‘epistemology of ignorance’ results in parties to the contract internalising a fiction of race neutrality despite the material existence of a white norm (Mills, 1997, p. 18). This obfuscation is described in terms of a ‘racialized moral psychology’ associated with the racial contract, which results in white people ‘act[ing] in racist ways while thinking themselves as acting morally’ (Mills, 1997, p. 93, emphasis in original). Importantly, Mills’ use of the term ignorance does not mean an innocent lack of awareness, but rather refers to an active structural production of unknowing. Vimalassery et al. (2016), in their writing on ‘colonial unknowing’, describe this epistemic manoeuvre as one that ‘establishes what can count as evidence, proof, or possibility – aims to secure the terms of reason and reasonableness – as much as it works to dissociate and ignore’. The cognitive norms of the racial contract therefore operate to produce specific forms of both knowledge and ignorance, where the creation of knowledge about a society as devoid of racialised power relations is contingent on obscuring the exclusionary nature of its founding contract.

How does this discussion of racial hierarchy and colonial ignorance or unknowing articulate with settler orientations towards contemporary truth-telling by Indigenous people? Writing on the nationalist role of affective purges within the context of Australian reconciliation, Povinelli (2002, p. 162) states: ‘the articulate pain of the other simultaneously allows the liberal subject to feel herself or himself to have been unintentionally causing wrong and to be constantly moving to rectify that wrong.’ Bearing witness to Indigenous people’s testimonies of colonial violence becomes – consciously or not – co-opted into a process of settler catharsis and legitimation of both the settler self and the Australian nation (see also Johnston, 2022). Crucially, however, this is contingent on the disavowal of contemporary culpability, with colonial harms confined to an ‘unfortunate’ past now being actively and definitively transcended. Despite the impossibility of mutual recognition within conditions of persistent colonial domination (Coulthard, 2014, p. 38), liberal recognition and its associated testimonial features are thus increasingly mobilised by settler states in pursuit of reconciliation with Indigenous people.

The critical view of recognition forwarded by Coulthard is usefully considered alongside Tuck and Yang's (2012, p. 10) work on the metaphorisation of ‘decolonisation’, drawing on Mawhinney's (1998) theorising of settler ‘moves to innocence’. Settler appeals to reconciliation in the absence of structural change gestures towards a desire by both the settler state and polity to avoid dealing with the challenging reality of being beneficiaries of Indigenous dispossession and genocide (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 9). Therefore, Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 35) identify reconciliation as primarily being about ‘rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future’. Liberal idealism and the political imaginary of the social contract present the possibility of a perfect, reconciled future that may be achieved without a fundamental break from the present system of domination (Strakosch & Macoun, 2012, p. 55). Reaching towards the fiction of a pain-free transition to a reconciled future requires maintaining a deficit or damage-centred approach towards Indigenous peoples (Fforde et al., 2013), an orientation which produces its own toxic discursive norms furthering the colonial project. Tuck (2009, p. 413), writing about damage-centred frameworks within the realm of academic research, notes that Indigenous truths of ‘pain and loss are documented in order to obtain particular political and material gains’, operating on a theory of change that ‘establishes harm or injury to achieve reparation’. Within Indigenous–settler relations more broadly, this revelatory approach risks reinscribing the abusive party as the adjudicator of these claims. These dynamics and the role of settler desire in shaping public discourse must be taken into consideration when assessing the epistemic labour undertaken by Indigenous people speaking truth about and against colonisation.

The skewed communicative and representational politics of the colonial project results in Indigenous people constantly being called to engage with settler-dominated framings of truth-telling both within and outside of formal mechanisms of redress. Racial violence against Indigenous people, including racist stereotyping in mainstream Australian media and political speech, continues to be a steadfast feature of Australian public life, compelling corrective counter-discourses (Elias et al., 2021, pp. 220–221). This counter-discursive work is encapsulated in Tanganekald, Meintangk and Boandik scholar Irene Watson's (2007, p. 16) assertion that ‘speaking or telling the black “truth” of Australia's colonial history means challenging white supremacist “truths” of history’. Writing over a decade later, Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist and scholar McQuire (2019b) in her essay ‘Black and White Witness’ identifies that Australia's media industry continues to thrive on misrepresenting Indigenous people and obscuring colonial violence. Far from being confined to the discursive arena, these representations are directly connected to and indeed facilitate material processes of land theft, corporeal harm and political injustice against Indigenous people – the Northern Territory Intervention is an exemplar in this regard. ⁵

