1. IntroductionFootnote 1
What epistemic response is needed to the destruction of knowledge systems under colonisation? I am concerned by a recent proposal: we ought to see the problem through the lens of epistemic reparations (Mitova Reference Mitova2025). Ensuring those affected by genocide, land dispossession, and slavery have their voices heard is essential in the much-needed transition to justice. Thus, I accept that epistemic duties fall on dominant knowers (Almassi Reference Almassi2018; Lackey Reference Lackey2022, Reference Lackey, Lackey and McGlynn2025; Altanian Reference Altanian2023). However, I have doubts that epistemic repair is possible. There isn’t a plausible interpretation of the concept that can satisfy the demands of decolonisation (Tuck & Yang Reference Tuck and Yang2012).
To make the case, I draw on the United Nations’ (Reference Nations2025) framework for reparations, which distinguishes between four forms:
Restitution, which should restore the victim to their original situation before the violation occurred, e.g., restoration of liberty, reinstatement of employment, return of property, return to one’s place of residence.
Compensation, which should be provided for any economically assessable damage, loss of earnings, loss of property, loss of economic opportunities, or moral damages.
Rehabilitation, which should include medical and psychological care and legal and social services.
Satisfaction, which should include the cessation of continuing violations, truth-seeking, the search for the disappeared person or their remains, recovery, reburial of remains, public apologies, judicial and administrative sanctions, memorials, and commemorations.
Each form is backward-looking: it presupposes an identifiable harm, a responsible party, and an obligation to repair. Crucially, the United Nations holds that reparations must satisfy a proportionality requirement: ‘reparation should be proportional to the gravity of the violation and the harm suffered’ (United Nations Reference Nations2025). If reparations are to do decolonial work, then decolonisation must set the standards of proportionality. I argue that there is a deep incompatibility between the logic of repair and the normative standards of decolonisation. Any form of reparation fails to meet the proportionality requirement.
My argument is both conceptual and normative. I interrogate the reparative framework itself, drawing on international law and applying its categories to the epistemic domain. And I assess whether epistemic reparations are capable of meeting the demands of decolonial justice. My conclusion is that they are not. Neither restitution, compensation, nor satisfaction can adequately redress the devastation of colonisation. If this is right, we must move beyond the logic of repair to imagine new forms of decolonial justice in a post-colonial world.
2. Background
A central oversight in the literature on epistemic reparations is the lack of a precise definition of reparation itself. Leading accounts frequently sidestep the question of what reparations entail and the normative standards they presuppose. Mitova (Reference Mitova2025), for example, affirms the importance of epistemic reparations for decolonial projects but uncritically adopts Lackey’s (Reference Lackey2022) definition. Lackey herself relies heavily on a single account, offered by Walker (Reference Walker2010), and does little to engage the broader terrain in which reparations have been theorised. Although Lackey situates her analysis within the United Nations’ framework of ‘the right to know’, she overlooks the more recent and expansive reparations principles developed by the United Nations (Reference Nations2025).
More fundamentally, neither Lackey nor Mitova adequately confronts the core question: What does it mean for an action to count as repair? We mostly receive gesturing at ideas like ‘making up’ for wrongdoing (Lackey 2020, p. 63), but this stops short of clarifying the normative structure that underwrites reparative claims. If reparations involve more than simply doing something beneficial for victims, we need a theory of how particular actions succeed or fail in repairing injustice. Not every form of recognition or redistribution will qualify. A coherent theory must therefore spell out how the good offered meets the standard of repair relative to a specific wrong. Strangely, very little work attempts this. Yet, if epistemic reparations are to be taken seriously as a continuation of the reparative justice tradition, and especially if they are to play a role in decolonial efforts, we need to more closely examine the question: What exactly counts as repair? And is epistemic repair useful for decolonial work? These are the questions I take up.
Before continuing, I will be upfront about how I understand decolonisation. Following Tuck and Yang’s (Reference Tuck and Yang2012) canonical paper, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, I take decolonisation to name a specific and uncompromising political demand: the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.Footnote 2 It is not a synonym for social justice, reconciliation, inclusion, or diversity. Rather, decolonisation is fundamentally a project of undoing the structures and logics of settler colonialism, not reforming them from within. As Tuck and Yang argue, ‘the metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence,” that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity and rescue settler futurity’ (Reference Tuck and Yang2012, p. 3).Footnote 3
Decolonisation: the undoing of settler colonialism through the repatriation of Indigenous land and the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty.
This account can be extended to the epistemic domain. Just as settler colonisation seizes land, it also seizes epistemic authority. It displaces Indigenous knowledges, assimilating them into Western frameworks or erasing them altogether. Efforts that aim merely to incorporate Indigenous knowers into colonial epistemologies, or attempts only to amplify their voices without transforming the structures that silenced them, are not decolonial but reconciliatory. They risk preserving epistemic domination under the guise of justice.
Epistemic Decolonisation: the undoing of epistemic domination through the amelioration of Indigenous epistemic authority and the resurgence of Indigenous epistemologies on their own terms.
As Tuck and Yang (2021, 34) sharply put it, ‘reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy’, not decolonisation. The same applies to the epistemic: projects of inclusion or recognition that leave colonial epistemic authority intact do not constitute epistemic decolonisation.
