In 2001, the Chilean government launched the Historical Truth Commission and New Treaty with Indigenous Peoples, which operated until 2003. Its aim was to shed light on “the history of the relationship that has existed between Indigenous Peoples and the State” and to lay the groundwork for a new relationship among the state, Indigenous Peoples, and Chilean society. Since independence from Spain in 1810, Chile’s national history served the project of nation-building, often celebrating the “superiority of the independent nation” while erasing or diminishing Indigenous histories. The commission sought to challenge this legacy by exposing dominant national historiography as “insufficient and reductionist” and by centering the voices and experiences long silenced in Chilean public history and memory. Beyond historical recognition, the commission exposed the processes of territorial dispossession, social fragmentation, and cultural loss that led to the extinction of entire peoples. This work provided Indigenous communities with evidence to support claims to ancestral lands and the recognition of their political, territorial, and cultural rights.
The Chilean commission is one example of a (post-)colonial historical commission[1]. These types of commissions, often set up by former colonial powers and settler states, are designed to address the legacies of historical injustice, foster historical, cultural and identity recognition, and open pathways toward social and political transformation. Yet, despite these transformative ambitions, such commissions are often shaped by, and embedded within, disciplinary assumptions rooted in European Enlightenment ideas of “reason” and “progress” that once helped justify empire and colonial rule.
This embeddedness is key to understanding what I will refer to as the coloniality of the method: the historical discipline’s methodological defaults, narrative conventions, and source preferences that shape how (post-)colonial historical commissions elevate some forms of knowledge while rendering others marginal or illegible. When these assumptions go unexamined, even well-intentioned efforts at historical reckoning with the colonial past may invertedly reinscribe epistemic harm—harm that undermines someone’s ability to share or be recognized for their knowledge.
History, Power, and the Politics of the Past
In Time’s Monster: How History Makes History, historian Priya Satia explains how the historical discipline not only chronicled empire but also served as one of its architects, “helping make the Empire ethically thinkable,” even as it was unfolding. Professional historical writing legitimized empire by crafting teleological narratives of progress and civilization that justified expansion and racial hierarchy. Europe became the universal standard of modernity against which all other non-European societies were measured.
After World War II, especially during the political decolonization of much of the Global South, historians began documenting the lives and struggles of those erased from official narratives—including workers, women, enslaved people, and Indigenous communities. This expanded the discipline’s scope beyond great personalities, war, and traditional political structures such as party systems, ideological formations, and geopolitical dynamics. Yet, including new subjects did not necessarily challenge the discipline’s Eurocentric foundations; its claims to objectivity, linear time, and hierarchies of evidence remained largely intact.
Following the end of the Cold War, a growing interest in reckoning with historical violence placed renewed emphasis on the civic role of history. As political scientist Eva-Clarita Pettai explains, as old ideological divides collapsed, calls for “self-critical retrospection” gained momentum. Historical inquiry was recast not only as an academic exercise but also as a political and civic tool capable of shaping collective memory and interrogating the foundations of contemporary social and political orders.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, as historians engaged more directly in efforts to confront injustice and repair fractured relationships throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, governments in nation states turned to the establishment of historical commissions to address (or sometimes contain) the legacies of past violence. These commissions marked a renewed in politics of the past and the use of history to officially condemn painful pasts within state narratives.
Commissioned History and (Post-)Colonial Reckoning
Historical commissions are commonly defined as temporary “academically-grounded bodies of enquiry set up by state institutions to revisit historical records and facts about wrongs.” Their objective is to shed light on the structural conditions, such as institutionalized discrimination or economic inequality, and historical processes such as colonial expansion or civil conflict, that underpinned past wrongdoing. These commissions represent an effort by a given state to foster public acknowledgment, promote recognition, and assign political responsibility. The goal is to influence how societies understand the past, so it reshapes historical imaginaries, social values, and symbols.
A distinct subset of these commissions emerged in the late twentieth century to address the legacies of empire and colonialism. These (post-)colonial historical commissions examine how histories of dispossession, racial violence, and systemic exclusion continue to shape inequalities today. Their purpose is not only to reconstruct the past but to show why it still matters in the present, offering a range of recommendations as potential channels to address the structural consequences of historical injustice. While these commissions may refer to international normative frameworks—for instance, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—they are typically a response to domestic struggles and the demands of Indigenous Peoples and historically excluded communities.
The first wave of (post-)colonial historical commissions emerged in the 1990s, primarily in settler-colonial states, in response to Indigenous struggles for official recognition of colonial violence and its lasting consequences. These included Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1991–96) and Australia’s inquiry led by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1995–97).
In the 2000s, historical commissions were established in other contexts, such as Chile’s Historical Truth Commission and New Treaty with Indigenous Peoples (2001–03), Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (2007–12), Mauritius’s Truth and Justice Commission (2009–11), Greenland’s Reconciliation Commission (2014–17), and the Commission to Investigate the Norwegianisation Policy and Injustice against the Sámi and Kvens/Norwegian Finns (2018–23).
In the Scandinavian region, the momentum initiated by the Norwegian commission led to the creation of similar bodies in Sweden and Finland. These include Sweden’s Commission for Tornedalians, Kvens, and Lantalaiset (2020–2023) and the ongoing Commission for the Sámi (2021–), as well as Finland’s ongoing Commission Concerning the Sámi (2021–). All focus on internal assimilation policies targeting Indigenous and minority populations. In mainland Europe, countries such as the Netherlands (2019–2022) and Belgium (2020–2022) launched inquiries into the legacies of overseas colonialism in Indonesia and Central Africa, respectively.
