Counter-Ableist and Neurodivergent Challenges for Indigenous Decolonial Politics

• In Event: Indigenous Political Thought and Pluralism

Abstract

Indigenous outward-facing political action and argument in present Canada unfolds within a differentially experienced and deeply unequal scene of enunciation that Audra Simpson calls a ‘theatre of apprehension.’ This is a ‘settler-colonial public’ which has ostensibly acknowledged the violent foundations of its circumscribed plurality in the forced inclusion or internalization of Indigenous people and polities to the state-building project. Here reconciliation as a post facto remediation of these violences has become a pervasive discursive framework critiqued for its potentials to insidiously re-instantiate assimilatory ends. Resurgence and refusal have become key concepts in certain Indigenous and allied intellectual and activist circles to challenge such dominant frameworks for giving accounts of transformative movement and to convey world re-making practices. In many respects, these concepts have formed a useful counter-hegemonic vocabulary to articulate a repertoire of Indigenous decolonial thought and activity that has been (and continues to concertedly be) otherwise inapprehensible to the prevailing political rationality. Yet this author is concerned that there is another totalizing tendency to valorize certain ‘Indigenous ways’ of being and doing, thinking, communicating and moving, in these circles of critical engagement. There has been a kind of pragmatic materialist turn to emphasize enactive, tangibly productive, grounded or land-based mobilizations that obfuscate the diverse capacities of possible participants, specifically those who are disabled/differently-abled and neurodivergent. While there has been work aligned to critical disability studies or Indigenous feminist and queer theory on pathologized or medicalized ideas of deviant or abject bodies and minds in relation to coloniality; there is less on those so subjected as existing and potential contributors to processes of decolonization. This paper argues for a serious reckoning with ableist and neurotypical normativities in conceptions of Indigenous resurgence and refusal to more fully realize their radical interventions in questions on the intelligibility, sensibility and disclosure of nondominant or alterNative political life and imaginaries.

Author

• Kelly Aguirre, University of Victoria