This reading poses a challenge for the epistemic reparations framework. Because reparations, as typically conceived, operate within the institutions of the settler state, they risk reproducing the very epistemic order they are meant to challenge. Decolonisation, however, demands more than revaluing Indigenous epistemologies within colonial systems; it demands their amelioration on Indigenous terms. To frame epistemic decolonisation as a form of reparation risks mischaracterising its task: it is not repair within an existing order but the re-establishment of epistemic self-determination beyond it. Anything less risks co-opting the language of decolonisation while leaving its material and epistemic conditions intact.
3. Material reparations
In international law, reparations have been extensively theorised as responses to egregious historical harms, such as genocide, colonisation, and other large-scale human rights violations. At their core, reparations identify what is owed to victims (or their descendants) in the aftermath of injustice. According to Oxford Public International Law (2015), reparations are ‘recompense given to one who has suffered legal injury at the hands of another; to make amends, provide restitution, or give satisfaction or compensation for a wrong afflicted’. This legal framework has shaped much existing theory. Crucially, however, the legal literature also offers a precise taxonomy. The United Nations (2025) identifies four forms:
Restitution, which should restore the victim to their original situation before the violation occurred, e.g., restoration of liberty, reinstatement of employment, return of property, and return to one’s place of residence.
Compensation, which should be provided for any economically assessable damage, loss of earnings, loss of property, loss of economic opportunities, and moral damages.
Rehabilitation, which should include medical and psychological care and legal and social services.
Satisfaction, which should include the cessation of continuing violations, truth-seeking, the search for the disappeared person or their remains, recovery, reburial of remains, public apologies, judicial and administrative sanctions, memorials, and commemorations.
The taxonomy captures how reparations have been cast within the literature. Accordingly, it is useful for the remainder of the paper. I will take time to spell out the details of each demand when I discuss them in turn below. For now, I want to draw out general features. Reparations involve the attribution of responsibility, a counterfactual evaluation of harm, the determination of adequate redress, and its implementation. Restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, and satisfaction are forms that such redressal can take. Note, the epistemic harms at issue render rehabilitation irrelevant, so I won’t discuss it further.
For the purposes of this paper, it is important to emphasise that not any form of reparation suffices for justice.Footnote 4 As the United Nations makes explicit, reparation is not a free-floating moral gesture but a constrained response governed by the principle of proportionality. According to its Basic Guidelines (United Nations 2025; my emphasis):
Adequate, effective, and prompt reparation is intended to promote justice by redressing gross violations of international human rights law or serious violations of international humanitarian law. Reparation should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.
Further, Section IX (18) affirms that victims of gross violations ‘should, as appropriate and proportional to the gravity of the violation and circumstances of each case, be provided with full and effective reparation’. This language makes clear that proportionality is a normative constraint: reparation must be scaled to both the seriousness of the violation and the nature of the harm.
Proportionality: reparation is proportional when its form and scale correspond to the gravity and the harm of the structural conditions that produced it.
Proportionality applies equally to epistemic reparations, though, as far as I can tell, it is rarely addressed in philosophical treatments. If epistemic reparation is to be more than symbolic inclusion or generic recognition, it must satisfy the proportionality requirement: it must be commensurate with the nature and extent of the epistemic harm and address the social, political, or historical conditions that enabled it.
Epistemic Proportionality: Epistemic reparations are proportional when they restore the epistemic standing of those wronged and directly address the structures that sustained the harm.
Determining how to interpret proportionality is not straightforward. However, for present purposes, some clarity can be achieved. If reparations are understood, as Mitova (2023) suggests, as a tool for advancing the aims of decolonisation, then proportionality must be assessed according to decolonial standards. On such standards, proportionality must actively disrupt the structures that produced the harm, including the epistemic, political, and territorial formations of the settler state. Redress that remains confined within colonial frameworks or affirms the authority of colonial institutions cannot satisfy the proportionality requirement as determined by decolonial aims. Reparations that fail to transform the conditions that made the harm possible are, by decolonial lights, disproportionate.
I will argue that no form of epistemic reparation can satisfy proportionality. Satisfaction, when it takes the form of recognition within a colonial epistemology, subsumes Indigenous knowers into the very system that decolonisation seeks to dismantle. Restitution and compensation are simply unavailable: a pre-colonial world cannot be restored, and nothing of equivalent value can be offered for what has been epistemically lost.
The literature on epistemic reparations is intended as an extension of material reparations. This is clear in the way Lackey (Reference Lackey2022) and Almassi (Reference Almassi2018) draw on Walker (Reference Walker2010). Accordingly, it is safe to assume that material reparations will have epistemic analogues. My aim is to identify what these analogues are and to assess whether they can meaningfully advance the aims of decolonisation. Before turning to this, I begin with material reparations. I do so for two reasons. First, existing work on epistemic reparations rarely engages with the legal and philosophical literature on material reparations, even though such engagement is crucial for understanding the conceptual and normative limits that epistemic reparations inherit. Second, I will argue that Mitova’s proposed model of epistemic reparation is best interpreted as a form of restitution or compensation. To make this claim precise, I must clarify what these categories involve.
3.1. Restitution
Restitution is one form of reparation:
Restitution: a form of reparation that demands the restoration of a victim to the status or condition they were in prior to an injustice by returning lost rights, property, opportunities, or standing.
