In this paper we examine the epistemic treatment of Indigenous peoples by the Inter-American Court and Commission on Human Rights, two institutions that have sought to affirm the rights of Indigenous peoples in the wake of colonialism and industrial encroachment onto Indigenous land. The Court and Commission have sought to do this in two ways. First, they have insisted on a right to consultation, according to which any Indigenous peoples who would be affected by industrial activity must be given a say in the decision-making process. Second, they have given an expansive interpretation of the right to property in order to encompass Indigenous relations to land. We argue that although the right to consultation and the expanded right to property have led to a number of landmark legal victories for Indigenous peoples, they nonetheless have an epistemic dark side in that they foster forms of epistemic injustice. What happens in the course of consultation often involves a kind of epistemic objectification of Indigenous testimony that amounts to radical testimonial injustice. And the requirement that Indigenous peoples frame their relation to land in the language of 'property' stifles their ability to articulate that relation, thus amounting to a hermeneutical injustice.
It is common in popular depictions to portray the attitude of trusting and the norms associated with rationality as standing in some kind of tension. In this article, we suggest a way of capturing this tension, and explore some recent attempts at resolving it.
Over the past few decades, Indigenous communities have successfully campaigned for greater inclusion in decision-making processes that directly affect their lands and livelihoods. As a result, two important participatory rights for Indigenous peoples have now been widely recognized: the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Although these participatory rights are meant to empower the speech of these communities-to give them a proper say in the decisions that most affect them-we argue that the way these rights have been implemented and interpreted sometimes has the opposite effect, of denying them a say or 'silencing' them. In support of this conclusion we draw on feminist speech act theory to identify practices of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary group silencing that arise in the context of consultation with Indigenous communities.
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