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ARTICLE
Tracing and troubling continuities between ableism
and colonialism in Canada
Emily J. Hutcheon and Bonnie Lashewicz
1
Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
ABSTRACT
This article draws on work in Critical Disability Studies
(CDS) to trace continuities between ableism and colonial-
ism in Canada, and illuminates three ways in which ableist
violences have historically functioned, and still function, as
colonial tools. These violences include: subtle and obvious
pathologizing of indigenous bodies rooted in a logic of
purification/elimination of defects; tropes of ‘inspirational
disability’which have ongoing material, colonial effects,
including the exaltation of white settler Canada; and
eugenic institutions –a naturalized part of our national
context –which subjugate indigenous ways of life while
creating and reproducing white settler space. We challenge
CDS scholars –especially those who, like ourselves, enjoy
white and settler privilege –to call attention to the colonial
effects of eugenic, ableist assumptions and to remain
accountable to the colonial impulses inherent in their/our
work. We conclude by charting possibilities of what decolo-
nizing in CDS might mean.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 18 January 2018
Revised 19 January 2019
Accepted 18 July 2019
KEYWORDS
Ableism; colonialism;
indigeneity; Critical
Disability Studies
Points of interest
Canadian society has been, and continues to be, organized in ways
that value white settler ways of life over indigenous ways of life.
Ableism, which is about valuing ability and devaluing ability differen-
ces, contributes to patterns where white settler ways of life are valued
over indigenous ways of life.
Ableism contributes to colonialism when indigenous people are treated
as problems, when specific disabled white people are treated as inspira-
tions and when institutions are used to contain and fix devalued people.
We believe Critical Disability Studies researchers and teachers should
do more to value indigenous ways of life.
We suggest steps that researchers and teachers might take to value
and be led by indigenous ways of thinking.
CONTACT Bonnie Lashewicz bmlashew@ucalgary.ca
ß2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
DISABILITY & SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2019.1647145
Introduction
In this article, we draw on work in Critical Disability Studies (CDS) to trace inter-
sections and continuities between ableism and colonialism in Canada. Through
this process, we illuminate ways in which ableist violences have historically func-
tioned, and still function, as colonial tools. We underline convergence between
ableism and colonialism given that ableism, which entails privileging of ability,
serves colonial interests which are built on ‘disabling old forms of life by systemic-
ally breaking down their conditions’(Scott 2005, 25). We align with scholars who
view disability and indigeneity as interlocking sites contained by, and marginal-
ized amidst, the white settler, able-bodied, masculine enterprise (Soldatic 2015,
59). Our aim is to contribute to historical and contextual accounts of the converg-
ing struggles faced by people with disabilities and indigenous peoples in ways
that call attention to the need for CDS scholars –especially those who, like
ourselves, enjoy white and settler privilege –to more fully account for, and
resist, colonial practices embedded in our own academic projects.
Given the ways disability and indigeneity can converge, and in arguing the
need for CDS to take fuller account of the colonial impacts of its own projects,
we use select works in CDS to draw out three strands of ableist violence
which function as colonial tools in Canada. These violences include subtle and
obvious pathologizing of indigenous bodies that is rooted in a logic of purifi-
cation/elimination of defects. Second, violences include tropes of ‘inspirational
disability’which have ongoing material, colonial effects, including the exalt-
ation of white settler ways of life in Canada. Third, we discuss the violence of
eugenic institutions –a naturalized part of our national context –which
ignore indigenous ways of life while creating and reproducing white settler
space. Our purpose in exposing ableism in these ways is to call attention to
gaps in CDS theorizing and to raise possibilities for a sharpening of theoretical
tools and corresponding practices in CDS.
We begin by describing our own use of language by highlighting commonal-
ities between debates over language used to characterize experiences of indige-
neity and disability. We follow this with a tracing of histories and present
realities of colonization in Canada. We then turn to examining existing theoret-
ical tools in CDS and how these tools support and constrain theorizing and
mobilizing amidst the structural spaces and overlap between ableism and white
settler supremacy. Finally, we strive to bring indigeneity and disability into
deeper conversation with each other by ‘calling out’violences of settler coloni-
alism and then charting possibilities of what decolonizing in CDS might mean.
The naming of indigeneity and disability
We follow feminist disability studies scholars to highlight ‘both the cultural
work and the limits of language’(Garland-Thomson 2005, 1559) and we
bring together struggles with terminology used to characterize indigeneity
2 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
and disability. Our goal in this section is twofold; first, we aim to touch a
nerve of commonality between indigeneity and disability in their challenges
with confusing and unsatisfying language, and we believe this is one way of
pointing out the need for CDS to do more to resist coloniality. Second, by
highlighting language, we are expressing caution about our own choices of
language in this article. As such, we declare the limitations of our work as well
as our effort to be part of keeping discussions of language, and the ways lan-
guage organizes our perceptions of ‘indigeneity’and ‘disability’,alive.
Gilroy et al. described the politicized nature of language relating to
Indigenous peoples by discussing how governments use and create termin-
ology through which to ‘control and demonise the peoples’(2018, 1361).