When a person has wronged another, and a situation needs repair, that person can take action to restore the situation in a way that brings about a state of affairs similar to before the occurrence of a wrong. For example, a court might require an offender who has stolen money to repay the amount, restoring the victim’s financial position. Assessments of proportionality are counterfactual: they ask what the victim’s condition would have been absent the wrongdoing and what measure can approximate that state.
In the literature on material reparations, the discussion has focused on the repair needed to achieve justice for victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (e.g., Boxhill Reference Boxhill1972; Kershnar Reference Kershnar1999; Fullinwider 2000, Reference Fullinwider, Salzberger and Tuck2004; Bittker [1972] Reference Bittker2003; Corlett Reference Corlett2010; Táíwò Reference Táíwò2022). Restitution views have been offered. Darity and Mullen (Reference Darity and Mullen2020, p. 3; my emphasis) suggest that victims of slavery should be restored to ‘a more equitable position commensurate with the status they would have attained in the absence of the injustice(s)’.Footnote 5 Proportionality is key. The United Nations (2025) makes this clear:
Restitution should, whenever possible, restore the victim to the original situation before the gross violations of international human rights law…
Of course, the United Nations makes a concession: restoration may not always be possible. Nevertheless, proportionality demands that whatever is offered must be appropriate relative to the severity of the wrong.
Beyond harm repair, some views emphasise relationship repair. A relationship-repair view sees ‘the task of reparations to be fixing damaged relationships: typically between the aggrieved party (and/or those who inherit their identity) and the aggrieving party (and/or those who inherit that identity)’ (Táíwò Reference Táíwò2022, p. 133). One kind of relationship repair is debt repayment. Repaying a debt ‘alters the moral relationship between the debtors and those to whom the debt is owed and may even restore the possibility of peaceful and friendly relations’ (2022, p. 133; see also Boxhill Reference Boxhill1972, Reference Boxhill2003; Lu Reference Lu2015; Corlett Reference Corlett2003; Fullinwider Reference Fullinwider, Salzberger and Tuck2004). Restitution is achieved when a debt is settled or a relationship is restored.
3.2. Compensation
Reparations can also take the form of compensation:
Compensation: a form of reparation that demands harms be addressed by providing a substantive good whose value corresponds to the severity and nature of the loss suffered.
Where restitution is not possible or chosen against as a solution, reparative justice may instead involve giving the victim something of equivalent value. The principle is straightforward: compensation must match the value of what was lost. Suppose someone crashes into another’s car, rendering it a write-off. Offering the victim enough money to buy an electric scooter would fail to repair the harm insofar as the value of the redress falls short of the loss. For a wrong to be redressed qua reparation, what is given must be commensurate with what was taken. This requirement is codified in international law. As the United Nations (2025) puts it:
Compensation should be provided for any economically assessable damage, as appropriate and proportional to the gravity of the violation and circumstances of each case…
Proportionality functions as a normative constraint on compensation. For compensation to be justice-promoting, it must be proportionate to the severity of the harm. If what is given falls short, then the reparation fails. Disproportionate compensation undermines the very purpose of reparation by mischaracterising the harm and failing to recognise its moral weight.
What follows from this discussion is that compensation implies commensurability: a measure of something’s value by two or more permissible standards. The value of a car, for example, can be measured by reference to its monetary worth or to another car of the same quality. And compensation is sufficient for justice when what is given as compensation is equivalent in value to what has been lost. Without such commensurability, the requirement of proportionality cannot be meaningfully applied. For instance, assessing how much compensation would be proportionate for victims of the transatlantic slave trade depends on whether there exists a meaningful equivalence between enslaved labour and monetary value.
Again, compensation views have been offered. Returning to Darity and Mullen (2020, p. 3; my emphasis), the descendants of slavery can be moved to a ‘position commensurate with the status they would have attained in the absence of the injustice(s)’, which would mean the elimination of ‘racial disparities in wealth, income, education, sentencing, and incarceration’. Instead of reading this as restoring the status of those who have inherited the effects of slavery, we can interpret the goal as compensation. For all the injustices of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, past and present, there is a need to compensate the victims or their descendants for labour, contributions to building an economy, hardships, and suffering. This is called ‘The Inheritance Argument’. Those who have suffered injustice in the past are owed reparations for their work and injuries, where the debtors are slaveholders and the state, and such entitlements are passed on by familial inheritance (see Corlett Reference Corlett2010; Boxhill & Corlett Reference Boxhill, Corlett, Zalta and Nodelman2024; Locke Reference Locke and Laslett1689). Often, the argument is couched in terms of failure to respect property rights. Such violations can be corrected over generations.
4. Epistemic reparations
I now turn to the epistemic. To begin, consider how epistemic reparations have been articulated thus far. According to Lackey (Reference Lackey2022, 70),
Epistemic reparations are intentionally reparative actions in the form of epistemic goods given to those epistemically wronged by parties who acknowledge these wrongs and whose reparative actions are intended to redress them.
Like material reparation, epistemic reparation is backwards-looking. It is about one party’s acknowledged wronging of another and redressing that past wrong with actions in the present. The relevant question is: What forms of redress count as epistemic repair? Adapting the United Nations’ list, we can make each epistemic:
Restitution, which should restore the victim to their original epistemic situation before the violation occurred.
