The Right of the River to Be Known: Epistemic Reparations, Environmental Justice, and Indigenous Truth-Telling about Custodial Group Agents

Editor
Sep 26, 2025
1 min read

Updated: Apr 8

Authors

Stephen W. Enciso and Nicolas J. Bullot

Abstract

The ‘right to be known’ has traditionally been interpreted from a human-centric and individualistic perspective unsuitable for resolving the environmental crises of our epoch. Given the political need to raise collective awareness about the inter-connectedness of the human and more-than-human worlds, we establish a dialogue between Indigenous and Western philosophies about the rights of more-than-human entities to be known and cared for. We consider a Western Australian Indigenous community’s advocacy on behalf of ‘Martuwarra’, a non-anthropocentric socio-environmental structure that encompasses the cultural ecosystem of a river (the ‘Fitzroy River’ in colonial nomenclature) and the Indigenous groups with ontolo-gies and First Laws belonging to that ecosystem. For the First Peoples of Martu-warra, their cultural ecosystem is a custodial group agent that is the victim of an epistemic injustice. The advocacy on behalf of Martuwarra, we suggest, is an act of Indigenous truth-telling that establishes the custodial group agent’s right to be known and which seeks to entrench restorative norms of justice as part of a moral revolution. We address contractualist and other objections to our proposal and dis-cuss the benefits of theorising the rights of custodial group agents.