Epistemic Injustice and Indigenous Peoples in the Inter-American Human Rights System

Abstract

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.

Doing epistemic justice in sustainable development: Applying the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice to the real world

“…Testimonial injustice comprises attributing too little (or too much) credibility to a testimony due to identity prejudice on the hearer's part, often related to intersectional racial, class and gender identity, such as racial disparity in access to financial services (de Bruin, 2019) or disbelief of victims of sexual assault and particularly female victims (Jackson, 2018;Solnit, 2017). To illustrate identity prejudice, Fricker' ( 2007 (Townsend & Townsend, 2021) has been identified by Fricker as 'silencing' where the speaker has so little credibility that she might not have even spoken. Anderson (2012) makes a distinction between transactional testimonial injustice when epistemic injustice is due to the identity prejudice of an identifiable agent and structural testimonial injustice where 'institutions are set up to exclude people without anyone having to decide to do so' (p. 166).…”

“…Grabelsky, in particular, relates this type of epistemic injustice to white supremacy and notes that 'women of color are often expected to take on the responsibility of bridging the interpretive gap-due to either language barriers or divergent life experiences (or both)-between their white interlocutors and themselves' (Grabelsky, 2016, p. 2). Townsend and Townsend (2021) distinguish between cognitive and communicative forms of hermeneutical injustice. They argue that indigenous peoples in their study do not have a cognitive form of hermaneutical injustice because they have highly developed customs, systems of knowledge, rituals and mythologies for understanding their connection to their physical environment.…”

“…Building on a wide range of recent studies on epistemic injustice in philosophy (Bratu & Haenel, 2021;Casuso, 2021;Catala, 2022;Hänel, 2020;Smith & Archer, 2020), this article aims to complement new studies which go beyond philosophical study of epistemic injustice to consider its impact in the real world of sustainable development (Boogaard, 2021;Elías, 2020;Koch, 2020;Kosko et al, 2022;Townsend & Townsend, 2021), education (Khoo et al, 2020), healthcare (Heggen & Berg, 2021) and information sciences (Patin et al, 2020(Patin et al, , 2021. Although this focus on epistemic injustice has great value because it increases our understanding of this complex phenomenon, so far it has largely been divorced from action to address these injustices.…”

Settler Colonialism, Decolonization, and Climate Change

“…One part of recognizing Indigenous ontologies and frameworks might include accepting collective rights to land as well as cultural and identity-related grounds for land rights as, for example, the Inter-American Court and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have started to do. 38 Yet, as Townsend and Townsend point out, creating equality between these differing ontologies must go beyond this and should include a reconceptualization of land rights along relational theories of land. 39 They describe the neglect of Indigenous views in courts as an epistemic injustice which deserves correction in its own right.…”

¿Existen injusticias hermenéuticas en el derecho?

“…El potencial crítico del concepto de injusticia testimonial para el análisis de las transacciones epistémicas que ocurren en el contexto judicial se puede ver no solo en los ejemplos trabajados originalmente por Miranda Fricker (2007), 4 sino también en otros estudios que enfocan el mundo jurídico. El tema fue objeto de consideración por Hock Lai Ho (2012) con respecto a la filosofía del derecho probatorio, pero podemos destacar estudios más recientes: Fyfe (2018) se vuelve al contexto del derecho criminal internacional; Townsend & Townsend (2021) se dedican a discutir el tema de los daños epistémicos (testimoniales y hermenéuticos) que sufren los indígenas en el contexto del sistema interamericano de derechos humanos; Jennifer Lackey (2021Lackey ( , 2022Lackey ( y 2023, José Medina (2021) y Janaina Matida (2020) discuten la injusticia testimonial por exceso de credibilidad en los casos de confesiones falsas y reconocimiento 3 Aquí se nota que Fricker adopta una perspectiva evidencialista con respecto a las razones que justifican creer en el testimonio de alguien. Para una crítica, véase Jennifer Lackey (2018).…”