Compensation, which should be provided for any epistemic damages.
Satisfaction, which should include the cessation of continuing violations, truth-seeking, the search for the disappeared person or their remains, recovery, reburial of remains, public apologies, judicial and administrative sanctions, memorials, and commemorations.
Only restitution and compensation need to be revised. Satisfaction can either be understood as extending to epistemic concerns or is distinctly epistemic already.
For the most part, epistemic reparations, beginning with Lackey, are best interpreted as a form of satisfaction, not restitution or compensation. For Lackey, epistemic reparations are intended as a means of ameliorating epistemic wrongs that have been hidden throughout history, giving rise to a ‘right to know’ (2020, pp. 62–69). A way to frame this is ‘truth-seeking’. But beyond this is ‘truth-telling’, where justice demands that what ought to be told consists of how it ought to be told. Not only should wrongs be said out loud, but they should be expressed as such by the victims themselves. Lackey calls this the right to be known.
Mitova (Reference Mitova2025) attempts to extend Lackey’s insights to the domain of decolonisation, specifically the right to be known. The kind of epistemic redress that Mitova suggests is decolonial epistemic authority reparations. Her goal is to ground an obligation that demands ‘recentering knowledge and restoring epistemic authority’ (2025, 6, my emphasis), particularly in relation to South Africa’s traditional healers.
Interestingly, Mitova’s project is not strictly an extension of Lackey’s proposal. Where Lackey is best interpreted as endorsing satisfaction, Mitova can be read as either motivating restitution or compensation. Exactly which depends on how ‘restoring epistemic authority’ is interpreted. First, if we interpret ‘restore’ in its ordinary sense, namely ‘to return something or someone to an earlier good condition or position’ (Cambridge Dictionary 2025), victims of colonisation should have their positions of epistemic authority restored to a state prior to colonisation. This would be restitution. Second, if ‘restore’ means that victims of colonisation should be elevated to comparable positions of epistemic authority within the existing epistemic context, victims of colonisation must find a home within colonial epistemology. This would be compensation.
Either way, Mitova faces a dilemma. The first horn is that, assuming restitution, epistemic reparations are impossible and therefore not a useful lens for decolonisation. The second horn is that, assuming compensation, elevating victims to positions of authority within a colonial epistemology is against the goals of decolonisation. Neither delivers the conclusion that reparations are decolonial.
The rest of the paper aims to reach this conclusion. In this section, I will explore epistemic restitution and compensation more closely. In the following section, I will show that the project of colonialisation was constitutively epistemic, involving a clash between competing and incompatible knowledge systems. I then make a case for why epistemic restitution and compensation are not available for decolonial work. Finally, I say why satisfaction isn’t up to the task either. Thus, Lackey’s proposal is also not amenable to decolonisation.
4.1. Epistemic restitution
Restitution, in the epistemic sense, is a kind of repair that aims to restore an epistemic situation. The object of restitution is varied, such as reinstating someone’s position as a knower, enquirer, or reasoned believer.
Epistemic Restitution: a form of reparation that demands a wronged party be restored to the epistemic status or standing they held prior to the wrong by reinstating their credibility, authority, or recognition as a knower within a relevant epistemic community.
Altanian (Reference Altanian2023) is the most explicit advocate of this way of thinking. As a reparative correction to epistemic wrongs, restitution demands restoring the epistemic status of victims. Namely, the ‘recognition and re-establishment of victims’ epistemic standing or epistemic recognition…’ (2023, p. 1). This involves mass changes to the distribution of credibility within an epistemic community. Part of what this entails is offered by Lackey: public apologies, memorialisation, and education (2022, p. 70; see also the United Nations 2025). Where there has been gross historical injustice that resonates in the present (e.g., colonisation), public apologies, memorialisation, and education function to express acknowledgement of wrongdoing and promulgate knowledge of atrocities, which could then serve as the foundation for others to update beliefs or opinions about their nation’s past. Accordingly, the epistemic status of victims and their relatives would be restored to a state where they are seen as fully-fledged epistemic persons.
It is also plausible to interpret Lackey (Reference Lackey2022) as endorsing epistemic restitution. The right to be known focuses on restoring the epistemic status of victims so that they are seen and respected as valid sources of knowledge, particularly because they have an intimate understanding of the injustices from which they suffer. Importantly, respecting the right to be known comes with a correlative epistemic duty. Restoring the epistemic status of a victim requires discharging the duty not simply to believe according to the evidence but also to ‘collect, or expose ourselves to, evidence that we ought to have’ (2022, p. 78). This is an active demand that we make efforts to seek out, listen to, and be open-minded about testimony concerning injustice.
4.2. Epistemic compensation
In contrast to epistemic restitution, there is epistemic compensation.
Epistemic Compensation: a form of epistemic reparation that demands redress to epistemic harm by providing a valuable good whose value corresponds to the severity and nature of the harm.
Consider an example. Suppose an academic has been accused of plagiarising large portions of their seminal works. The accusation spreads through gossip networks, and she starts being treated differently. Colleagues refuse to talk to her, speaking invitations are rescinded, and her papers are no longer published. Ultimately, the gossip spreads so far that the academic is barred from attending events. She loses her job and is forced into early retirement. Later, it is found that the accusation is false: she never plagiarised.