Greensmith (2012), for example, argued that the term Aboriginal was con-
cocted by the Canadian state for colonial and assimilative purposes. At the
same time, non-indigenous scholars Senier and Barker (2013) along with indi-
genous scholars (for example, Driskill 2010; Gilroy et al. 2018) pointed out
that using the term ‘Indigenous’can flatten differences or conflate histories,
cultures, and needs of unique tribes or nations. Accordingly, Gilroy et al.,
although writing of their experiences as indigenous scholars, qualified that in
describing themselves they ‘did not use the term “Indigenous”but instead
identified themselves by using the terms that connected them to their com-
munities, countries and culture’(2018, 1360).
Comparable debates about disability language have been circulating for
decades as personal preferences, shifting ideologies, and interchangeable uses
of different words have created confusion in the field of Disability Studies
(G. Wolbring, personal communication, 12 August 2011). Disability language,
like indigeneity language, has real and material effects in that chosen terms
are used to legitimate how resources and possibilities are dispersed (Garland-
Thomson 2011; Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006). Moreover, Gilroy et al. reminded
that ‘“disability”is not always used in Indigenous communities’(2018, 1360).
As such, we underline the need for CDS to negotiate language in ways that
account for shifting ideas of indigeneity, and of disability, across histories and
contexts. We argue further for the need to advance corresponding under-
standings which are plural and flexible (Gilroy et al. 2018; Jarman and Kafer
2014; Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009; Shildrick 2012). In this article, we
attempt to name/locate specific nations and tribes where possible, and to use
‘indigenous’where we intend to point to commonalities and shared realities
(e.g. the global patterns of violence produced by settler colonialism, or shared
imaginations around decolonization).
Histories and present realities of colonization in Canada
Canada, along with other colonial settler societies, is shaped by histories and
current realities of colonization. Chris Chapman called this Canada’s‘ongoing
DISABILITY & SOCIETY 3
history of genocide’(2012, 138). Colonization involves the extraction and use
of elements of Indigenous worlds –animals, plants, land, and human beings
–in order to build the wealth, privilege, and armies of colonizers (Tuck and
Yang 2012). Dene scholar Glen Coulthard wrote that a settler–colonial rela-
tionship in the Canadian context is ‘structured …to facilitate the disposses-
sion of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority’
(2014, 7). Colonialism in Canada thus involves eliminating or assimilating
indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their uprisings, primarily to facilitate
greater access to their land and resources (Coulthard 2014; Jaffee and John
2018). Colonial interests require classifications of ‘unfitness’(Jaffee and John
2018) and corresponding use of institutions and processes of social control.
Institutions include prisons, media, and schools (Chapman 2012; Erevelles
2011) and processes of social control include segregation, genocide, and sur-
veillance of indigenous ways of life (Simpson 2017).
Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colonization in
Canada was multi-pronged and involved at least five strategies: the decima-
tion of indigenous populations at first contact; the appropriation of land and
other natural resources; the allotment of small, undesirable pieces of land to
indigenous people in the form of reserves; the exploitation of indigenous
labour; and crown-sponsored (legalized) assaults and murders (Menzies and
Palys 2006). As Canada shaped itself into a nation-state, explicit colonial vio-
lence and wars were practised alongside indirect forms of colonization (Peers
2009; Thobani 2007). Colonial structures, processes, and discourses continue
to create conditions for countless violences against indigenous peoples. Such
structures were advanced in the Indian Act of 1876 (Speck 1915; Stote 2012),
which was built on the three British principles of assimilation, protection,
and civilization. The Act replaces indigenous ways of life with colonial, and
inherently patriarchal, racist, and ableist relations and institutions. These rela-
tions and institutions brought, and continue to bring, indigenous life under
government administration and surveillance –including births, deaths, mar-
riages, and movement on and off reserve.
Indeed, the Indian Act bolsters mechanisms of genocide –such as the
residential school system –which often thrive on discourses of benevolent
support. Residential schools promised educational opportunities but, in prac-
tice, furthered the aim of assimilating, containing, and killing ‘the Indian’.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, established in 2008 as
part of Canada’s attempts towards a comprehensive response to the residen-
tial school legacy, reported that the federal government deemed the residen-
tial school system unsuccessful in its aims of assimilation. Indeed, Canada
closed the last school in 1996. Yet residential schools were precursors to
‘integrated’, yet nonetheless assimilationist, provincially run schools that
entailed removing indigenous children from their families in the name of
4 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
support and education. Relatedly, children and youth were, and continue to
be, apprehended by provincial welfare authorities at high rates and placed
with white families (Chapman 2012; Meekosha 2011; Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada n.d.).
Institutions such as hospitals, prisons, group homes, and foster homes are
just a few sites where colonial structures and relationships continue to oper-
ate in Canada and, in turn, create and sustain violences and dependencies
(Chapman 2012; Speck 1915). Not only this; colonial impulses continue to be
enshrined in Canadian law and policy. Examples include the passing of sev-
eral omnibus bills during the reign of Stephen Harper, as well as in Canada’s
Criminal Code and provincial health policies (Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada: Calls to Action n.d.). These institutions, laws, and pol-
icies have produced, and continue to produce, an array of physical and eco-
nomic threats for indigenous peoples (Chapman 2012; Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada n.d.).
