(Mis)Trust and Pragmatism as Grounded Normativity

in 2009, the us federal government settled a class action lawsuit, Cobell v. Salazar, where the plaintiffs, a group of 250,000 Native Americans, declared that the government had “breached and [is] in continuing breach of their trust obligations to class members” (US Senate 42). The settlement, over the next several years, led to a congressionally approved settlement amount of nearly $4 billion, with roughly $1.4 billion paid to the plaintiffs, about $2 billion for the rematriation of lands taken by the federal government under the Dawes Act of 1887, and the remainder in a scholarship fund for Indigenous students. In the settlement, the US government “den[ied] and continue[s] to deny any and all liability and damages to any individual Indian trust beneficiary” (45) but nevertheless agreed to pay the settlement and to reform the federal Indian Trust policy. While legal trust and trust in everyday life are not identical, they rely on a similar disposition, namely, the idea that one has faith or confidence in another to act in ways that benefit the one who trusts. In the case of Cobell v. Salazar, one could argue that successfully calling into question the trust relationship between Indigenous nations and the government of the United States is a good example of the role of mistrust, a failure of that confidence. Could this also be a model for an approach to decolonization? Can mistrust be a resource or tool by which Indigenous peoples, in the United States and elsewhere, undermine the structures of colonization that have purported to be “beneficial” and “trustworthy” since at least the late nineteenth century?

In a way, the settlement of Cobell v. Salazar is a significant decolonial action. It has restored nearly 1.7 million acres of Land¹ to tribal control in the United States. In addition to the cash payments to the plaintiff class, it started a process of reforming the US federal trust relationship and has led to changes in the practices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In this short paper, I will argue that while mistrust can be understood in the context of pragmatic inquiry as a successful means of resolving the identified problems with the trust relationship, it is nevertheless unsuccessful as a resource for decolonial action. However, by connecting pragmatic theory of inquiry to what Indigenous North American philosophers Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson have called “grounded normativity,” an alternative response to the trust relationship is available that, I will argue, is decolonial in its potential.

Several recent theorists have taken up the concept of mistrust as a potential response to experienced problems of our day. Most recently, Ethan Zuckerman has argued that mistrust should be understood as the loss of confidence in institutions and other social structures and practices that sustain the community. When institutions begin to fail to meet the needs of those they are to serve, it becomes, he argues, “increasingly difficult to know how to fix problems,” because the institutions that are the means for solving problems are themselves suspect. Members of the community tend to carry out their mistrust in two different ways: some become militant and try to force change from outside the established institutions (Zuckerman 66) while others disengage because they do not believe that they can bring about change (Zuckerman 61). For Zuckerman, “[m]istrust is the single critical factor that led to the election of Donald Trump in the United States and that may be empowering ethnonationalist, populist autocrats around the world.” It is, he concludes, “this loss of trust, both in our institutions and in our ability to change our societies, that should worry us” (xvi). His solution is that “[w]e must harness mistrust so that we don’t lose the power, strength, and creativity of those who’ve lost faith in institutions” (Zuckerman 206); that is, mistrust should become a resource for preserving but changing institutions to be better able to address the needs of the present world.

Matthew Carey, in his 2017 book Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory, argues that mistrust provides a means of entering into relations while maximizing one’s...