As political instruments, historical commissions operate within mandates shaped by specific sociopolitical contexts and institutional frameworks. These factors influence their timelines, determine which historical harms are officially recognized, and shape how responsibility is assigned. As historian Berber Bevernage puts it, crafting historical discourses under such conditions means that “making sense of the past” is always done “in light of the [needs] of the present for the sake of aspirations for [a specific] future.” In this sense, historical commissions do more than clarify past events: they help construct historical meaning. This dual role, as both political tools and producers of knowledge, demands critical scrutiny. While commissions can open space for reflection and contestation, they may also be co-opted to suppress dissent, deflect state accountability, or entrench dominant narratives through selective or distorted histories.
The Coloniality of the Method
While (post-)colonial historical commissions often succeed in challenging dominant historical narratives that either glorify colonialism or minimize its lasting effects; their methods remain deeply embedded in Western traditions. As such, these commission can inadvertently reproduce colonial logics embedded in the production of historical knowledge.
History by Political Mandate
While the commission’s mandates define the scope of its investigations, other factors shape its findings: who will serve as commissioners, how events will be studied, and which sources will be made available and considered credible. It becomes an issue when political interests and methodological assumptions are used to exclude certain people, events, or forms of knowledge. When this occurs, commissions risk committing epistemic injustice—injustice rooted in how knowledge is produced. This dynamic echoes anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s point that power shapes historical discourses: what gets remembered or silenced depends on who has the authority—and the institutional means—to be heard.
The Belgian Commission investigating the impact of colonialism in Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi set up in 2020 illustrates how commissions can produce epistemic injustice, especially in terms of who is recognized as an expert. When the expert group was formed, civil society organizations, diaspora groups, and Afro-descendant communities were excluded as “experts” and instead relegated to provide information during open sessions, placing them in a subordinate position to the official investigators. This sidelining sparked widespread criticism among affected groups (particularly diaspora communities) who were excluded from meaningful participation. Although later attempts were made to include more diverse voices, the commission continued to replicate racial hierarchies of expertise and, thus, reproducing forms of epistemic violence.
Temporalities
In their investigations, (post-)colonial historical commissions actively draw lines of continuity between past and present. They show how structural injustices such as racism and systemic inequality are not relics of the past but ongoing realities embedded in social and political structures. While this challenges the traditional Western view of the past as concluded and separate from the present, many commissions still follow Eurocentric timelines—structured around conquest, colonization, or independence—that reflect colonial viewpoints and marginalize Indigenous ways of understanding time, such as cyclical or ancestral frameworks.
The Chilean Historical Truth Commission is one example of this tension. By relying on Western periodization (such as pre- and post-colonial, or pre- and post-independence phases) the commission required Indigenous communities to express their collective experiences within an imposed temporal framework. This demand bound Indigenous groups to translate their histories into frameworks and languages that were often unfamiliar to their worldviews, thereby channelling their lived experiences into predefined and externally imposed timelines.
In Chile, this disciplinary embeddedness appeared in the commission’s use of independence from Spain as a key temporal marker for Indigenous historical accounts. While independence marked a formal break from Spanish rule, national historiography framed it as a continuation of the colonial civilizing mission—reproducing Eurocentric ideas of progress and ‘rejecting everything that escaped the principles of cultural homogeneity’.
Sources
Even though (post-)colonial historical commissions usually include personal experiences, they often nevertheless treat written documents and archival records as the most valid sources of historical knowledge. This reflects a hierarchy of Western historiography that values written records over oral traditions, embodied memories, or other non-written ways of knowing. As a result, entire knowledge systems are ignored, raising important questions about whose history is recognized and how the past is officially remembered.
The Mauritius Truth and Justice Commission highlights this issue. Created in 2011 to address the legacy of slavery and indentured labor, it included an Oral History Project with around 200 interviews in Creole and French. While this gave space for community voices, many participants doubted the commission would lead to real change. Their skepticism was partly confirmed when the final report barely reflected the oral testimonies, effectively sidelining Creole perspectives and continuing to devalue oral knowledge.
Language
(Post-)colonial historical commissions often rely on dominant, usually colonial, languages as their main working language. But language isn’t neutral—it carries ways of thinking, cultural meanings, and power dynamics. When commissions prioritize a single dominant language (often at the expense of Indigenous or non-dominant ones) they risk erasing culturally embedded knowledge and contextual meanings, limiting how people express their histories, and reinforcing power dynamics over whose ways of knowing are legitimized.
The Chilean Historical Truth Commission, which operated primarily in Spanish, and the Mauritius Truth and Justice Commission, which used French and English, are illustrative examples. In both cases, Indigenous and Creole languages were sidelined, limiting participants’ ability to express themselves through culturally resonant modes of knowing. This not only restricted the scope of what could be said but also shaped how (and what) historical meaning was created by these commissions.
Concluding thoughts
(Post-)colonial historical commissions occupy a paradoxical space: created to confront colonial legacies, they often end up reproducing asymmetries of power and knowledge production.
Their potential to re-interpret the past is not in doubt. The challenge lies in how they do so: in the timelines they privilege, the voices they amplify or silence, and the languages through which history is allowed to speak.
Recognizing the coloniality of method invites us to interrogate the frameworks through which historical knowledge is produced through the work of such commissions. It also creates space to imagine more epistemically just approaches to historical inquiry.
[1] The term (post-)colonial is used throughout to refer to this specific subset of historical commissions because it captures both the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of colonial injustice. While formal colonial rule may have ended, its enduring consequences render the notion of the “colonial” relevant in and for the present.
Featured Image: John-Mark Kuznietsov, photographer, Pexels.
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