Canadian cultural scripts have the dual effect of maintaining and obscur-
ing these material and structural circumstances. Canadians have been
‘carefully taught to devalue Indigenous nationhood and culture’(‘Idle No
More’n.d.). Stereotypes of indigenous peoples prevail in the form of images
of ‘wild frontiers’,‘noble braves’, and ‘savages’, and accommodating, albeit
silent, ‘squaws’that ride on horseback and dress in ‘feathers and in fringe
and buckskin’(Adese 2012, 483). Yet the cultural scripting of ongoing colo-
niality goes well beyond representations of indigenous peoples. As Adese
(2012, 485) noted, more ‘fashionable’Canadian rhetoric of multiculturalism
and tolerance have replaced narratives about white settler superiority and
civilizing indigenous populations. Yet, as Dene scholar Glen Coulthard
pointed out, while polices of recognition and accommodation of indigenous
peoples have replaced previous policies of genocidal exclusion and assimila-
tion, the ‘relationship between indigenous peoples and the state remains
colonial to its foundation’(2014, 6). Discourses of Canada as a tolerant multi-
cultural nation, which appeared in official government policy during the
1970s, are still key to the naturalizing of whiteness as the taken-for-granted
Canadian identity.
Indigenous peoples have ‘absolutely resisted, adapted, and survived in the
face of all these policies by keeping their own ways alive in spite of legisla-
tive or other attempts to extinguish them’(Stote 2012, 43). Resistances to
colonial structures and relationships in Canada involve bids for self-determin-
ation and autonomous co-existence with settlers. Specifically, resistances
take the form of claims to land rights and hunting and fishing rights
(Simpson 2017; Speck 1915), cultural resurgence, and storytelling (for
example, King 2003). Resistances are part of everyday survival, and can take
the form of a simple ‘I hate you’(Chapman 2012). Yet critical theorists point
DISABILITY & SOCIETY 5
out that the opportunities and possibilities afforded to Indigenous peoples
are defined by white settler society and are most available to indigenous
peoples who assimilate (Chapman 2012; Speck 1915). These theorists stress
the need to keep the context of acts of resistance in full view:
Regardless of how aboriginal peoples have responded to imposed policies, it is
critical to remember that the context out of which this agency is practiced has
consistently been one of encroachment and colonialism. (Stote 2012, 44)
Given the ableist logics embedded in colonial policies and practices, we
turn to CDS to trace continuities and intersections between colonialism
and ableism in Canada. In this process, we call attention to gaps in CDS
theorizing and we raise possibilities for a sharpening of theoretical
tools in CDS in the service of better understanding, and mobilizing
amidst, the structural spaces and overlap between ableism and white set-
tler supremacy.
Existing theoretical tools in CDS
CDS is built on a view of disability as a relational, political, material, and
embodied experience (Garland-Thomson 2011; Kafer 2013; Meekosha 2011).
What ‘counts’as disability (or not) and who can ‘claim’disability or crip iden-
tity is necessarily blurry, shifting, contextual, and political (Kafer 2013).
The aim of CDS is to create room for many and varied identifications, and
de-identifications, with disability experiences and cultures. CDS scholars
challenge dominant ways of ‘knowing’disability and other categories of
existence, and in this process they resist binaries, such as disabled/non-dis-
abled (Lalvani and Polvere 2013; McRuer 2006; Overboe 1999; Shildrick
2012). The CDS call is to acknowledge the ways in which able-bodiedness
masquerades as a natural state (McRuer 2006, 1). Through these efforts, CDS
scholars account for disability knowledge generated by disabled and non-dis-
abled people alike as they engage in care relationships, partnerships, fami-
lies, and friendships.
CDS entails attentiveness to the multi-pronged nature of ‘ableism’, under-
stood as both the ‘exclusion, devaluation and violence against disabled peo-
ple as well as the exaltation, perpetuation and maintenance of ableness/
able-bodiedness and ability privilege’(Stevens 2011, 4). CDS is aimed at rep-
resenting complex experiences of disability, beyond typical cultural depic-
tions of lack, loss, inspiration, or super-ability. This includes attending to the
creative, disruptive, and generative possibilities of disability experiences.
Attending to such possibilities goes beyond a mere re-valuing of what has
been constructed as less than (which is a popular approach in this neoliberal
moment of tolerance of difference). Instead, attending to possibilities entails
evaluating this ‘less-than …in relation to an ideal’(Chen 2014, p. 173).
6 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
Indeed, CDS is about interrogating and resisting the demands of what
McRuer (2006) terms compulsory able-bodiedness and Kafer (2013) terms
compulsory able-mindedness. St. Pierre (2012) and Duque and Lashewicz
(2018) add to this line of resistance with their interrogations of demands for
compulsory fluency. Correspondingly, CDS is aimed at proliferating alterna-
tives crafted by individuals and communities as they respond to ableism and
expand meanings of access.
