Disability as a Colonial Construct: The Missing Discourse of Culture in Conceptualizations of Disabled Indigenous Children

Abstract


 
 
 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.
 
 

Re‐Imagining Inclusion Through the Lens of Disabled Childhoods

“…Critical disability studies emerged over the past decade in response to provocations (Goodley et al, 2019) by feminist, queer, crip, feminist of colour, Global South, and other scholars and activists whose work illuminates some of the limitations of the social and other disability models to substantively take up intersectionality and decenter white, male, physically disabled experiences (Bell, 2006;Erevelles, 2011;Garland-Thomson, 2013;Kafer, 2013;Schalk, 2018;Sins Invalid, 2019). It also developed to theorize impairment and lived experiences of impairment (including painful or difficult ones; see Douglas, et al, 2020;Patsavas, 2014;Tremain, 2015), decentre Global North experiences of disability, take up provocations from decolonial, post-colonial, and Global South disability studies (Erevelles, 2011;Ineese-Nash, 2020;Nguyen, 2018;Puar, 2017); and move beyond western Enlightenment ontologies centered on a humanist perspective (as opposed to relationality or the non-human; see Braidotti, 2013;Rice et al, 2021). Disabled children's childhood studies (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2013Runswick-Cole et al, 2018) extends critical disability studies by centering the experiences and perspectives of disabled children and the role of (m)others, families, kin, and care, aspects of disability experience typically associated with the devalued feminine and missing within critical disability studies Underwood, Angarita Moreno, et al, 2020).…”

Autism and Autism Services with Indigenous Families and Children in the Settler-Colonial Context of Canada: A Critical Scoping Review

“…Indeed, the medical model of disability is something that social and critical disability scholars have critiqued for decades in an effort to promote a greater focus on the social and cultural production of disability (Oliver, 2013). This hegemonic worldview is problematic in a colonial state such as Canada, as it tacitly colludes with and perpetuates harmful, racializing, and inferiorizing colonial myths and narratives about Indigenous parenting and developmentally 'at risk' Indigenous children (Ineese-Nash, 2020;Ineese-Nash et al, 2018;Inman, 2019). From this critical perspective, the findings on the absence of data on Indigenous children with autism and the repeated references to, or inclusion in studies of Indigenous children with FASD (Di Pietro & Illes, 2014Leitch, 2007;Shochet et al, 2020;Lindblom 2014) are particularly troublesome given the prevailing misconception and 'colonial myth' that FASD is 'epidemic'…”

“…Indigenous parents' equitable access to ECD and intervention can also be influenced by everyday lived and anticipated experiences of racism, dismissal and discrimination, including in their encounters with the Canadian healthcare, ECD and children's disability systems (Allan & Smylie, 2015;Gerlach, Browne, & Greenwood, 2017;Ineese-Nash et al, 2018;Wright et al, 2019). The colonial construction of 'disability' and its underlying assumptions of '(ab)normalcy' may also influence the accessibility and efficacy of early intervention and disability services with Indigenous parents who may hold their own distinct views of child rearing, development and neurodiversity (Ineese-Nash, 2020;Ineese-Nash et al, 2018). (Sinha & Wong, 2015, p. 62).…”

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

“…Disability as a social and political construct is deeply rooted in histories of Indigenous death and dispossession. As Anishinaabe scholar Nicole Ineese-Nash (2020) states, “within the context of settler colonialism, disability becomes one of many factors which depress Indigenous futurity and self-determination” (p. 30). This assault on futurity has historical roots in the construction of thriving and productive nation-states, carefully crafted through ideological mechanisms, which would naturalise notions of ability and value through processes of colonialism.…”