Maawandoonan: early childhood disability support services in Constance Lake First Nation

Abstract

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.

An International Conversation on Disabled Children’s Childhoods: Theory, Ethics and Methods

“…Further, our interests are in international development discourses that are focused on early childhood, education or early intervention. We aim to ask research questions that go beyond documenting disabled children, toward approaches that can elucidate the power Underwood et al, An International Conversation CJDS 9.5 (December 2020) imbalances that are entrenched in institutional practices, and that allow us to document the ways that dominant discourses impose themselves on the lives of disabled children (Ineese-Nash et al, 2017). We therefore share a commitment to approaches that engage with social oppression.…”