Tools for theorizing and mobilizing amidst the spaces and overlap
between ableism and white settler supremacy are not yet well developed in
CDS. Scholars have begun to point to the cursory treatment of racism in
most CDS analyses and to identify racism as inherent to the disability field
which is largely concerned with ‘white bodies’(Bell 2011). Scholars are mak-
ing corresponding efforts to include those most marginalized (e.g. disabled
queers of colour; people living in institutions) and to decentre the white,
male, economically privileged, disabled subject currently at the centre of dis-
ability theory and theory production. To that end, CDS draws on other
resources, including queer theory (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006; McRuer and
Mollow 2012), critical race theory (Erevelles 2011; Ghai 2012; Meekosha
2011), and feminist theory (Garland-Thomson 2005; Kafer 2013; Morris 1996).
Critiques of inadequate theoretical development and marginalization
within CDS are being taken up by scholars who employ intersectional ana-
lysis, allyship, and revolutionary response (for example, Goodley 2013;
Jarman and Kafer 2014; Chen 2014). CDS scholars have taken the lead from
black feminists (for example, Anzaldua 1991; Crenshaw 1991) who propose
an intersectional framework for moving ‘past simplistic and unidimensional
notions of identity’(Connor, Ferri, and Annamma 2016,1–2). As such, schol-
ars in CDS are accounting for the complexities of multiple differences and
structures of threat. At the same time, Erevelles (2011) pointed to problems
with ‘additive’approaches which position disability as an afterthought, a
metaphor, or a nuance to existing intersectional analysis of race, gender, and
class. Also, some scholars have pointed out the workings of ableism evident
in the absence of disability in intersectional analyses (Erevelles 2011; Mitchell
and Snyder 2003).
Other scholars added that although intersections of gender and disability
oppressions have been examined as part of CDS, racialization and colonial-
ism have yet to be well considered (Bell 2011; Jarman 2012; Meekosha 2011;
Peers 2009; Withers & Withers, 2018). Senier and Barker (2013) and Barker
and Murray (2010) are among the few who have begun charting shared con-
cerns of disability studies and Indigenous or Native Studies. Senier and
Barker (2013) argued that disability studies scholars have detailed ways in
which the structures and logics of eugenics serve to construct and conflate
human traits, including feeblemindedness, poverty, race, and physical
DISABILITY & SOCIETY 7
disability. At the same time, few disability studies scholars have observed
particular risks posed to indigenous people by these eugenics logics and
structures (Senier and Barker 2013, 132). Senier and Barker (2013) also sug-
gested that even within the vast array of literature about the health of indi-
genous peoples, certain impairments –including congenital conditions,
mobility impairments, and cognitive differences –have not been linked to
colonial impulses. Meekosha (2011) and Ghai (2012) provided rare accounts
of the ways in which colonial and imperial aggressions in Australia and India
produce disability amongst indigenous groups, through combat, environ-
mental devastation, and disease.
Historian Mary-Ellen Kelm described the ways in which colonial policies in
twentieth-century Canada produced diabetes, autoimmune disorders, tuber-
culosis, trauma, and other illnesses. This included the separation of indigen-
ous people from their traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering grounds
and food supplies; the housing of indigenous children and adults in unsani-
tary residential schools, prisons, asylums, and other institutions; and the crim-
inalization of traditional healing practices and ceremonies (Kelm 1998 as
quoted in Senier and Barker 2013). Senier and Barker (2013) added that
environmental destruction is an additional way that colonialism produces
disability. Barker and Murray put it the following way: ‘the history of colonial-
ism (and its postcolonial/neocolonial aftermath) is indeed a history of mass
disablement, and [ …] the acquisition of disability [is] tied to wider patterns
of dispossession –the loss of family, home, land, community, employment’
(2010, 230). Thus, while some attend to the ways in which colonization pro-
duces indigenous disability (Senier and Barker 2013), few scholars, in our
estimation, call attention to the colonial effects of ableist structures
and violences.
In the following, we aim to bring indigeneity and disability into deeper
conversation with each other and we want to contribute to efforts to centre
the experiences of indigenous people and to call out the violences of settler
colonialism. Mirroring queer of colour critiques and indigenous feminisms
which position patriarchy as a colonial tool (Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Chrystos
1995 as quoted in Driskill 2010), we explicate ways in which ableism and
ableist violence function as a colonial tool. We draw from select works in
CDS in an effort to tease apart three strands of ableist violence which func-
tion this way in the Canadian context. These strands include the pathologiz-
ing of indigenous bodies and minds; the perpetuation of tropes of
‘inspirational disability’which have the colonial effect of exalting white set-
tler Canada/Canadians; and the continuance of eugenic institutions which
have the effect of ignoring indigenous ways of life and creating white set-
tler space.