In the face of myriad untruths, Munanjahli and South Sea Islander scholar Chelsea Watego (2021, p. 41) thus describes Indigenous people as being ‘summoned to speak truth’ in a variety of arenas to challenge harmful representation from a position of authoritative knowing. However, Watego (2021, p. 41), referring to McQuire's aforementioned essay, reflects that:

Despite being armed with our degrees, our titles, our theories, our literary awards and our research grants, we simply could not be believed. Our work was deemed biased, emotive, political, passionate and radical, and despite how moving and articulate the account, the Aboriginal author could never be cast as all-knowing like the ‘white witness’.

Watego (2021, p. 42) identifies the impasse that Indigenous people are forced into when challenging ‘coloniser mythologies’ of Indigenous deficit, where in mainstream public discourse the terms of these conversations are predetermined by the colonial relation. The full expression of Indigenous truths therefore involves a struggle over representation and meaning that demands significant labour from Indigenous people speaking at once against and beyond these mythologies. Given the concerns of both persistent representational violence and normative approaches to truth-telling, a nuanced analysis of the demands that truth-telling places on Indigenous speakers within a context of ongoing colonisation is appropriate.

Epistemic injustice, violence and exploitation

The operation of a colonial politics of recognition in contemporary Australia relies on an unequal pattern of communicative exchange between Indigenous people and settlers informed by a racial hierarchy of knowledge production. To unpack the workings of epistemic power within communicative exchanges, this section turns to the work of feminist philosophy on the concept of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). Feminist moral philosopher Miranda Fricker's (2007, p. 1) theorisation of the concept begins from the premise that ‘there is a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice’, of which she identifies two forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. The former occurs based on prejudiced assessment of a speaker's credibility, while the latter occurs due to a lack of ‘collective interpretive resources’, such that both the speaker and listener are not equipped to identify particular forms of harm (Fricker, 2007, p. 1). Drawing on the argument about racialised un/knowing developed in this article so far, it can be determined that a racially prejudiced form of testimonial injustice underpins status quo communicative exchanges between Indigenous people and settlers in the Australian settler colony. However, as will be discussed below, further theoretical development of Fricker's work on epistemic injustice by philosophers including Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Kristie Dotson and Nora Berenstain engaging explicitly with racial inequality and other forms of power differential provide the opportunity for a more nuanced identification of multiple epistemic injustices at play in this context.

Pohlhaus’ theorisation of wilful hermeneutical ignorance attends to the deliberate disavowal of marginalised knowers’ knowledge-producing capacity. Relevant to analysing unequal communication shaped by ongoing settler colonialism, Pohlhaus (2012, p. 718) writes that ‘in a socially stratified society, some persons are situated in positions that allow their experiences to count more in the development and circulation of epistemic resources’. Because of this, dominantly situated knowers – in this case, settlers, and in particular white settlers – will find themselves operating within a normative field of epistemic resources that happens to be attuned to their experiences of the world, while marginally situated knowers – here, Indigenous people – will be acutely aware both of the necessity of engaging with these resources as a matter of navigating real power differentials while recognising their inadequacy in accounting for marginalised experiences (see also Dotson, 2012, p. 31). Having established the consequences of this distribution of epistemic power, Pohlhaus (2012, p. 716) identifies wilful hermeneutical ignorance operating in ‘instances where marginally situated knowers actively resist epistemic domination through interaction with other resistant knowers, while dominantly situated knowers nonetheless continue to misunderstand and misinterpret the world’. Wilful hermeneutical ignorance is clearly resonant with Mills’ previously discussed epistemology of ignorance under the racial contract, and indeed, Pohlhaus (2012, p. 722) explicitly situates her work on deliberate unknowing within this epistemology. Wilful hermeneutical ignorance as a form of epistemic injustice is embodied in settler Australia's choice to discount Indigenous people as capable of theorising about colonial violence (and how to end it), instead positioning testimony and theory as mutually exclusive (Watego, 2021, p. 88).

