Discursive Injustice and the Speech of Indigenous Communities

An important strand in recent feminist philosophy of language has been guided by the thought that speech is social action, and more specifically that the performance of speech acts requires not only a contribution from a suitably competent and entitled speaker but also that the speaker’s contribution be given a suitable reception or social uptake. Put somewhat crudely, the idea is that, in order to perform a speech act of, say, promising, or telling, or warning, a speaker must be taken by others as doing so. In this way, speakers are thought to depend profoundly on the competence, goodwill, and receptiveness of others—their audiences and other relevant parties—in order to exercise their linguistic agency. The idea that speakers are profoundly dependent in this way on others has prompted a lot of discussion about what could be called the politics of uptake. In particular, feminist philosophers of language working within this tradition have highlighted various kinds of injustice that occur in speech situations. Certain speakers from are said to be “silenced,” or to be the victims of “discursive injustice,” on account of the social reception their acts routinely receive.1 Though the philosophers working in this field acknowledge the broad significance and applicability of this theoretical framework, the overwhelming focus of the extant literature is on the ways in which the speech of women, in particular, is unjustly disempowered. In this chapter, my aim is to explore how unjust uptake impedes the speech of a different kind of speaker—Indigenous communities. This involves looking focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual speech, can be unjustly impeded. I argue that, just as the speech of women is often heard in ways that tend to reinforce their disempowerment, so too is the speech of Indigenous communities routinely taken in ways that contribute toward their ongoing marginalization and disenfranchisement. In order to make this argument, I adopt a “social normativist” approach to speech acts. After briefly outlining the framework (Section 2), 11 Discursive Injustice and the Speech of Indigenous Communities