8 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
Ableist violence as a colonial tool
Pathologizing indigenous bodies and minds
Meekosha (2011) along with Mitchell and Snyder (2003), authors of a special
issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, provided rare insight
into intersections of colonization and ableism, primarily in Australian and
American contexts. Mitchell and Snyder (2003) noted that colonization and able-
ism are intertwined, as evident in the eugenics logics and practices that continue
to present day. These logics and practices were, and are, aimed at ‘racial purifica-
tion and the elimination of human “defects”’ (2003, 844). Marginalization of
racialized people thus was, and is, dependent on eugenics concepts of ‘built-in
biological inferiority’(Mitchell and Snyder 2003). Notions of biological inferiority
justify accusations of ‘feeblemindedness’(Mitchell & Snyder, 2003, p. 845) and
indigenous peoples, like disabled peoples, have been regarded as ‘social men-
ace’(Mitchell & Snyder, 2003, p. 862.). Intertwined discourses of eugenic and
racial degeneracy bolstered anti-indigenous policy in settler societies like
Canada (Meekosha 2011). Policies included marriage restriction laws as well as
coerced sterilization. Coerced sterilization, while carried out in multiple Canadian
provinces, was formalized in legislation in Alberta and British Columbia (Stote
2012). Practices included/include routine institutionalization, confinement to
reserves, and mandated segregation in schools (Erevelles 2011; Mitchell and
Snyder 2003; Stote 2012), indigenous communities, and nations. Senier and
Barker summarize how such discourses and practices remain entrenched:
From Canada to Australia and New Zealand, colonial discourses have pathologized
indigenous bodies …narratives of indigenous pathology are anything but subtle
when it comes to underwriting colonialism. Native mortality means indigenous
lands are available for the taking …Native illness means indigenous people are
unable to manage their own resources—their water, their trees, their minerals,
their labor. Further, in the language of settler colonialism, indigenous people need
medical ‘intervention’and ‘management.’Thus, around the world, federal and state
institutions have mushroomed purporting to manage indigenous health: federal
clinics and indigenous health services, TB wards, housing departments, boarding
schools, prisons. (2013, 127–128)
Several scholars aid in understanding the workings of pathologization of
indigenous bodies. In efforts to address questions about ‘recursive relations
of race, ethnicity, Aboriginality, and psychiatry across British Columbia and
Canada’, Menzies and Palys, 2006, p. 152 examined the experiences of 100
Native patients who entered British Columbia’s public mental health system
between 1879 and 1950. Menzies and Palys provided an analysis which
accounts for:
institutional, cultural, and human environments that framed indigenous patient
biographies; considers how ideas about Aboriginality, pathology, and reason
figured into medico-legal management of ‘insane’Native people and; illustrates
DISABILITY & SOCIETY 9
some of the efforts that patients and advocates made to resist and transcend
official imputations of pathology, identity, and race. (2006, 154)
Menzies and Palys found evidence of racialized constructions of health
and madness; for example, attributing madness to biological inferiority,
administering IQ tests as ‘evidence’of the low intelligence of indigenous
peoples, understanding assimilation of indigenous peoples as ‘recovery’from
madness and pathologizing resistance expressed through escapes, suicides,
and refusing to talk, eat, communicate, and cooperate.
More recent pathologization of indigenous bodies is illustrated by
Greensmith (2012), who provided a case-study analysis of news-media cover-
age of Indigenous protests against pipeline development in Caledonia,
Ontario. Drawing on LaRocque (1993) and Titchkosky (2007), Greensmith illu-
minated how disability tropes served colonial and ableist purposes and con-
cluded that:
The stories told in the Canadian news media can be read as normative
representations of ‘problem’Indians and their disturbing and violent behaviours.
They can alternatively be examined through textual analysis to show how disability
tropes constitute Indigenous issues and peoples as …problems of a pathological
bent. (2012, 22)
Greensmith worked to unsettle these tropes by attending to the words
and narratives which ‘make disability (dis)appear’(Striker 1999, 134). Further,
Greensmith accounted for disability’s intertwining with embodied subjectiv-
ities of gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, and class. As such, Greensmith
attempted a more complex casting of indigeneity and disability, and a trou-
bling of simple identifications and representations. Representations of indi-
genous peoples as pathological serve to reconstitute national Canadian
mythology of white settlers as ‘normal’and rightful inhabitants of Canada, a
land with no genocidal past. Indigenous peoples are portrayed as
‘disturbingly out of the ordinary’, thus reaffirming what we all seem to know:
that both indigeneity and disability are unwanted and undesirable, and
whiteness and normalcy are desirable (Greensmith 2012). Greensmith (2012)
illuminated constructions of disability and madness as not only the products
of colonialism, but also as colonial tools for dismissing individual and collect-
ive claims to land and sovereignty.
Pathologizing of indigenous bodies is also used to frame indigenous
‘failures’to respond positively or normatively to western ideals as evidence
of their biological, cultural, and racial inferiority (Speck 1915; Stote 2012). In
everyday discourse, indigenous resistance is reduced to an ‘anger manage-
ment problem’(Chapman 2012) which serves to further justify eugenic poli-
cies and structures. For example, Greensmith (2012) noted the ways in which
spaces of protest to land exploitation (e.g. in Caledonia, Ontario in 2005)
were constructed as evidence of indigenous people’s madness. Legitimate
10 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
protest to conditions of colonization disrupt not only Canadian mythology –
such as the Canadian government’s‘gifting’of land to incoming white set-
tlers –but also Canada’s popular image of itself as a generous and tolerant
(‘multicultural’) nation. This cherished image is, according to Schick and St.