Adding further substance to Fricker's theorisation of testimonial injustice is Dotson's work on the systemic curtailment of individual knowers’ epistemic agency, which she characterises as epistemic oppression. Dotson (2014, p. 116) conceptualises epistemic oppression as ‘a persistent and unwarranted infringement on the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources that hinder one's contributions to knowledge production’. Such infringements exclude marginalised individuals or groups from the cohort of credible knowers and knowledge producers, extending beyond mere epistemic exclusion by virtue of their persistence over time. Dotson's work here pinpoints how both socio-political forms of oppression and lack in epistemological frameworks overall impact dominant knowers’ assessments of marginalised knowers’ testimonial credibility, with Fricker's testimonial injustice categorised as a type of epistemic oppression (Dotson, 2014, p. 135, footnote 13). Within the colonial relation between Indigenous people and settlers, this results in the discounting of Indigenous people as sufficiently credible knowers and legitimate knowledge producers within mainstream public discourse. In line with the operation of whiteness as an epistemological a priori, Berenstain et al. (2022, p. 284) thus identify that ‘in worlds terraformed by colonial epistemologies and their corresponding generation of normative practices, the production of epistemic oppression is the default’.

Berenstain extends Dotson's theorisation of epistemic oppression by identifying epistemic exploitation as a particular type of this injustice. Berenstain characterises epistemic exploitation as a form of violence ‘marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor’, upholding structural oppression ‘by centering the needs and desires of dominant groups and exploiting the emotional and cognitive labor of members of marginalized groups’, demanding that the latter provide evidence of their own oppression (Berenstain, 2016, p. 570). Berenstain (2016, p. 570) stresses the insidious nature of this type of epistemic oppression, noting that ‘it masquerades as a necessary and even epistemically virtuous form of intellectual engagement’. Returning to Mills’ writing on white ignorance, Berenstain (2016, p. 586) highlights the role of epistemic exploitation ‘in upholding the active ignorance of the dominantly situated’, even while these knowers may stress the educative necessity of marginally situated knowers in addressing ‘experiences of disadvantage’ (notably distinct from structures of oppression). The evidentiary burden of epistemic exploitation also comes with the associated demand that any such evidence is presented in terms that are politically palatable and emotionally restrained (Berenstain, 2016, p. 577).

Berenstain (2020) has also elaborated on the role of appeals to ‘civility’ in Indigenous–settler communicative exchanges, where liberal settler epistemologies impose a set of requirements governing appropriate political communication (see also Coulthard, 2014, pp. 105–129). These ‘unquestioned norms of open debate’, a style of discourse firmly bounded within a politics of liberal recognition, work to facilitate the epistemic exploitation of Indigenous people (Berenstain, 2020, p. 332). As Bond et al. (2018, p. 422) have identified, given the fact that Indigenous people ‘expose the lie of unoccupied land’, presenting an affront to ‘white sensibilities’, ‘it is the bodies, acts and speech of Blackfullas that must be regulated, curtailed and caged as a means to contain the lie, or at the very least, rationalize the imperative for lying’. The racialised circumscription of appropriate political speech must therefore also be factored in by Indigenous people weighing up whether and how to engage in public discourse about colonial violence, particularly within a discursive environment where such truth-telling is so frequently elicited. Drawing on Berenstain's emphasis on the violence of repeated demands for epistemic labour by marginalised people, I suggest that the repetitive elicitation of truths about colonial violence experienced by Indigenous people from them, detached from commitments to structural transformation, may also constitute an example of epistemic exploitation.

While not a novel claim per se, naming epistemic exploitation in relation to truth-telling here is intended to reframe, to settlers and settler institutions, the labour that we call on Indigenous people to do through our choice to maintain a position of wilful hermeneutical ignorance. This can take a variety of forms, including repeatedly asking Indigenous people to testify to harms whose causes under settler colonialism are well established. Demands for repetitive testimony from survivors relies on a theory of change that identifies revelation or knowledge accumulation as the source of justice (Tuck, 2018, p. 158). Berenstain (2016, p. 575) identifies that even when privileged interlocutors begin to agitate for structural changes in response to being ‘educated’ about oppression, this still relies on significant labour by marginalised knowers and so still constitutes epistemic exploitation. While the marginalised testifier has once again had to sacrifice ‘time, energy and expertise in service of the privileged’, the privileged then stand to ‘receive social recognition from their newfound knowledge and self-improvement that are rarely conferred on the marginalized persons who produce this knowledge’ (Berenstain, 2016, p. 575). Integrating this insight with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's (2017, p. 46) analysis of settler colonialism as a shapeshifting ‘structure made up of processes’ allows for a nuanced assessment of how this epistemic marginalisation has changed over time.

