That’s a hard question because I, like many writers, feel an attachment to my writing. I think my piece, “The Erasure of Indigenous People in Chronic Illness”—which was originally featured in Bitch Media and then was included in the first volume of Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong—is one of my favorites, if for no other reason than because it prompted people to think about Native communities and disability, colonialism, and genocide in a way they never had before. Native people have been so forgotten, so erased, yet we still face such horrible forms of violence and oppression in our purposeful disablement.
I’ll add a second piece, “Indigenous People with Disabilities Are on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis” which I wrote three years ago for Truthout. I spent over a year researching for the piece. And it was one of the first pieces I wrote where I examined the issue from a global perspective. The combination of indigeneity, disability, and the environment and climate crisis was just not something really anyone was talking about.
In your June 2024 essay for Crushing Colonialism, “Where is my pride? On being disabled, queer, and Native,” you critiqued the concept of “disability pride.” You said that your relationship to your identity as a disabled person is complicated by the United States’ “purposeful disablement of [your] Indigenous body.” You contextualized this, explaining that Indigenous people have higher rates of disabilities and illnesses than non-Indigenous people due to “centuries of brutalities” from colonizing nations. Given this context, it is “a place of real privilege, and is frankly a bit galling, to expect a disabled Indigenous person to proclaim themselves proud of being disabled.” From your essay, it seems that you are focusing on disability justice with an intersectionality lens. You argue that pride celebrations aren’t enough, and that you need to see your “communities aiming to ensure disability justice practices.” What are some of the ways they could do that?
There are numerous ways. First, I would like to see Indigenous communities, particularly tribal nations, begin to ensure accessibility when planning events, such as ceremonies and pow wows or constructing new buildings on our tribal lands. I don’t see that happening, in part due to a lack of funding and resources. However, our communities could be doing more. For example, writing image descriptions on our social media. My tribe has the staff to do it.
Second, I’d also like to see the disability community meaningfully include Indigenous people. We are so forgotten and thrown away, including in the disability community. It’s frustrating. I’d like to see the large disability rights organizations cut ties with corporations like Wells Fargo and entities harming Indigenous people on these lands and abroad.
Third, I want to see disability and healthcare communities fighting just as hard for the full robust funding of Indian health services as they would for Medicare and Medicaid. I want to see those in the environmental community take a disability justice lens. Don’t just say, “Oh this pipeline makes people sick,” but talk about how communities are already disabled, in particular, Indigenous people, and how something like a pipeline continues a legacy of genocide. There are just so many ways in which communities could be showing up for us. And while I appreciate a good celebration, if we are oppressing folks, leaving them behind, and letting them be harmed and even murdered, then our pride celebrations are hollow at best.
How do members of the various tribal nations within the Indigenous community view disability, in your experience?
That’s a difficult question to answer because every nation is different with our own ways and customs and worldviews and such. We have well over 500 federally recognized tribal nations just within the so-called United States, and that number doesn’t come close to actually identifying the amount of tribal nations that have existed on these lands since the white invasion, let alone Indigenous communities on a global level. There’s also limited research on the topic, as Indigenous people tend to relate information through oral histories rather than written histories. What we would call disabilities or illnesses in a modern-day colonized world was once seen very differently among Indigenous people. For instance, in a modern-day world, we would call seers, who could see the future and talk with the ancestors, mentally ill.
The month of the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), you wrote for the Disability Visibility Project about your mixed feelings about it. “I’d rather the ADA exist than not, but as we’re seeing under COVID-19 it means very little for Native lives.” You added that policy such as the ADA isn’t enough, and that people must “stand together in solidarity and become co-conspirators in the fight for our people’s lives. … We can, and must, do better.” Can you say more? What are some ways individuals can actively fight for the lives and livelihood of Indigenous people with disabilities? Are there policies that you think would be more effective than the existing policies?
I think there’s a lot of different, concrete ways we can do this from more grassroots nonviolent direction action, like showing up for the Haul No! fight to try to stop the transport of uranium across the Navajo Nation Reservation or for the Thacker Pass movement to stop another lithium mine from going on Native lands. On the policy side of things, indigenous people in the so-called United States, as well as in many other countries, are purposefully impoverished by the colonial governments. If we are fighting for the most basic needs like food or shelter or clean water, we can’t ever rise up and fight for our true rights, justice, our trust, and treaty rights. When our tribes are purposefully underfunded, or the existence of our tribes are denied, we don’t have control over the infrastructure projects that come onto our lands. How can you have paratransit if you don’t have good roads? How can you provide the most basic of healthcare, if you don’t have healthcare providers
Some of the policies that are supposed to address some of the glaring oppressions of Native people are failures. For example, American Indians and Alaska Natives have the lowest rates of home ownership in the so-called United States. There is a policy to make a mortgage more accessible, but you can only access that federal program where there is federal trust land— basically almost entirely West of the Mississippi and on lands that are very rural, often very polluted, and have no healthcare or jobs. All this land is Indian country, whether the federal government recognizes it or not.
There’s not a single issue in this country that does not impact Indigenous people. For example, if you are looking at the over-policing and police brutality of disabled people, you should also be looking at those issues for Indigenous people. Even the federal government admits and owns the fact that American Indians and Alaska Natives are killed by police and also incarcerated at the highest rates per capita.
You’re working on two books. Can you talk a little bit about them and what your goals are for each book?
The one I am currently working on with the most gusto is an anthology called Sacred and Subversive: Queer Voices on Faith and Spirituality. This is the first ever English language multi-faith book of pieces by queer people. I have worked very hard to make it diverse and robust, because just like with Native people or disabled people, there’s not any one way to be queer. This book is more crucial than ever as the well-being of queer people and our very lives are under attack across the world.
The other book, which I began writing several years ago, looks at a web of resource extraction in central Appalachia, from lumber to the very first oil drill to the present day of the building of multiple pipelines, export facilities, and cracker plants. I began with research and reporting on the Mariner East Two Pipeline, but expanded to other fracking related projects, including other pipelines, cracker plants and fracked waste storage facilities.” It was a web of extraction. As soon as I get my first manuscript for Sacred and Subversive in, I will get back to working on this book.
Is there anything you would like to add?
November may be Native American Heritage Month—but we Natives are here year-round. Support us year-round. And remember whose land you are on, and that the Land Back movement is more than just a catchy hashtag. The wellbeing of Indigenous people is the wellbeing of all people.
