Abstract

Critical responses to the “Anthropocene narrative” have largely focused on deconstructing or reconstructing its narrative content, without close examination of social epistemic practices involved in the process of narrative production. In this paper, I address this gap by posing the question: How can epistemic-narrative practices reduce or eliminate environmental domination? To answer, I first draw on scholarship in the epistemology of ignorance to frame Anthropocene narratives as reproducing systemic ignorance in the service of anthropocentric domination. I argue that addressing anthropocentric ignorance requires a view of knowledge that values not only truth, but also building and sustaining epistemic trust. I then propose two epistemic dispositions for developing this view of knowledge, based on close readings of Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by feminist scholar Donna Haraway and texts written by environmental ethics scholar Kyle Whyte. In the final section, I develop a case study based on a narrative-building project in Tiohtià:ke to demonstrate the value of these strategies to the struggle for environmental justice. Overall, this project contributes to research in the fields of environmental justice, feminist epistemology, and posthumanism by offering concrete practices for decentering the human in dominant Western ways of relating to others in epistemological communities. It emphasizes the value of thinking in and with specific communities, located concretely in time and space—and therefore seeks to connect directly with present, ongoing and future struggles for liberation in the settler-dominated communities of Turtle Island that I call home.