Simpson's critique of the subtle manoeuvres that uphold status quo colonial power relations returns us to the importance of interrogating not just those instances where the epistemic agency of Indigenous people is explicitly undermined, but also more subtle forms of epistemic violence, particularly those presented with a progressive or genuinely dialogic veneer. Here, it is useful to bring Coulthard's colonial politics of recognition into conversation with Pohlhaus’ (2020, p. 245) exploration of a phenomenon she refers to as ‘vertical attention’ in contexts of epistemic oppression. Engaging with Dotson's (2012, 2014) writing on epistemic exclusions, Pohlhaus (2020) critically appraises the harmful potential of epistemic inclusions. Pohlhaus argues that ‘the normative force of epistemic systems in conjunction with targeted exclusions can produce inclusions within epistemic systems that are exploitative, leading to infringements on epistemic autonomy and exhausting of epistemic agency’ (Pohlhaus, 2020, p. 241). The concern here is that ‘vertical attention maintains a dynamic in which those who are oppressed devote their epistemic energy toward those who are oppressors’ (Pohlhaus, 2020, p. 245). Insofar as both liberal recognition and vertical attention orient oppressed persons towards the needs or desires of privileged persons, they depend on a structure of validation that can serve to reinforce status quo unequal power relations. These concepts also overlap in their operation through an inclusionary mechanism that purports to facilitate change in favour of the marginalised through greater participation in unequal communicative exchanges, such as via interventions in structurally biased public discourse.

Resisting epistemic exploitation

A central feature of public discourse around 26 January is the role of truth claims as they correspond to relationships between Indigenous people and both the settler state and broader settler polity. Luke Pearson, Gamilaroi man and CEO and founder of independent media site IndigenousX, reflected on this issue in a 2020 opinion piece, writing:

Invasion Day, for me, reflects an honest truth that needs to be expressed. It speaks to the power of protest. It speaks of a history that has never been reconciled, of justice denied. (Pearson, 2020)

This statement envisions a particular understanding both of what truth is and what truth-telling can do. The ‘honest truth’ of colonial violence, told through protest, presents an opportunity – if received in good faith – for both collective Indigenous testimony and mutual witnessing, and for a reorientation of settler commitments towards changing the colonial relation. Pearson's framing of truth in the above quote exemplifies an ongoing commitment to honouring the legacy of the 1938 Day of Mourning protest in contemporary Indigenous activism against colonial denialism. However, the connection that Pearson draws between truth-telling, protest and justice in this statement remains a marginalised approach within broader public discourse in Australia around 26 January, even with an increasing use of ‘truth’ by settlers as well as Indigenous people in reference to the date. While not necessarily representative of all Indigenous people’s perspectives on Indigenous–settler relations, this statement also includes an implicit acknowledgement of the suppression of counter-narratives of both Australia's historical and current relationship to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The burden of expectation on Indigenous people around 26 January is described by Wonnarua and Kunja woman and consultant Shiralee Lawson in a 2020 article for IndigenousX published in the lead-up to Invasion Day. Lawson wrote:

I thought about writing upbeat, optimistic, fluffy buzzwords about ‘reconciliation’ but I am tired. I am tired of being expected to play nice and fall in line just to be given an inch. We are expected to continuously extend the olive branch and to be honest, our arms are tired. I strongly believe that we need to dismantle the current oppressive system, aka the government, and start again. (Lawson, 2020)

Here, Lawson identifies the exhaustion associated with epistemic labour demanded of Indigenous people in not just expressing truths about colonisation, but in doing this in a way that is sensitive to ‘white sensibilities’ (Bond et al., 2018). By being expected to ‘continuously extend the olive branch’, she also gestures towards the emotional labour involved in responding to settler expectations of civility and generosity from Indigenous people. Lawson describes how her own self-expression is inflected by an awareness of the normative expectations of settlers regarding discussions of colonialism, and how frustrating it is to be ‘expected to play nice and fall in line just to be given an inch’. These expectations are oriented towards reconciliation, something which Lawson positions as distinct from dismantling the structures perpetrating oppression against Indigenous people.

Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, a Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul woman and human rights advocate, lawyer and writer, also presented a critique of settlers’ consumption of Indigenous trauma around colonial anniversaries including 26 January during a panel discussion for NITV's ‘The Point’ programme in early 2020. She stated:

Why is the onus always on First Nations people to address what we’re going through and our pain and our sorrow? When are the conversations and the panels going to be white Australia saying this is what we’re going to do to give back what we’ve benefited off? (Jenkins, 2020)

Turnbull-Roberts makes several key assertions here pertinent to the present analysis of truth-telling as an epistemic strategy of resisting settler colonialism. By stating that it is white Australia who should be telling the truth, Turnbull-Roberts, like Lawson, questions the extraction of emotional and epistemic labour from Indigenous people, shifting the focus to settler avoidance of the question of redress or redistribution and identifying the circuitous character of a colonial politics of recognition. She calls into question the value – especially given the trauma of re-telling – of repeating the truth of colonial violence in the face of a public and state that is fundamentally uninterested in transformation (see Tuck, 2009). Turnbull-Roberts instead places the responsibility for truth-telling back onto settlers, requiring participatory engagement instead of risking further harm to Indigenous people. This critique is crucially action-oriented: truth is not defined as a good in itself, but as part of creating the conditions of possibility for structural change, which must begin with a shift in who must bear the burden of responsibility to be truthful.

The requirement for Indigenous people to negotiate energy expenditure within an exploitative pattern of communication was also evaluated by several Indigenous commentators who regularly contribute to public discussion in the lead-up to 26 January 2020. During this period, Birpai journalist Jack Latimore spoke with Arrernte feminist, unionist and writer Celeste Liddle about the labour demanded of Indigenous people to comment on the national day. This discussion was broadcast both in the 24 January debut episode of NITV's ‘Take it Blak’ podcast, then hosted by Latimore and Wiradjuri journalist Rae Johnston, and later documented in a 25 January opinion piece by Latimore in NITV titled ‘The January 26 culture industry demands a toll from Blak bodies’. During the preamble of the podcast episode, Johnston and Latimore discussed the work expected of Indigenous people by settler media platforms in the lead-up to 26 January, noting that even when requests for commentary are made with good intention, they still constitute a draining and potentially harmful form of labour. Johnston remarks:

And for them, they're just doing the right thing. They're looking and they're seeing, hey, Jan 26, we should have an Indigenous perspective on this. Let's bring on an Indigenous writer. We'll give ’em four days’ notice and you know, make them put everything out there and then deal with the backlash on social media as well. (Latimore & Johnston, 2020)

Here, Johnston touches on an additional consideration for Indigenous people engaged in the epistemic labour of truth-telling around 26 January. Not only is the repetitive nature of describing colonial violence retraumatising, but this harm is compounded by the risk that public commentary poses to Indigenous people through exposure to reactionary conservative backlash. Despite such commentary being reliably treated as inflammatory by right-wing media pundits and their broadcast and online audiences, the call for Indigenous people to speak truth by centrist and even progressive media outlets is identified by Johnston as frequently devoid of an associated duty of care towards commentators (see Elias et al., 2021, pp. 220–221; Faruqi & Quinn, 2023). Johnston also gestures towards the multiple forms of settler entitlement inherent in last-minute media requests. This issue is revisited during Liddle and Latimore's conversation later in the episode, with Liddle noting:

If you take that emotional toll out of it for a second … the sheer ask on time of any Aboriginal commentator, and indeed, key activist, is just extraordinary. And that time is mainly, apart from a couple of written pieces, is mainly expected to be freely given. So you're expected to freely give your knowledge and your experience to white organizations over and over again, without any form of compensation and that, um, you're expected to drop everything to do it. (Latimore & Johnston, 2020)

In the written piece, Latimore's reflections on the conversation with Liddle touch on the complexities of engaging with media requests, particularly when such space has been hard-fought for by Indigenous people. Latimore (2020) reflects that ‘the function of our hot-takes can feel like we've been press-ganged into the provision of false balance, co-opted to confer a semblance of self-awareness to the overall celebratory spectacle’. This quote reveals another element of the frequently circular nature of epistemic exploitation around 26 January. Rather than being positioned as a legitimate and authoritative contribution to political discourse, Latimore indicates that Indigenous people’s critiques of colonial violence and nationalist mythology are reduced to a ‘hot-take’, included as part of a diversity of opinions within an open debate about 26 January (see Berenstain, 2020). This framing draws a false equivalence between identifying and disrupting colonial unknowing on the one hand and perpetrating it through triumphalist or conciliatory narratives on the other, obscuring the real power differential between Indigenous people and settlers. Despite these problems, however, Latimore ends the piece with an affirmation of the importance of truth-telling that occurs beyond the boundaries of vertical attention. He writes:

