Disability and Disablement in Settler Colonial States: Indigenous Perspectives of Disability Since Time in Memorial

This chapter is a journey of learning, focusing on the experiences of Indigeneity, disability, and disablement in the settler colonial states of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States and how we collectively can work on healing or reconciling. We start by taking up colonization, which for many settler states share numerous elements and functions (removal from land and forced relocation to reserves, residential schools, and removal of children to “care” by the state). We take up three main periods of time: First, learning about notions of disability prior to widespread European contact. Second, using an intersectional lens, we will learn about the initiation of colonization and ongoing processes of colonization impacting Indigenous Peoples in settler states, using the life span as a way to organize this section. Finally, we conclude with our journey toward healing and knowing by discussing the lived and imagined futures that return to Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and relationality that resist Western and settler-state productions and reproductions of disability and disablement.