What kind of reparation would the academic be entitled to? Since she lost her source of income, she deserves material compensation. Roughly, the money she would have earned in the absence of the false accusation. Here we can see that an epistemic wrong, namely a false accusation of plagiarism, can be (somewhat) corrected by financial means. However, this is not enough. Her epistemic status has been unfairly compromised, and she is entitled to a reparation that rectifies that wrong. As such, the academic community issues a formal apology, and her home university restores her position. Further, she is invited to give keynote presentations, and a special issue is organised around her work.
We might interpret the epistemic solutions on offer as restitution. They function, partly, to restore the academic’s position within the epistemic community. Yet, the redressal goes beyond this since a formal apology and reappointment would suffice. The academic is further compensated in the form of keynote invitations and special issues, opportunities she could have received if the wrong had never happened.
In brief, epistemic compensation can take different forms in response to epistemic wrongs. It is successful only insofar as something of equivalent value can be offered as redress. Otherwise, it fails to satisfy the proportionality requirement. Where no such equivalence is possible, the notion of a proportionate compensatory response is irrelevant. In the case of the academic, certain lost epistemic opportunities may be compensable. However, there appears to be no form of epistemic compensation that could adequately address the distress, frustration, and anxiety experienced during the period of wrongful exclusion. While some epistemic harms may admit of compensation, others resist commensurability entirely.
5. Destruction
Is epistemic restitution or compensation available to advance the aims of decolonisation? Providing a background to colonisation is an instructive entry point. There is far too much history to explore. I will focus on the Australian context and show that colonisation, apart from being material, was also constitutively epistemic (e.g., Mills Reference Mills1997).Footnote 6 It involved a clash of coherent knowledge systems, where the domination of colonial epistemology was achieved through genocide and cultural erasure.Footnote 7
When British colonisers came to the shores of Australia, they not only slaughtered, extracted resources, and erased cultures. They imported a particular way of seeing the world. The resources of the environment were to be worked on, generating property rights to the products of labour. John Locke (Reference Locke and Laslett1689, Chapter 5, 27) typifies this thought:
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all man, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of this body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that exclude the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to…
One interpretation of Locke’s position is that land is a source of potential capital. Its value is increased only when it is turned into something owned and traded in efforts to accumulate wealth (e.g., Macpherson Reference MacPherson1962). Moreton-Robinson (Reference Moreton-Robinson2015), an Indigenous Australian scholar, calls this the White Possessive: the logic of possession over territory is central to settler notions of property law.
For Indigenous Australians, land is not a proprietary good. It is a source of identity, spirituality, and connection to ancestors. Ambelin Kwaymullina (Reference Kwaymullina2005), a Palyku woman, makes this point most vividly:
For Aboriginal peoples, country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human – all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self’.
An indigenous relationship to land is not constituted by a perceived potential to mix it with labour to accrue capital and wealth. It is grounded in a particular ontology that describes a narrative of origins and ties to ancestors. Land is a sentient landscape. ‘The original ontogenetic move arises with the Dreaming when the world was soft and ancestor figures moved through the landscape, giving the world form – shaping rivers, mountain ranges, and particular sites – through their behaviour’ (Brigg and Graham Reference Brigg and Graham2021). Land, then, is critical in the epistemology of Indigenous Australians. It is a source of knowledge of ancestors and their wisdom and serves as the architecture of community, belonging, and identity (Morton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015). Importantly, this relationship implies a notion of care: looking after land is caring for and respecting ancestors, which ensures the land’s viability for future generations.
This sharp ontological difference provided the ‘justification’ for colonisation: terra nullius. A land belonging to no one. White settlers attempted to legitimise their occupation on the grounds that there was no legal ownership of Australian land and, as such, it could be rightfully colonised under British rule (Morton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015; Carlson Reference Carlson2016; Bargallie Reference Bargallie2020; Langton Reference Langton2020). What followed was the mass genocide and erasure of Indigenous populations. Those who survived were removed from the land and forced into white society (Carlson Reference Carlson2016). Many Indigenous children were taken under government programmes and were enslaved (‘blackbirding’), adopted into white families, or placed in foster care. The goal was to ‘breed out’ non-white bloodlines over generations. This period, from the late 1800s to the 1970s, is called The Stolen Generations.
What I want to draw specific attention to is that the distinction between Western and Indigenous ways of seeing the world is not simply a difference in unstructured collections of belief. Both are coherent systems whose constituent beliefs are interconnected to form a unique whole, or what Quine and Ullian (Reference Quine and Ullian1978) call a web of belief. While some beliefs may be more central than others, such as the Dreaming for Indigenous People or property rights for the British, each is in some way dependent on others. Core beliefs tend to be resistant to change, whereas peripheral beliefs are more easily revised. Nonetheless, no belief exists in isolation. Revising one belief can have ripple effects throughout the entire web, requiring adjustments to other related beliefs to maintain consistency. Changing core beliefs can require abandoning the knowledge system altogether.
Apart from coherence, Western and Indigenous knowledge systems are constituted by different social positions: abstract nodes within an interconnected network of social relations, such as the positions ‘mother’ and ‘child’ in a family structure (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2016). Within epistemic networks, there are also social positions, or what we can call epistemic positions. We often talk about the epistemic positions of expert and layperson, where our beliefs should be, to some extent, formed based on the information that experts convey to the public.
