Return, Reconcile, Renew - beyond Epistemic Decolonisation?
In a recent article, Timothy Neale and Emma Kowal persuasively suggest that current decolonisation initiatives in post-settler societies can usefully be understood as situated within a spectrum between what they describe as ‘epistemic’ and ‘reparative’ attributes and qualities in how they go about the business of coming to terms with the still pervasive and still to be overcome psychic and material legacies of settler colonialism. By ‘epistemic’, Neale and Kowal have in mind those initiatives that seek to identify the abiding impact of Western ways of knowing in sustaining colonial ambitions, Indigenous dispossession and oppression. Racial science during the long nineteenth century, for example, stands among the more obvious examples of the pernicious impact that Western epistemic practices have had in rendering true or false statements about Indigenous peoples, their life-ways and culture. And in this regard, much of my own historical work to date could be described as ‘epistemic’ in that I have sought to expose the obvious, and also the more subtle, ways in which, historically, Western epistemes have served to distinguish what was from what was not accepted as scientific truths about Indigenous peoples, their bodies and their minds. Moreover, a cornerstone of the provenance research I have undertaken over the years, at the request of Indigenous knowledge custodians engaged in securing the return of their Ancestors from museums and other scientific institutions, has been recognition of the ontological and epistemological equivalences of Indigenous and Western knowledges.
In recent times, what Neale and Kowal characterise as ‘epistemic’ initiatives have been criticised by (for the most part) Indigenous scholars for laying bare the intellectual complicity of Western ways of knowing in Indigenous dispossession and subjugation on the margins of settler societies, but then doing little or nothing to proactively address the loss of ancestral lands and subsequent experiences of social and economic inequalities. ‘Put bluntly’, Neale and Kowal write, ‘by what magical means does becoming literate in Amerindian cosmologies and historicities improve the lives of Amerindian peoples?
It is a good question, prompting reflection on how well current praxis in disciplines such as history and heritage studies allows for the translation of the outcomes of analysis into activism and advocacy in support of Indigenous political aspirations within post-settler societies. Some barriers are obvious. In the Australian context, for example, federal government imposition of national criteria for judging the excellence of research has persuaded many scholars to focus on communicating the outcomes of their research by conventional print-based and pay-walled scholarly media. The potential of freely accessible digital modes of communication, and modestly priced books written so to spark public awareness of, and (hopefully) political action to address, the ongoing legacies of dispossession and exploitation, is slowly being realised. However, in the cold neo-liberal climate of Australian academia, books and articles published by international scholarly publishers and professional societies continue to be ‘gold-standards’ by which research excellence is judged and professional advancement secured.
There are, however, more complex matters to address. Tensions can arise when seeking to reconcile differently enculturated ways of knowing the past that may give rise to incommensurable explanations of past behaviours, probable intentions and their apparent consequences. The long history of Western scientific interest in the remains of Indigenous Ancestors is a case in point. Here, tensions can occur between the outcomes of conventional Western academic research and Indigenous histories of the abduction and spiritual torture of their Ancestors. At the core of contemporary Western historiography is the presumption that the myriad contingencies in play in past times rule out our judging its actors by present-day ethical standards. Whereas from the perspective of Indigenous knowledge custodians and researchers, there may be little or no hesitancy in judging the actions of scientists active century or more and those who assisted them in taking Ancestors from country. The risk here is that projecting contemporary ethical concerns onto the past risks failing to appreciate the true complexity and longevity of the consequences of science’s implication in settler colonialism. But equally the risk is perpetuating inequalities originating in the privileged status according Western thinking about the nature of reality and its investigation. The danger is not the perpetuation of colonialist perceptions of Indigenous sciences as myth. Postcolonial histories of science since the 1980s have exploded that erroneous and subtly pernicious categorisation of Indigenous ontological and knowledge-making traditions. The danger, drawn to our attention by Neale and Kowal, is, as Marie Louise Pratt, David Scott and others have argued, the relatively little attention given within postcolonial scholarship to the hybridity of Indigenous worlds.
To be continued
Notes:
On epistemic and reparative decolonization, History and Theory 59, no. 3 (September 2020), 403-412
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992)
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6, 209.
