The term "borderland dialogues" no doubt brings up associations with Gloria Anzaldúa, whose theoretical framework of Borderlands theory situates borderlands as not only physical boundaries, but also psychological and physiological boundaries. For Anzaldúa, living in borderlands enables inhabitants to navigate the contradictions found in diverse cultural settings, including race, gender, and sexuality. Although Anzaldúa is not widely discussed within the field of Disability Studies, her contribution to the field is no less significant: her experience of living with diabetes theorizes a distinct way to reconsider the relationship between identity, embodiment, and oppression.
At first look, Lavonna L. Lovern and Carol Locust's Native American Communities on Health and Disability: Borderland Dialogues appears to build on Anzaldúa's work—the title alone suggests a promise to offer a much-needed dialogue between Indigenous and Disability Studies—yet it steers away from both fields, serving instead to address possible cultural mistranslations between Native and non-Native peoples in Western-based medical institutions. Emphasizing the use of practical information for non-Native medical employees, Lovern and Locust center this information around the concept of "borderland dialogues."
Borderland dialogues, as Lovern and Locust define the term, are conversations designed to alleviate the potential for cultural mistranslation by inviting additional perspectives into conversations that involve inter-cultural communication. In these spaces, the cultural position and epistemological theory of each participant is both acknowledged and privileged, affording each participant's contribution to a conversation an equal position. Authenticity of a borderland dialogue is determined by the constant vigilance of each participant's own worldview and the attitudes created by this perspective; this requires an authentic borderland dialogue to be flexible and ready to respond to the participants and issues involved in the dialogue.
Native American Communities on Health and Disability functions as a space to practice an authentic borderland dialogue around issues surrounding health and disability. The authors begin by situating their own perspectives as Western academics, drawing on the Habermasian style of communication, wherein each participant must come to the conversation or dialogue from what is familiar. Entering into a borderland dialogue from a Western perspective requires the placement of Indigenous ontology and epistemology into a context that can be "translated" into Western paradigms. In doing so, "Western readers and academics…avoid some of the historic mistakes made concerning Indigenous cultures and Indigenous knowledge claims," such as misinterpretations and biases from historic Western accounts (7). The first section of the book, divided into three chapters, scaffolds Western academic paradigms with Indigenous knowledge claims to culminate in a demonstration of how these paradigms interact in a borderland dialogue of Indigenous manners and hospitality.
The authors present the second section of the book—chapters 4 through 8—as a borderland dialogue between various Native American perspectives of wellness, unwellness, and disability. Whereas the first section of the book included Western academic worldviews, the purpose of this largest section of the book "is to allow the Native American voices to participate in a borderland dialogue inside of their own worldviews" (74). Here, the authors offer an overview of traditional Native beliefs regarding disability, illness, wellness, and unwellness, as well as a more nuanced discussion of the beliefs of the Yaqui, Hopi, and San Carlos Apache peoples. The authors emphasize similarities among various Native communities, five of which relate to disability and unwellness: 1) illness affects the mind and spirit as well as the body; 2) wellness is harmony in body, mind and spirit; 3) natural unwellness is caused by the violation of a sacred or tribal taboo; 4) unnatural wellness is caused by witchcraft; and 5) each of us is responsible for our own wellness (78). Among these discussions, disability is categorized as either natural unwellness or unnatural unwellness—disabilities or illnesses that are the result of natural causes or those as a result of unnatural causes—and because each person is responsible for his or her own wellness, disability is thus understood as a consequence of a negative action. Alternatively, the transference of negative energy from one person to another (referred to as "witching" or "witchcraft") leads to unnatural unwellness.
It is important to recognize, however, that despite the fact that disability is understood as a consequence, it is not necessarily regarded as a punishment. For example, a pregnant woman's proximity to an animal that is identified as a carrier of negative energy will result in her child being born with a disability. Thus, unlike Western religious and moral models of disability, the understanding of disability that Lovern and Locust present (and consequently work from) resists putting the responsibility of "overcoming" a disability on the individual, and instead regards disability as a difference that Native communities respond to on a case-by-case basis. In this way, it is the responsibility of the community to respond to an individual's disability by finding or creating tasks that will allow them to contribute to the community.