In Indigenous cultures, epistemic networks consist of several different epistemic positions. Of great importance is the Elder (First People 2023):
An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elder is a revered custodian of Indigenous wisdom. They emerge as leaders and guides within their community, undertaking the essential role of preserving, promoting, and passing down their knowledge, beliefs, and practices rooted in Aboriginal culture.
It’s important to stress that elders are not analogues of the Western ‘expert’. Where experts are those who possess greater knowledge in a particular domain of enquiry and have institutional accreditation, an elder is someone who functions as a community figurehead and cultural conservator. Elders assume the responsibility of leading ceremonies, addressing community concerns, linking the spiritual and physical world, upholding principles of caring for land, and promulgating values to members of their group. Most importantly, the role of elders is to pass down knowledge to future generations. There isn’t a clear analogue of elder in Western thought. Of course, there are elected representatives, community leaders, religious figureheads, and the like. Each plays some role in generational knowledge transfer. However, they radically deviate from the variety of roles that elders play in Indigenous culture, where their scope of guidance ranges over entire communities.
I bring up the origins of white Australia to show that its colonial history was not just existential. Even at its inception, it involved a clash of coherent knowledge systems, each with distinctive social positions. When the British arrived and settled, they engaged in epistemic colonialisation. Fast forward 250 years, and we can see how tragically successful the project was. Modern Australia is not just a predominantly white society but a country with mass ignorance and a false understanding of its colonial history. In many places, it is a part of one’s normal education to be told that Australia was ‘discovered’ during the 1700s. In 2023, the Australian public was given the opportunity to change the constitution to institute a body, called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, that would serve as a non-binding advisory group on matters of Indigenous relevance. An important aspect of this proposal was the Makkarata Commission: a supervisory body that would oversee the process of treaty and ensure that Indigenous voices were heard in truth-telling about Australia’s dark past (The Uluru Statement 2024). Australia struck the proposal down.
Colonisation’s ruinous effects on Indigenous populations wreaked such horrors that a once-thriving coherent knowledge system was so badly devastated that it is now in dire need of preservation. Australia is a modern capitalist country whose relationship with land continues in the tradition of British imperialism. Indigenous knowledge systems are relegated to the status of being quirks of less sophisticated people, whose ways of knowing are seen as relics of an exotic time. Indigenous people have very little say over the shape of their lives, are constantly under government surveillance, are denied opportunities to act in accordance with the customs of their culture, and are unable to live in relation to the land passed down from their ancestors. Their knowledge system and associated epistemic positions have been largely eradicated.
This is but one colonial story. Nevertheless, the general themes of Australian colonisation are similar to those in other places around the world. Ongoing struggles for recognition and demands for the right to exercise cultural practices are seen in Aotearoa (New Zealand), North and South America, throughout Southeast Asia, and across Africa. Of course, each place has a unique story that requires careful attention when reflecting on the transition to justice. Despite this, there is a common element: settlers came to foreign lands and not only engaged in dispossession, genocide, and erasure but also epistemic colonisation that threatened, disrupted, and destroyed Indigenous knowledge systems that existed prior to settlement. These wrongs of colonisation must be rectified. We need a decolonial epistemology. Is epistemic reparation up to the task?
6. Limits of epistemic reparations
My aim in this section is not to reject the very idea of epistemic reparations but to interrogate whether they can meet the demands of decolonisation, understood as the standard-setting framework for proportionality. On this view, reparations are only successful if they challenge the epistemic structures that produced the harm. When held to this standard, I argue that neither epistemic restitution nor epistemic compensation is up to the task. To foreshadow: restitution is unavailable in a post-colonial world, given the irreparable epistemic destruction wrought by imperialism, and compensation fails, since there is nothing of equivalent value that can be offered to Indigenous knowers. Whatever response we take to the epistemic wrongs of colonisation, it cannot take the form of restitution or compensation as understood within a decolonial framework. This directly challenges Mitova’s proposal.
6.1. Limits of epistemic restitution
To assess whether epistemic restitution can advance the goals of decolonisation, we must first clarify what would need to be restored. A broad idea is that Indigenous people should be restored in their capacity as knowers: recognised as capable of transmitting information across social space rather than mere sources of belief. On this view, repairing epistemic harm requires reshaping how Indigenous subjects are perceived: restoring their epistemic status means acknowledging their epistemic agency (Lackey Reference Lackey2022; Altanian Reference Altanian2023).
This solution falls short. Treating Indigenous knowers as credible within a colonial epistemology, grounded in the logic of possession, is not restitution but assimilation. It renders Indigenous people intelligible only insofar as they are legible within Western thought. Yet restitution requires a counterfactual assessment: it aims to restore the world to the state it would have been in had the wrong not occurred. So, we must ask: what would Indigenous knowledge systems have looked like if colonisation never happened?
If colonisation had never happened, Indigenous knowledge systems would have remained rooted in non-proprietary relationships to land, grounded in care, kinship, ancestral continuity, and the guidance of Elders. Restoring Indigenous people as knowers without attending to the content of the knowledge they are bearers of fails to meet the standard of restitution. The epistemic harm of colonisation was not merely a loss of status but a disruption of an entire way of knowing. As such, restitution demands more than increasing credibility assessments within colonial epistemology. Instead, it requires recognising epistemic agency as situated within Indigenous epistemologies. It is no reparation to treat Indigenous people as reliable transmitters of facts about property rights if the very notion of property is foreign to the worldview in question. Justice, on a decolonial model, means not only restoring epistemic agency but also re-embedding that agency within the epistemic system that colonisation sought to erase. Anything less falls short of the demands of decolonisation.
