The contributors to the special issue come from locations all over the globe. We co-editors are guests on the ancestral lands of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, Abenaki Nation, Lenni Lenape Tribe, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Myaamia, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations. We offer our deep respect to the ancestors of these peoples, past, present, and emerging. Acknowledging the long and continuing histories of the stolen land on which we live, work, and dream, resists forces of erasure; it honors a more truthful account of our collective stories; and affirms solidarity with the Indigenous peoples who are its traditional stewards. We invite readers who are not familiar with land acknowledgments, Indigenous sovereignty work, or the Indigenous histories immediately around you to spend time with the resources listed in the endnotes. 1
We also want to express our deep appreciation to the many people who made this publication possible. In dreamscaping this project, we intentionally recruited people from wide-ranging locations inside and outside of academic worlds, across Turtle Island and beyond, in the hopes of sparking more coalitional, cross-disciplinary, and broad public collective learning. The generous response has buoyed our work. Thank you to our 2019 Organization of American Historians Conference co-panelists (Jessica Cowing, Caroline Lieffers, and Amanda Stuckey) with whom we originally conceptualized this issue. Thank you to the authors, the external reviewers, the Quarterly's editorial staff, colleagues at the Ohio State University library who produce the DSQ, and our communities of kin, colleagues, and comrades who sustain and hold us.
This special issue centers on Indigeneity and disability. Reciprocity is our question, practice, and aspiration: What is possible when we Indigenize disability studies (DST) and when we fully embed disability studies in Native American Indigenous studies (NAIS)?
Throughout the process of editing this special edition, we aimed to create connections among ourselves and with the contributors that were informed by the idea of reciprocity and kinship we found in their articles. We were invested together in a set of relationships that brought with them both expectations and obligations. We endeavored to be respectful of one another and focused on the well-being of the group. Remembering that coming together from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines and understandings of Indigeneity and disability is a practice with long histories, we welcomed the gifts of curiosity, struggle, adaptation, and cooperation. Our obligations also extend to the wider Indigenous and disability communities to whom we hope this issue might be a useful resource.
Innovative, ancient, land-based, and interactive, the methods across this special issue reflects reciprocity. Interdependence is a through-line. Co-authored essays, cross-generational storytelling, citational practices, writing workshops, and extended collaborations with communities at the center of projects are some of the ways mutual connections have taken form. In distinct and quiet ways, processes of cooperation, accountability, and sustainability hold these pieces. Questions hover in the margins of our work, demanding our attention and care: Who's not here? Why? What if? How else? These questions, and all the varied answers offered in response, invite close attention to well-being, justice, sustainability, self-determination, access, identity, belonging, memory, and power. The practice of collaboration with the authors and the writings they produced are fundamental sources upon which our reflections draw. In short: reciprocity made this special issue on Indigeneity and disability possible; we hope that it reciprocates in many other forms.
Our own conversations about the transformative possibilities of critically studying Indigeneity and disability revealed multiple meanings of self-determination and ableism. Attention to these foundational forces especially challenges us to seek out and learn deeply from people, stories, and worlds targeted by colonialism, imperialism, and ableism. 2 Practices of Indigenous-disability scholarship and artistic expression resist merely looking at disabled Indigenous people; rather, these approaches call scholars and activists (and those who inhabit both identities) to look to Indigenous people, disabled people, and others (human and other-than-human) who have been especially marked by ableism, as holders of valuable lived knowledge. 3 As our contributors collectively underscore, conceptualizations of disability and bodymind differences take vastly different forms when considered outside narrow settler and imperial frames. Insights sparked by knowledge rooted in Indigenous and disability lived wisdom creates new ways of knowing and relating to others, to place, to the fluid past and present. As self-nourishing practices, Indigenous-disability studies and activism seeds possibilities for different paths into the histories ahead of us.
The cumulative development of this DSQ issue has drawn our attention to three interlocking themes at the center of Indigeneity and disability: kinship, place, and knowledge-making. We offer them back in reciprocity and as entry-points to the authors' individual and collective works. These themes serve as anchors to the collection, not as binding categories of stories or as the only approaches to engage. We share them as an invitation to generate connections at their overlaps and beyond. We hope that you create additional linkages, reconfigure the current offerings, start new conversations or extend ongoing ones. Collectively, we seek to dismantle more of the barriers blocking reciprocity between NAIS and DST, and to forge greater connections between fields of study and the communities whose lived histories make them possible.
Kinship is a nourishment, a methodology, and a source of knowledge. Kinship embodies sets of relations and practices that change the meanings we attach to bodyminds and behaviors. 4 At every register and across times and places, kinship is dynamic, contextual, contingent, collective, and contested. As historian Adria L. Imada argues in her study of Kānaka 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiians) forcibly removed to the leprosy settlement on the island of Molokai, family experiences "constitute a micropolitics of survival against the aggregate, coercive power of settler colonial institutions and the weight of Western biomedical knowledge." In Imada's account, "seemingly discrete and heterogeneous acts of contesting medical and legal regulations, Native people and their collateral kin unmade settler colonial processes of ability and disability formation." 5 A variety of DST and NAIS scholars detail that relationships people inhabit—as parents, siblings, partners, and friends, as well as government-sponsored trustees, judges, and physicians—shape the understandings and material consequences of bodyminded difference. 6
Because of its power, kinship has long been a target of imperial and colonial medical and legal intervention. Indigenous-disability studies deepens our understanding of kinship as a central force. In the story of her Muscogee great-great grandmother Emma Gregory, Native American studies scholar Anne Gregory details how U.S. settler policies such as allotment, compounded by medical categories of incompetency, corroded familial obligations, self-determination, and sustenance. 7 Exile from land and kin, confinement and institutionally-induced illness, followed in their wake. The lived impact extends swiftly past the individuals taken away, incarcerated, and buried far from home. Generations later, those who carry the stories continue to reach, question, and to seek justice. In these and many other accounts, kinship explicitly claims human relatives but also kinship to other-than-human-beings, and to air, water, and land.
