Disability, Blackness, and Indigeneity: An Invitation to a Conversation

I have such admiration for Therí Pickens's work, and was so moved that she asked for this "thought-piece" on Indigeneity for her second special issue on Blackness and disability. Special issues and edited collections are among the precious few spaces where scholars can come together to exchange ideas about the intersections of disability and race. In her first such special issue, the summer 2017 African American Review, Pickens described the complexities of tracing a Black Disability Studies genealogy; in her call for the issue at hand, she noted that the scholarship has been sporadic. For her, this is both a problem and an opportunity—on the one hand, the conversation risks getting dropped or marginalized, but on the other hand, we have "a wide range of entry points" for engaging this urgent and compelling issue.

Arguably, Indigenous Disability Studies performs similar work. One landmark book does the same kind of heavy duty as Christopher Bell's Blackness and Disability, and it was published just shortly after his groundbreaking volume: in Native American Communities on Health and Disability Lavonna Lovern and Carol Locust (Eastern Band Cherokees) argue that "for centuries tribes have emphasized the normality of people with difference."¹ Scholars following their lead have sought to describe longstanding, tribally specific approaches to (dis)ability; of Cherokee descent, Sean Teuton suggests that "in many oral traditions, disability is a paradoxical source of power."² Other scholars have shown how specific kinds of bodymind impairment have been produced by settler colonialism: For example, residential schools produced post-traumatic stress and intergenerational trauma; massive out-adoption of Indigenous children has led to psychic conditions like "split feather syndrome"; the destruction of traditional food sources has created diabetes and other illnesses.

As in Black Disability Studies, however, these conversations have proceeded intermittently, especially with respect to literature. Teuton, Michelle Jarman, and Petra Kuppers stand out as scholars who have explored Native American and Indigenous literary representations of disability. In her work on postcolonial literature and disability, Clare Barker, at the University of Leeds, has also been consistently attentive to Indigenous issues. But in the eleven years since its inception, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association has referred to the word "disability" in its conference program only twice: once in 2017, for a panel on "Indigenous Disability Studies" organized by Dr. Lavonna Lovern; and once in in 2015, for a single paper on leprosy in Hawai'i. It is possible that NAIS might be skeptical of a field that, historically, has seemed over-saturated with work by non-Native people in rehabilitation and occupational therapy. It is possible, too, that a consideration of disability as a separate category of analysis is not quite resonating with scholars who are more inclined toward holistic, tribal-nation-based approaches. I would argue that considerations of disability are surfacing in NAIS, but that they are framed differently—as intergenerational trauma, for instance, and as abrogations of tribal sovereignty. Indigenous people, NAIS keeps reminding us, are not simply ethnic minorities: They are political entities, with their own longstanding claims to particular territories, highly evolved systems of governance, and treaty-defined relationships to settler governments. Because settler colonialism has sought deliberately to eliminate Indigenous people as collective entities, a decolonial Indigenous Studies will likely insist on deliberate considerations of (dis)ability as a collective concern.

In fact, a discussion of colonialism might be our most productive starting place. Kim Nielsen has said that U.S. disability history is "a story of land and bodies stolen." In what follows, I want to offer CLAJ readers and colleagues a few insights into what has been occurring in the field of Indigenous Studies and Disability, in the spirit of inviting us all to think through this "wide range of entry points."

Institutionalization/Incarceration

Like Black and disabled bodies, Indigenous bodies pose a problem: They have to be disappeared, domesticated, assimilated, and rehabilitated. Like disabled Black people, disabled Indigenous people have been specifically targeted for institutionalization, incarceration and erasure. Black Disability Studies has fruitfully demonstrated how Black disability emerged directly from the history of slavery. For instance...