Disability and Indigenous resistance: mapping value politics during the time of COVID-19

Abstract

This article is about value politics and Indigenous resistance in the time of COVID-19. The effects of the pandemic on our global community have fuelled rhetoric of productivity—advancing collective lamentations of losing our normal lives within wider socio-political dialogue. This article examines how global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the visibility of settler-colonial histories in union with capitalist discourses to form value politics that impact Indigenous and disabled communities. Mapping wider social dialogue through time, I focus on current economy-based solutions in the call to return to a social normal at the risk of disabled communities. Such global responses are premised on capitalist logics of productivity and ableism which continue to disproportionately impact marginalised communities. By mapping rubrics of value within two settler nation states—the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand—I offer another rubric of value predicated on Diné (Navajo) practices of relationship and resistance.