Denis (2005 as quoted in Greensmith 2012, 25), ‘necessary to cover over and
forget that the land was taken by coercive means through a process that
depended on inferiorizing and racializing [indigenous] people[s]’.
Perpetuating inspirational disability tropes that exalt white settler
Canadians/Canada
Some scholars link ableist and colonial pathologization as emerging from,
and sustaining, Canadian nation-making. Danielle Peers, for example, dis-
cusses how ‘inspirational’, physically fit disability as exemplified by
Paralympic athletes is rooted in, and reproduces, practices that ‘differentiate
and segregate differently racialized, gendered and classed populations
(2009a, 86). Citing herself and others, Peers (2012) points out that we love to
tell stories about competitive disability sport and that these stories tend to
feature ‘heroic, white, able-bodied, biomedical doctors who invented new
sports to save poor, useless disabled war veterans’(p. 177). Such stories are
accompanied by stories of ‘heroic, hyper-able disabled athletes who have
used sport to overcome their tragic biomedical disabilities and to live more
normal and productive lives’(Clare 1999; Hardin and Hardin 2004; Howe
2008; Peers 2009a,2009b; Titchkosky 2007 as QUOTED in Peers 2012, 5). The
production of primarily white, inspirational, physically fit disability in Canada,
visible in figures like Terry Fox and Rick Hansen, is contingent upon the cre-
ation of myriad Other kinds of categorized ‘subjects’(Foucault 2003). Other
subjects, including Indigenous peoples, are racialized and pathologized and,
as such, serve to secure and reproduce white supremacy. Inspirational figures
are used to elicit discourses of a ‘united’Canada, exalting Anglo-Canadian
ways of life including superior tolerance of disability. Through these dis-
courses, Canadians celebrate themselves as compassionate and inclusive, and
‘evade the responsibility to address the deeper questions of colonial power’
(Adese 2012, 485). Indeed, through discourses of tolerance, compassion, and
inclusivity, Canadians produce ‘new ways to suppress Indigenous populations
[and make invisible Indigenous sovereignties] while appearing to do the very
opposite’(2012, 481). These discourses exalt the Canadian nation while qui-
eting uprisings and radical demands for structural changes to political and
economic inequity (Mishra 1990; Thobani 2007). Correspondingly, calls for
changes on issues such as transportation, housing, and employment which
impact disabled Indigenous people and other marginalized groups are
also quieted.
DISABILITY & SOCIETY 11
Chris Chapman (2012) helped link discourses of tolerance to everyday set-
tings by examining the ways in which his own positionality as a non-dis-
abled white helping professional in a Canadian institution is tethered to the
denigration of the disabled Aboriginal children he claims to ‘help’. Chapman
situated his own reputation as a competent, benevolent, innocent non-dis-
abled white helping professional amidst ongoing legacies of colonialism,
genocide, and eugenic incarceration in Canada. Particularly relevant to the
purposes of the current article, Chapman examined the ways in which the
pathologization of Aboriginal youth, and the corresponding ‘individualizing
of professional psychology interventions’, mask colonial processes (2012,
144). First, children’s experiences or struggles are not attributed to the inter-
generational trauma of colonialism. Instead, the ‘failure to adjust’to a colo-
nial world is individualized, pathologized, and labelled a disability. Second,
the supposed need for ‘intervention’and ‘treatment’(or eradication) of dis-
ability creates (historically colonial) relations of dependency between whites
and indigenous youth. These relations of dependency sustain logics of
whites as independent, able-bodied, benevolent helpers of the dependent
child in need of help. Delivering children to white professionals who provide
such treatment seems wise. Thus, legacies of eugenic incarceration and path-
ologization serve to justify the removal of Aboriginal children from their fam-
ilies, and render colonial relations and institutions invisible and
unremarkable.
Eugenic institutions that create and propagate white settler space
Ableist violence is manifest in the continuance of eugenic institutions
through which indigenous sovereignties are subjugated and white settler
space created and propagated. Jijian Voronka (2008) provided an account of
Ontario’s first asylum, built in 1850 under the name of the Provincial Lunatic
Asylum. This asylum was subsequently, and on multiple occasions, re-named,
renovated, and partially torn down. Voronka contended that this asylum, and
each of its iterations, constitutes moral interventions aimed at building and
narrating the Canadian nation. The asylum site, and its evolution, are part of
a larger, longer ‘history of whiteness’(2008, 46) in which Canada mytholo-
gizes itself as a once bare, empty land ‘discovered’by the British. This myth-
ology has been key to establishing the boundaries of ‘white settler space’,
and ‘create[ing] the Canadian nation’(2008, 46) through violent segregation
and ‘geographical banishment’of Indigenous peoples, including into carceral
sites like the Provincial Lunatic Asylum. The asylum site itself was con-
structed as a ‘problem space’, which was aimed at regulating, policing, inter-
vening on, and containing madness and racialized mad subjects.
