Responsibilities of Identity: Epistemic Trustworthiness as Resistance to Settler Colonial Domination

• Main Author: Dillon, Robbie
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Turtle Island; First Nations; inuit
• Online Access: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/988416/; https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/988416/1/Dillon_MA_S2021.pdf

I argue that unsatisfying relations of political recognition between the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Turtle Island, and the Canadian state are a product of, and thereby a means of reinforcing and reproducing, hermeneutical domination, a distinct form of epistemic injustice. Remedies for hermeneutical domination require the granting of epistemic trust, which I claim is untenable absent subordinated parties’ autonomous assumption of responsibilities that establish their epistemic trustworthiness. Given the logics of elimination that are a defining feature of settler colonial projects, I claim that my approach provides a more effective defense of Indigenous alterities than proposals based on Fanon-inspired notions of ‘turning away.’