Place in this context includes specific locations, whether buildings, towns, or territories that are constructed in the minds and by the hands of human beings and land, air, water and all areas of the so-called "natural world." Through both NAIS and DST, we understand that place shapes relations of care and defines relations of power. 8 In our usage of the category, "place" erases the imaginary gulfs between human/non-human and past/present belonging and interaction. 9 Places provide opportunities to talk about reciprocity with—and responsibilities to—non-human kin. As Caroline Lieffers, In'aska (Dennis Hastings, Umoⁿhoⁿ) and Margery Coffey (Mi'oⁿbathiⁿ, Umoⁿhoⁿ) write in their essay on Umoⁿhoⁿ (Omaha) Territory in this collection, "Nothing in this landscape lives alone." 10
Invoking a capacious understanding of place is a critical practice in writing against imperial and settler colonial ideas and histories of Indigeneity and disability. Early European colonizers popularized the idea that Indigenous lands were terra nullius—empty spaces, ripe for the taking by Europeans who could make them "productive"—meaning to make them profitable in a Western, capitalist understanding of land use, domination, and Manifest Destiny. 11 Environmental destruction from imperial and settler exploitation have pathologized and disabled the land itself and the places that hold memory and meaning for a variety of communities and Indigenous nations across the globe. As journalist-activist Jen Deerinwater (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) and others show us, this devastation has disproportionately harmed disabled, deaf, mad, and ill Indigenous people and communities. 12
Indigenous people have never agreed with the notion that the lands they and their ancestors have inhabited, the places with whom they have deep relationships, were ever "empty." Places store knowledge, identity, and memory. Reclaiming histories of those places has been a powerful tool in challenging settler myths and fortifying self-determination. 13 In addition to this kind of resistance, place-based collective memory can often cultivate and preserve belonging. 14
This special issue underlines the significance of specificity and the ways places situate individual and community understandings around care and affinity. From Sāmoa to Wabanaki space to Abya Yala and beyond, specific places draw our attention to situatedness—to the ways our positions in the world (physical, social, cultural, economic) influence bodyminds, community, self-determination, and identity.
Ableism, via Western biomedical diagnosis, has been a potent weapon disconnecting Indigenous and disabled peoples from their places. It has aided in the theft of Indigenous lands and the confinement of Indigenous and disabled people. Indigenous-disability studies spells out the inextricable links between medical treatment, confining institutions, and stolen lands. As Juliann Anesi's account of psychiatric institutions and jails in postcolonial Sāmoa reveals, the complex mechanisms through which place and care come to define each other can carry life and death consequences. 15
Kinship and place are the foundations on which knowledge grows. They create how, why, and where we find meaning. Research practices, preservation of sources, and ways of sharing information work in reciprocal ways. 16 Indigenous and disabled knowledge-making insists that we grapple with the material consequences of enmeshed structures and systems, including settler colonialism, imperialism, and ableism. 17
Our critiques are nourished by a variety of sources: oral histories and storytelling, exhibits, policies, lands, and correspondence, to genealogies, institutional reports, novels, medical and spiritual practices, and newspaper accounts and more. Our learning—from sources, relationships, and places that hold both—is cross-generational, emerging from different centers, unfolding in winding paths, and carrying changing meanings. 18 This collective work needs to pay careful attention to the power of knowledge-making and to reciprocity: who and what is consulted, valued, resisted, yearned for, and imagined.
The very languages of these raw materials and how they are communicated change what we know about them and how we think about them. Educational studies scholar Alexánder Yarza de los Ríos (Komuiyama) puts it this way: "Languages are woven with ancestral memories; they resonate from their first breath and find new codes, platforms, and modalities. They are breath, energy, vibration, networks, wave and particle, fractal, holon." 19 In this special issue, languages other than English play a prominent role; some essays foreground these languages. The dual translation of Yarza de los Ríos' essay—as just one illustration—reflects an interest and growing practice in de-centering English and of literally expanding our vocabulary (and word-worlds) to understand Indigeneity and disability stories. Intentionally varied formats extend the invitation to engage with one another, growing connections. Hybrid family-historical research projects exist side-by-side with artistic-intellectual creations, photo-essays, long-form scholarly articles, shorter self-reflective pieces, and abridged archival studies.
In our own dreamscape of this project's next chapters, knowledge-making spills past the digital pages of the DSQ—into classrooms and subsequent scholarship and also into cross-generational and interpersonal relations, ecosystems, and our shared futures. At the beginning of each section of this issue, we have provided a brief introduction to the essays within. A list of questions and issues for consideration follow, highlighting the section's unifying themes alongside the individual and collective arguments, calls for justice, and invitations for further interaction, reciprocity, and care between author and reader.