This paper explores the concept of disability through a critical disability lens to understand how Indigenous ontologies are positioned within the dominant discourse of disabled peoples in Canada. This paper draws on the inherent knowledge of Indigenous (predominantly Anishinaabek) communities through an integration of story and relational understandings from Indigenous Elders, knowledge keepers, and community members. Indigenous perspectives paired with academic literature illustrate the dichotomous viewpoints that position Indigenous peoples, most often children, as ‘disabled’ within mainstream institutions, regardless of individual designation. Such positioning suggests that the label of disability is a colonial construct that conflicts with Indigenous perspectives of community membership and perpetuates assimilation practices which maintain colonial harm.

This knowledge synthesis aims to understand Indigenous experiences of early childhood education, care, family support, intervention, health, and Indigenous services in the context of childhood disability. Each of these institutional contexts has its own underlying professional discourses and worldviews. Knowledge from three sources have been synthesized: (1) interviews with Indigenous families about their experiences of having disabled children, conducted through the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System (IECSS) Project; (2) analysis of the IECSS interviews by the Districtof Temiskaming Elders Council and Indigenous community partners; and (3) the existing body of literature on disability and Indigenous children.This project was conducted in partnership with a mixed team of Indigenous and settler researchers.

This article explores the intersectional identities of Indigenous peoples who may walk the path “in-between” Indigenous and settler nationhood, and the implications that reside in that ethically ambiguous space. Employing the use of personal narrative, poetry,1 and decolonizing perspectives, this work positions identity as a politicized construct that continues to surveil Indigenous bodies, marking them as threats to settler advancement. This article asks questions around what it means to be Indigenous in a time of social unrest, when your life is marked by colonial interference but your skin is not; is resisting colonialism enough to create spaces for all Indigenous peoples to thrive?

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This paper details an institutional ethnography conducted in Constance Lake First Nation, a rural Oji-Cree community in northern Ontario, Canada. The study is a part of a larger project called the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System Project, which is partnered with several municipalities and service organizations in four communities across Ontario. The current project examined six family narratives of accessing disability support services for young children. The project seeks to understand how the service system functions from the perspective of families, and the impact of institutional interactions on families within the service system. Employing critical disability theory and Indigenous perspectives of child development, the study seeks to develop a culturally-based conceptualization of disability support for Indigenous children with disabilities or gifts.