The commission’s revelations merely restated information already present in colonial archives.

Evidence

The commission made its point strongly by enumerating these seemingly disparate “findings” in a unified picture of sustained inequities. But few of their observations were novel, nor did they ever rise to the level of official disclosures; the colonial archives were full of missives on every 8 All of these nota appear in KV 28 March 1874, no. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 840

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did the archive already ‘know’ these inequities yet the state fail to act — what does that say about the epistemic status of archived knowledge vs. disclosure?