Yet, here we are in 2020, with Liddle and myself, and scores of other Blak commentators and Aboriginal Rights activists, advocates and allies, back on the streets, the airwaves, the bandwidths and in the columns, participating and engaging with the spectacle. Which either marks us as suckers for punishment or committed proponents for a more considerate, considered and inclusive nation. (Latimore, 2020)

This commitment to engage in epistemic labour in pursuit of relational transformation in spite of it all speaks to a vision of change that extends beyond the style of political communication demanded by liberal recognition. While speaking into the same arena of public discourse, this approach is perhaps closer to what McQuire (2021) refers to as Black witnessing in Indigenous journalism, which functions ‘to refocus the lens on a settler colony that still uses violence to enforce a racialised hierarchy’. Rather than being a ‘sucker for punishment’, then, continuing to undertake the work of truth-telling operates here as a refusal to cede discursive space to settler narratives about Indigenous people and Australia's history – and future.

Conclusion

In the context of Australian settler colonialism, epistemic exploitation can manifest as a settler sense of entitlement, conscious or not, to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ testimonies about colonial violence and trauma. This entitlement throws the decolonial potential of broad appeals to truth-telling into question – particularly when touted as such by settler actors and institutions – indicating the importance of not just attending to whether the truths of colonisation can be told, but how they are received by settler interlocutors. White possession, epistemic exploitation and a racialised deficit orientation towards Indigenous people converge to produce a profoundly unsafe environment for Indigenous speakers to engage in truth-telling and raises questions about the transformative possibilities of the ad nauseam documenting of interpersonal and systemic racism. Indeed, despite a plethora of Royal Commissions and other myriad forms of public testimony by Indigenous people about their experiences of colonial violence, there has been little mainstream political appetite in Australia to implement the changes required to stop this violence from happening (see, for example, Gregoire, 2023).

Writing about the annual ‘Closing the Gap’ reports published by the Australian government, Watego (2021, p. 121) points out that rather than a mere policy failure, these reports are a ‘coloniser commemoration, disguised as commiseration, of their system working as it should’. Settler Australia, it seems, has an endless appetite for testimony, but little stomach for change. Repetitive extraction and documentation thus ‘functions to produce a fiction of racial inferiority, rather than tell the truth of the mechanisms that produce racial inequality’ (Watego, 2021, p. 121). Within a discursive environment profoundly shaped by colonial recognition, settler responses to Indigenous people's truth-telling have increasingly skewed towards passive absorption rather than informed, anti-colonial action. This has occurred alongside a persistent current of conservative denialism that expressly refutes any racism or wrongdoing by both past and present colonisers (McQuire, 2019a). Both types of response reinscribe the Indigenous speaker as the primary site of intervention, and it is therefore only the settler audience that can achieve a sense of catharsis having consumed these stories of violence. Relatedly, the refusal by some Indigenous people to participate in communicative processes characterised by vertical attention, to express their truths otherwise, are reconfigured under a politics of recognition as deviant (see Ahmed, 2021). This is especially so when the truths of colonial violence are expressed in the form of protest and espouse a theory of change that explicitly relies on a shift in the colonial power relation (see Bond et al., 2018).

Indigenous commentators’ critical appraisal of the limits of truth-telling around 26 January included in this article indicate that settlers must interrogate the purpose of repeatedly eliciting Indigenous testimonies as opposed to relinquishing power in setting the agenda of truth-telling and reception (de Souza & Dreher, 2021, pp. 41–42). In Pohlhaus’ (2020, pp. 242–243) estimation, ‘to call upon another is to direct them, but to listen is to be directed. That dominantly situated knowers may be in the habit of the former but not the latter speaks to habituated forms of epistemic domination.’ The critiques discussed above draw attention to the burden on Indigenous people of being directed by settler expectations of a straightforward journey towards a preconceived and reconciled future, one that aims to bridge the chasm of colonial injustice without attending to the requirement of a meaningful redistribution of power. These expectations constitute just one of the many ongoing forms of epistemic oppression that Indigenous people are subjected to and continue to refuse under Australia's racial contract. Birch (2021) summarises the issue as follows: ‘the time for white Australia gaining comfort from the trauma and grief of Aboriginal people must end. Truth without justice is not only evidence of failure. It is yet another act of colonial violence.’