Can you even trust the settlers? Robbie Dillon, Responsibilities of Identity: Epistemic Trustworthiness as Resistance to Settler Colonial Domination, MA dissertation, Concordia University, 2021 | settler colonial studies blog

Can you even trust the settlers? Robbie Dillon, Responsibilities of Identity: Epistemic Trustworthiness as Resistance to Settler Colonial Domination, MA dissertation, Concordia University, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: 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.’

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