One might object that many Indigenous communities still retain rich knowledge traditions that non-Indigenous people can, in principle, recognise as knowledge. Couldn’t members of these communities therefore be treated as knowers in the relevant way? The objection overlooks the historical scale of epistemic destruction wrought by colonisation. In many cases, colonisation forcibly severed Indigenous people from their epistemic contexts, most starkly exemplified by policies that led to the Stolen Generations. These acts fractured generational change and, in many cases, permanently disrupted the conditions under which certain forms of knowledge could be sustained. For many Indigenous people, recognition as bearers of that knowledge is no longer possible. Not because they lack epistemic capacity, but because colonisation stripped them of the very epistemic content and cultural grounding needed for that recognition. In such cases, the ideal of restitution simply isn’t available. There is nothing to restore.
Perhaps this analysis focuses too narrowly on individuals. Restitution might be better conceived at the collective level. Some Indigenous communities continue to maintain their knowledge systems, and it may be possible to recognise these communities as consisting of authoritative epistemic agents. On this view, group-level restitution remains viable: it requires creating conditions in which Indigenous epistemologies can be practised and preserved. But this does not solve the deeper problem. For many individuals, colonisation severed access to those systems entirely. They were denied the possibility of learning language, inheriting traditions, or participating in the transmission of epistemic life. For such individuals, restitution is not available. When cultural and epistemic inheritance has been wholly foreclosed, the idea of restoring a prior status is also foreclosed.
Even setting aside the problem of irreparable individual loss, a deeper difficulty remains. As noted earlier, knowledge systems are not mere aggregates of beliefs. They are structured networks, composed of interrelated epistemic practices and positions. Restitution, then, cannot simply mean recognising Indigenous people as knowers. It would require the restoration of Indigenous knowledge systems as such.
But this is precisely what colonisation has made impossible. Colonisation was not only a material and political project. It was distinctly epistemic. Imperialism brought with it a way of seeing the world that has since become dominant, structuring everything from our desires (e.g., accruing capital), beliefs (e.g., it is wrong to steal), and ways of living (e.g., driving cars). Central to this worldview is the logic of possession. And this is fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous knowledge systems that deny that land can be owned. Attempting to restore Indigenous knowledge systems within a framework saturated by the logic of possession is self-defeating: integrating these frameworks risks destabilising core commitments. But altering or abandoning those commitments would mean abandoning the systems themselves.
What if, instead of restoring entire knowledge systems, we aimed to restore the specific epistemic positions within them? This too fails. First, epistemic positions, such as the Elder, derive their significance from the relational and normative structures of the knowledge system itself. Without that system, the positions aren’t coherent. But even setting this aside, restoration within a colonial epistemology is not possible. Subsuming Indigenous knowers into a colonial framework contravenes the standards of justice set by decolonisation. And even if that were ignored, the historical damage remains: colonisation did not merely displace knowledge but disrupted the generational structures through which epistemic authority was transmitted.
Consider the role of elders. The loss of access to sacred sites has rendered many place-based knowledge practices unviable. Western legal and governance systems have diminished elders’ authority as community leaders and cultural custodians. Forced assimilation policies and the suppression of Indigenous languages fractured intergenerational transmission. In short, colonisation devasted the conditions of epistemic inheritance from elders to younger generations. Pre-colonial epistemic positions, such as elder, cannot simply be restored because the systems that sustained them have been irreparably altered.Footnote 8
Let’s return to Mitova’s proposal. She offers a form of epistemic reparation in which victims of colonisation are to have their epistemic authority restored. If we interpret ‘restored’ as meaning a return to a state prior to colonisation, then Mitova’s proposal is conceptually untenable. It would require the wholesale revival of Indigenous knowledge systems and the reconstitution of the epistemic positions within them, such that those positions could once again be occupied. In a post-colonial world, this is not possible. This is not pessimism but historical realism: colonisation so thoroughly disrupted the epistemic infrastructure of Indigenous life that a return to a pre-colonial epistemic order is foreclosed. The bell cannot be unrung.
6.2. Limits of epistemic compensation
A less promoted view is that epistemic wrongs can be compensated.
In this way of thinking, while restitution may be impossible, justice can be pursued by offering victims something of equivalent value. Yet this is deeply problematic when applied to the epistemic wrongs of colonisation. The core difficulty lies in the very notion of equivalent value. What could plausibly count as compensation for the systematic destruction of knowledge systems?
Even in the material domain, compensation proves conceptually perverse. To suggest that monetary payment could make up for cultural devastation risks implying that culture has a commensurate market value. This is not just disrespectful but a misrepresentation of what has been lost. And even setting aside concerns about disrespect, there appears to be no coherent metric by which to determine how much compensation would be proportionate. The value of what was destroyed cannot be translated into economic terms without distorting the significance of the wrong. In any case, my interest is in an epistemic response to colonisation, so we can leave the discussion of material reparations here.