Situating disability and unwellness as a result of negative energy also allows Lovern and Locust to decenter a medical approach without necessarily overlooking it. The last section, chapter 9 and the appendix, represents a borderland dialogue among Native and non-Native participants discussing the issue of wellness, including Western medical approaches to health and medicine. While Western medical treatments are discussed and presented as both a viable and common option for Native peoples, Western medicine is not privileged, and is instead presented as only one part of healing: "What may be deemed a cure by the standards of the Western medical practitioners—may be only treatment of the symptoms the Native American. (…) This understanding is why a medicine person may be consulted at the same time a Western medical doctor is seen" (80). Such an approach reflects the need to acknowledge how Western medicine has constructed the concept of disability, and consequently, the ways in which colonial structures frame the relationship between Native peoples and their own bodies.
Yet Lovern and Locust never fully flesh out the consequences of this framing, instead choosing to focus on the ways in which Western audiences might approach the "unwell" Native body. Within the medical profession, this is a positive step forward, to be sure—as I have mentioned above, the primary intended audience is those invested in (respectfully) improving treatments and outcomes for Native peoples—yet this approach does not take into full consideration the consequences of the power structures within the borderland dialogues Lovern and Locust put forth. While the authors are careful to emphasize the fact that no information presented in the book should be taken as a universal, the book is intended to function as an entry point into a borderland dialogue. One consequence of this is that the subject of disability becomes secondary to the construction and implementation of borderland dialogues, and on the whole, is presented only as evidence to larger claims surrounding the movement of negative energies.
When disability is discussed, it is within the context of Native understandings of unwellness, and is often accompanied by a term that identifies the disability within a Western framework. Thus for many Western readers, the subject of disability may seem to disappear within the larger context of Native understandings of disability: for many Native communities, "mental, physical, or emotional abnormalities were seen as disease or unwellness, not as a 'disability,'" and Western concepts of disability impose "their method of emphasizing the abnormal when for centuries tribes have emphasized the normality of people with differences" (90). Lovern and Locust never fully engage the interaction of these two approaches to disability, nor the implications of reframing these discussions within Western frameworks.
Yet the concept of borderland dialogues thrives upon just this: engaging implications of the interaction between varying perspectives and understandings of being in the world. And while the concept of borderland dialogues is useful—it's positioned as a way to build a sustained dialogue between Native and non-Native communities—in practice, this concept of borderland dialogues risks rehearsing the same Western methods that Lovern and Locust construe as problematic. For example, Lovern and Locust spend time defining an "authentic" borderland dialogue as one that "not only allows each participant an equal position but also imposes boundaries for the dialogue being attempted" (2). While Lovern and Locust use this definition so as to maintain the integrity of the dialogue, this emphasis on "authenticity" is still grounded in a Western philosophical model (7). The price for this authenticity, as demonstrated by the examples of borderland dialogues offered throughout the book, is the exclusionary potential that still privileges traditional, Western ways of communication. Unfortunately, part of the dominant Western forms of approaching disability rely on distinctly ableist methods: ironically, for all the emphasis within the book on bringing in different voices and making them equal to one another, the voices of people with disabilities are largely missing from its pages. The presence of people with disabilities is limited to anecdotes, case studies, and subjects of analyses. Furthermore, the presence of disability is predicated on the imagined disabled body, that is, the body that while disabled, still has the capability to contribute to a labor-based community. Thus while borderland dialogues attempt to create a productive space, they do not take into account the power and privilege that exists within and comes from the spaces that are determined as "authentic."
This failure to confront the implications of power and privilege is amplified by the omission of Anzaldúa's work. While Lovern and Locust insinuate a relationship between colonialism and illness—specifically with regard to alcoholism—the Western epistemologies from which they work prevent them from considering this relationship in depth. Framing borderland dialogues as an extension of Anzaldúa's work would allow the authors to explore this relationship, given that Anzaldúa's borders are predicated on the fact that experiences of suffering or oppression cannot ever be disengaged from the body. To leave this out amidst the urge to recognize all possible causes for one's unwellness seems a curious omission.
For those in Disability Studies, this exclusion can serve as the impetus to begin working toward a sustained dialogue between Indigenous and Disability Rhetorics, one that actively engages the relationship between colonial power and disability. Lovern and Locust offer a way to enter into this discussion with borderland dialogues, a dialogue that thrives upon varying—and sometimes dramatically different—perspectives, compelling the participants to recognize and accept the varying ways of being in the world and making meaning. Furthermore, it acknowledges that these different ways of meaning-making are valued, opening up spaces where varying needs are responded to as effectively as possible. Thus Lovern and Locust's concept of borderland dialogues positions future scholars in Disability Studies to rise to the challenge of expanding upon the critical questions raised by Native American Communities on Health and Disability: Borderland Dialogues, and may serve as one place from which to work toward a more consistent presence of Indigenous Studies within Disability Studies.