Voronka asserted that Canada was, and continues to be, actively built as a
‘white, middle-class nation that needs to protect its citizens from the
12 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
degenerate underclass’(2008,45–46). Protection involves colonial projects
like carceral containments of mad, degenerate, disabled subjects. Other sites
–not just asylums, but schools, hospitals, prisons, rehabilitation settings,
group homes, and day programmes –where disability and madness are con-
tained might also be part of these colonial projects. Carceral sites are used
to ‘contain, supervise, survey, discipline, coerce, rehabilitate, and/or normalize
degenerate bodies’(2008, 47). These sites are simultaneously used to moni-
tor, train, and create the ‘worthy’(read respectable, self-contained, healthy)
Canadian citizens (Voronka 2008). Such sites were ‘disguised as benevolent
and philanthropic, calling for discipline, regulation, and temperance in the
name of nation-building’(2008, 48). These sites, and their various new
designs, are still proffered as a benevolent solution to the ‘problem’of mad-
ness; yet these new designs serve to obfuscate the reality of continued car-
ceral confinement, segregation, and subjugation of mad subjects.
Bringing our strands together
We want to raise questions about how the Canadian nation was made
through colonial violence (Coulthard 2014) and mad/disability containment
(Menzies and Palys 2006; Voronka 2008). We also want to question how
Canada is continually made and re-made through such violence, and the cor-
responding creation of benevolent white, settler (and ability-normative)
space imperiled by the Native and disability ‘problem’. This ongoing nation-
making runs counter to recognizing the sovereignty of indigenous peoples,
and their nations, and is tied to disability/mad containment and degradation.
We encourage scholars to build on this emerging work by expanding and
deepening critiques of the ways in which racialized knowledge has been,
and continues to be, constructed in disability studies as ‘an impossible or
undesirable or simply unthought way to know’(McRuer and Johnson 2014,
156; emphasis in the original). Also, we argue the need for further critique of
how disability studies and disability activisms problematically adopt what
Chen (2014) calls disability nationalism. Such nationalism is most visible in
western disability pride movements and identity politics, and is most upheld
in circles of white, class-privileged activists. Such nationalism does not
account for the ongoing forces of colonial war, impoverishment, and pollu-
tion, particularly in the context of western imperial aggressions, which
deliver death and injury globally to racialized people (Chen 2014; Meekosha
2011). Chen put it the following way: ‘Disability rights often takes place,
today, at a distance away from certain sites of damage/change’(2014, 176).
Moreover, Jaffee and John draw on McRuer (2010) as well as Mitchell and
Snyder (2010) to remind us to critique disability nationalism as one (more)
DISABILITY & SOCIETY 13
means of making ‘disabled settlers ‘productive’in perpetuating settler-coloni-
alism’(Jaffee and John 2018, 1413).
Bridging distances between troubling pasts and meaningful ways forward
entails questioning how we collectively sustain intellectual and practical rac-
isms in our projects even as we gesture towards critical and reparative com-
muning in academia (Chen 2014). In order to re-focus on sites of damage
and change which are typically ignored, we follow Chen who asks ‘What
knowing do we want [in disability studies]? What would a decolonized or
decolonizing cripistemology—one that took that decolonization seriously by
recognizing coloniality’s serious attachment to typology, identification, and
orders of knowledge—look, smell, and feel like?’(2014, 182). These under-
theorized intersections and previously ‘unthought’ways of knowing, when
desired and put into motion, have the potential to create alternatives to
ableism, white supremacy, colonization, gender oppression, and other sites
of social distress (Meekosha 2011).
Towards a decolonizing practice in CDS: future directions
What decolonizing in CDS might mean
We share the concern about the overuse and co-optation of the term
‘decolonizing’articulated by Senier and Barker (2013) and Tuck and Wang
(2012). Yet we find value in thinking through what steps towards decoloniz-
ing of CDS might entail and mean. Qo-Li Driskill (Cherokee) defined decolon-
ization as ‘ongoing, radical resistance against colonialism that includes
struggles for land redress, self-determination, healing historical trauma, cul-
tural continuance, and reconciliation’(2010, 69). Accordingly, cultivating a
decolonizing practice in the academic CDS context is complicated.
Indigenous people, and the specific historical and political realities of indi-
genous nations, tend to be ignored in academia ‘unless as “subjects”of
anthropological and historical research’(2010, 84). When indigenous people
are mentioned, they are usually part of a list of other racialized people and
are not discussed in terms of the specificity of their struggles for sovereignty
and claims to land. This amounts to ‘un-seeing’indigenous people and fuels
uneasy relationships between indigenous peoples and other social justice
movements (Driskill 2010).
Although the colonial nature of our projects in CDS and in disability activ-
ism remains largely unaddressed, a handful of scholars (as mentioned earlier)
have pointed to white-centric theorizing and organizing in CDS and the
need for a decolonizing of our theories and practices. Several CDS scholars
point to the inherently colonial nature of the education system in general
(Mitchel and Snyder 2003), and teaching in particular (Chapman 2012, 149).