What about epistemic compensation then? One might suggest that victims of colonisation could be granted opportunities to hold authoritative positions within colonial epistemology, roles that enable them to engage in truth-telling, speak on matters of Indigenous justice, or lead movements for social transformation. While these forms of inclusion are certainly possible, they do not constitute compensation in the relevant sense. Compensation implies equivalent value. To function as compensation, under the standards of decolonisation, these positions would need to carry the same epistemic value as what was lost. But this condition is not met.
Holding epistemic authority within a colonial framework is not equivalent to holding authority within one’s own. The offer being made is not the restoration of epistemic agency on Indigenous terms but the extension of epistemic space within a system that displaced them. This fails the proportionality requirement demanded by decolonisation.Footnote 9 Worse still, the original harm to Indigenous knowers was constituted by the dominance of colonial epistemology itself. Any attempt to compensate for that harm from within the colonial system repeats the harm by presupposing the very authority that decolonisation is supposed to challenge.
Is there any form of compensation that could satisfy the demands of decolonisation?Footnote 10 We must return to what decolonisation requires: the undoing of epistemic domination and the restoration of epistemic authority on Indigenous terms. Perhaps, in principle, compensation could take the form of granting Indigenous communities full control over dominant epistemic institutions. But this is not a live political possibility. There is no nearby world in which settler societies willingly cede this level of epistemic sovereignty. Australia is a clear example of this. Thus, if ought implies can, then compensation of this kind is simply off the table.
More fundamentally, however, compensation may be impossible in principle. Indigenous and colonial epistemologies may be incommensurable. There may be no equivalence relation that holds between the epistemic goods internal to each framework. If so, then losses in one cannot be rectified by gains in the other. Intuition gives us an initial grip on this idea: what, within colonial epistemology, could possibly be offered as compensation for the loss of an Elder? The closest analogue might be the figure of an expert. But this comparison fails. To be recognised as an expert is to occupy a role defined by institutional credentials, narrow specialisation, and propositional knowledge. To be an Elder is to inhabit an epistemic, moral, spiritual, and intergenerational role rooted in relationships, land, and ceremony. To equate the Elder with an expert is to strip the Elder of their complex epistemic standing within Indigenous communities.
The general point is this: Indigenous and colonial knowledge systems diverge so fundamentally in their ontological and epistemological commitments that they lack a common metric through which losses in one can be compensated by goods recognised in another. As a result, any attempts at compensation distort or erase the goods in question since they must be redescribed in terms that are alien to their original framework. Accordingly, proportionality cannot be satisfied because there is no shared measure of equivalence. Without a shared measure of equivalence, compensation is off the table.
Let us once more return to Mitova’s proposal. Suppose we interpret her as offering a form of epistemic compensation: victims of colonisation are to be granted epistemic authority within colonial epistemology. On such a reading, the view becomes untenable. Compensation requires equivalent value. But Mitova’s proposal fails on two fronts. First, the kind of epistemic inclusion she envisions falls short of the proportionality standard demanded by decolonisation. Being granted recognition within the very system that subordinated Indigenous knowers is not decolonial. Second, Indigenous and colonial knowledge systems may be incommensurable. Without a shared metric of value, there is no way to determine whether a loss in one system can be offset by a gain in another. If both points hold, Mitova’s proposal does not qualify as advancing the aims of decolonisation.
6.3. Limits of satisfaction
If restitution and compensation are unavailable, what about satisfaction? Lackey’s project appears to remain viable: we should respect the right to know and the right to be known. I agree that this is a crucial step toward decolonisation. Indigenous truths must be told. However, if the only form of reparation available is for Indigenous voices to narrate the atrocities committed against them, and to do so within a colonial system, this constitutes a rather miserly form of redress. It doesn’t go far in satisfying the demands of decolonisation.
Truth-seeking and truth-telling are necessary, but they are not sufficient. They do not dismantle the colonial epistemic structure but rather operate within it. In this respect, they risk becoming expressive acts addressed to power rather than tools for transforming it. They allow one to voice that the master’s house is unjust but not to dismantle the house itself. Decolonisation demands more than lip service.
7. Conclusion
I have argued that the epistemic reparations framework is inadequate for addressing the knowledge-related wrongs of colonisation. While recent work by Lackey and Mitova has expanded our understanding of epistemic duties in the aftermath of injustice, neither account can meet the demands of decolonisation. Restitution is unavailable: there is no pre-colonial epistemic state to which we can return. Compensation fails: there is nothing of equivalent value that can be given in exchange for what has been lost. Satisfaction, such as truth-telling and recognition, remains constrained by the very epistemic systems that colonialism has entrenched.
What this analysis reveals is not just a shortcoming in the reparative literature but a deeper incompatibility between the logic of reparations and the normative demands of decolonisation. Epistemic reparations are backward-looking: they aim to restore, compensate, or acknowledge. But decolonisation is not about repairing the colonial order from within but dismantling it. Decolonial justice requires a fundamental transformation of epistemic relations, one that resists incorporation into colonial frameworks and enables alternative knowledge systems to flourish on their own terms.
If the framework of epistemic reparations cannot meet this demand, it is the wrong tool for the task. The question is not how to repair what colonisation has broken but how to break from the epistemic order it has imposed.
Acknowledgment
I acknowledge my own Indigenous ancestors and culture from the Philippines.
Statements and Declarations
No statements or declarations to disclose.
Open access
