Indigenous communities in Australia have ancestral philosophies for caring about their local environments. As an aftermath of European imperialism, such philosophies have been racialized and silenced in attempted genocides and epistemicides by governing institutions in settler-colonial states. When environmental policies in most industrialized states have failed to prevent cascading environmental crises, how should we understand the relationship between the environmental philosophies of Indigenous peoples and the policymaking of settler-colonial states? Can such an understanding inform responses to environmental crises and the bestowment of collective reparations on Indigenous communities? We propose the Truth-Telling and Environmental Policy (TTEP) model to address these questions. Focused on case studies from Australian history, the TTEP model examines both vicious and virtuous cycles of cultural transmission in the relations between the philosophies of First Australians and environmental policy. The vicious feedback loop maintains the epistemic malpractices and falsehoods caused by racialization and settler privilege. According to TTEP, virtuous and reparative feedback loops are established by using truth-telling and rational understanding to remediate injustices and pass decolonial knowledge intergenerationally. Truth-telling operates as a circuit breaker of racialized ignorance and collective silencing.