Others in the field note, mostly in passing, the fact that post-secondary
14 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
institutions are only possible through colonial and imperial violence
(Aubrecht 2012; Driskill 2010). Still others have extended this critique to the
colonial underpinnings of activist and artist spaces within and beyond the
field of CDS (Chen 2014). Few take notice of, as Driskill (2010) calls out in
relation to queer studies, the fact that indigenous peoples and resistance
movements are ignored in academia and in CDS theorizing and critiques.
This article is not intended to advise, in a how-to style, about ways to
practice decolonization in CDS, but is instead aimed at mobilizing thinking
about the need for decolonized, or at least less colonized, CDS that employ
theoretical tools and practices different from those currently available. Thus, as
Driskill proclaims, we argue the value of a shift in thinking: ‘A major paradigm
shift …must take place for solidarity work to happen with Native people:
The United States and Canada are not postcolonial’(2010, 79; original
emphasis). Driskill cited the need for fields of study, outside Native Studies, to
position themselves as responsible for examining ongoing colonialism, geno-
cide, survival, and resistance of Native nations and peoples. This need not
entail the expectation that all projects in a given field focus on indigenous
people and experiences. Rather, positioning as responsible for such critical
examination involves a sustained analysis of colonial realities in settler–colonial
states such as Canada; recognition of the absence of indigenous peoples
except as subjects of study; and a change to the consistent portrayal of indi-
genous peoples as historical rather than contemporary (Driskill 2010).
We draw from Driskill (2010) and others to elaborate that CDS positioning
towards more critical accounting for colonial realities involves the centring of
indigenous –and, indeed, tribally specific –experiences of disability. This
needs to be accompanied by the centring of indigenous modes of critique
and creative resistance amidst historical and current realities of colonialism
and ableism. Such modes of critique and critical resistance require CDS to
grapple with epistemological challenges raised by Native Studies that include
rejecting the taken-for-granted dualism between the environment/space and
(disabled) humans/bodies within (settler) disability studies (Jaffee and John
2018). Correspondingly, CDS must respond more critically to the advance of
broad disability rights movement goals which are largely Eurocentric in
nature. Further, according with Native Studies will entail greater uptake of
story-based practices and narrative knowledges (Eigenbrod 2010). In research
collaborations and data collection, such uptake necessitates a relationship
orientation and a greater emphasis on being led by collaborator/participant
energies (Boettcher-Sheard et al. 2017; Duque and Lashewicz 2018).
We predict that decolonizing tools and practices will avoid monolithic
approaches and instead strive for relevance to unique contexts, needs, and
resources. This might take forms of providing material support and other
resources to indigenous resistances; valuing indigenous labour through
DISABILITY & SOCIETY 15
honoraria, access to funding. and authorship; collaborating with indigenous
scholars; and ensuring that our academic projects invite meaningful partici-
pation from, and directly benefit, indigenous communities. Such efforts may
involve seeking and including voices conventionally regarded as unruly and,
thus, distinctly challenging to the status quo (Gilroy et al. 2018; Tuhinwai
Smith 2010 as quoted in Gilroy et al. 2018). Also, indigenous perspectives,
perhaps especially those that challenge the status quo, may be used to gen-
erate reflective questions and develop standards to guide professional dis-
ability-service and allied practices. Further, Gilroy et al. recommend finding
opportunities for research partners to discuss who participated in the
research and, therefore, how the research unintentionally ‘privileges some
voices and not others in research findings’(2018, 1350).
Related to discussions of how some voices are privileged over others, we
qualify this discussion of what decolonizing in CDS might look like by
reminding of our own white and settler privilege and by pointing out our
having offered nothing about fuller accounting for distinct contexts,
needs, and resources experienced in the Global South. As such, we con-
tribute to what Meekosha discusses as a distinct irony born of ‘contesting
one kind of normativity while imposing another’(2011,670).Thislimita-
tion reminds us how much remains to be done towards a decolonizing of
CDS, and of the wisdom of the words of Jaffee and John (2018)whocau-
tion that coalitions between disability and indigeneity will not be easy or
comfortable.
In conclusion, Barker and Murray (2010), referring to what they termed a
‘decolonization of disability studies’, issued a call to re-think our dominant
use of models and leveraging of identity politics in disability studies. This
can include refusing to impose non-indigenous frameworks of health and
disability on disabled people and to engaging with ‘more nuanced under-
standings of disability in relation to cultural difference and situated experi-
ence’(Barker and Murray 2010, 227) in global contexts. By allowing for, and
galvanizing, epistemological challenges to CDS brought by Native Studies
and by the lived realities of disabled indigenous peoples, resistance to
assimilation may gain force. We offer this work as a small contribution
towards decolonizing theory and practice by illuminating ways that CDS
does not adequately account for the colonial and racializing effects of ableist
violence. We want this article to count towards what Senier and Barker
(2013) point to, as stated earlier, and to what we interpret Cherokee scholar
Qo-Li Driskill to achieve when he brings together Queer and Native Studies
under the rubric of what he calls Two-Spirit Critiques born of decoloniz-
ing impulses.
16 E. J. HUTCHEON AND B. LASHEWICZ
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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