The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability

Alice Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032570082
• eBook ISBN: 9781351699679
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Collections
• Index: Law

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability brings together some of the most influential and important contemporary perspectives in this growing field. The book traces the history of the field and locates literary disability studies in the wider context of activism and theory. It introduces debates about definitions of disability and explores intersectional approaches in which disability is understood in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality and ethnicity. Divided broadly into sections according to literary genre, this is an important resource for those interested in exploring and deepening their knowledge of the field of literature and disability studies.

Part I

New directions in the field

1

Disability in Indigenous literature

Siobhan Senier

Bringing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) keywords to bear on the literary study of disability, this chapter argues that Indigenous disability cannot be thought apart from tribal sovereignty and land claims.¹ Dialogue between NAIS and Disability Studies (DS) has been somewhat reluctant or halting. Perhaps this is just part and parcel of the continued marginalization of both topics – of the fact that so many academic disciplines are still too white and/or too ableist. NAIS’s reluctance to embrace Disability Studies might be understood in the context of social-science approaches to the field: Indigenous people, after all, have been routinely pathologized, subject to removal, cure, and “rehabilitation.” Disability Studies, for its part, might conceivably be puzzled by a paucity of Native American literature foregrounding disability as a category of identity or analysis, and by the seeming absence of what we might call Indigenous disability cultures – legibly Indigenous and disabled performance arts, poetry, visual arts, and/or social movements.

Just a few short years ago, Cherokee scholar Sean Kicummah Teuton also tried to stimulate a dialogue between our two fields. He and other scholars working at the junction of these disciplines have made two major claims: (a) that Indigenous disability is produced by colonialism, materially and discursively; and (b) that tribal communities have not necessarily Othered disability, historically or traditionally. I will review these arguments in greater depth in this chapter, but want to note here that Teuton began his foundational essay with a compelling vignette: in 1990, disabled Lakota activists staged a sit-in at Pine Ridge tribal headquarters. They called themselves “the Quad Squad,” and they were demanding the building be made accessible. Tribal governments, as sovereign entities, are in fact exempt from Title 1 of the ADA; but poverty is arguably the greatest obstacle to their efforts to improve accessibility in tribal built environments. Compounding the problem, Teuton adds, Native American tribes experience disproportionately high rates of disability, with an estimated one in four people experiencing some form of impairment.

So the Quad Squad protest can hardly be an anomaly. Surely disability protests and activism do happen on reservations and in rural tribal communities; and surely Indigenous people do participate in more urban, mixed disability collectives and communities. This kind of activism and disability expression, however, is not immediately apparent in literature written by Indigenous people. It is not that characters with disabilities don’t exist. On the contrary, physically and psychically wounded veterans appeared in many of the major novels of the Native American Renaissance (1960s–80s) by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe). Characters living with addiction, amputations, and AIDS appear in more recent fiction by Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki), Patricia Grace (Māori), and Tomson Highway (Cree). Disability has also been the subject of some Indigenous memoirs – most famously in The Broken Cord (1998), where Michael Dorris (Modoc) writes about his son’s Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; and in Basil Johnston’s (Ojibwe) Crazy Dave (1999), about his great-uncle who had Down’s Syndrome. Additionally, a small but growing number of scholars have begun to examine disability in these texts, including Clare Barker, Keely Byars-Nichols, G. Thomas Couser, Mary J. Couzelis, and Michelle Jarman.

But these are representations of disability by Indigenous authors who are not themselves disabled, or who at least have not publicly identified as such. In what follows, I try to offer a glimpse of an Indigenous disability literature canon – works authored by Indigenous people who openly claim disability identities (or have had those thrust upon them) and who make disability a subject of their work. I argue that insofar as we might identify an Indigenous disability aesthetic or poetics, we should see it as deeply rooted in tribal nationhood and land relations. My discussion is grounded in terms elaborated in the important collection Native Studies Keywords (2015), edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja. These are concepts that have long-standing importance in NAIS, and that continue to be refined and contested by Indigenous scholars. They can help shed light on Indigenous disability literature, and in turn be enriched by concepts from within Disability Studies.

Sovereignty and nation

At some level, every Indigenous text is arguably about sovereignty. When NAIS scholars speak of sovereignty, they are invoking Indigenous peoples’ unique political and legal status. In the United States, Native Americans are not “ethnic minorities” in the same way as African Americans, Asian Americans, and other “hyphenated” groups, because they have specific territorial claims and rights to self-government, many of which are enshrined and recognized in federal and international law. Teves, Smith, and Raheja succinctly trace the development of sovereignty as a critical concept in NAIS as an academic discipline, observing that while on the one hand, it has prompted scholars to seek “to defend indigenous nationhood” first and foremost, on the other hand it has also been limited or problematic, insofar as it depends on “recognition” from the colonial state.

Thus, many Indigenous intellectuals now define sovereignty much more capaciously, speaking, for example, of intellectual sovereignty, visual sovereignty, and rhetorical sovereignty – in short, of the rights of Indigenous people to have first voice and control over their representations. One contributor to Native Studies Keywords, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg), argues that sovereignty can be conceptualized and exercised outside of the framework of modern nation-states, as “authentic power coming from a generated consensus and a respect for dissent rather than…from authoritarian power or power-over style of governance” (19). Simpson and like-minded colleagues have led NAIS to be much more concerned with liberation and intersectionality – “envisioning,” as Teves and colleagues put it, “what sovereignty would look like if it were based on principles of justice for all peoples and care for all of creation” (15).

We might say that Deaf Indian writers express intellectual sovereignty, for example, when they argue for the primacy of American Indian Sign Language (AISL) over American Sign Language (ASL), either as something that preceded the creation of ASL or as something more culturally appropriate and meaningful for them. Howard Busy (Mississippi Choctaw/Eastern Cherokee) relates a story of Apache leaders traveling to Washington, D.C., for diplomatic negotiations in 1872; when they came upon students from Gallaudet, he says, “soon the two groups were signing to each other in combinations of American Sign Language and Indian signs” (42). Historian Brenda Farnell suggests that “the situation was complex, to say the least”; that “what mutual understanding was achieved was probably the result of explicit miming combined with trial and error, rather than the use of either sign language. Both groups were already very skilled in using the medium and no doubt rose to the occasion with creativity” (43). Farnell’s point is that not all gestural languages (even all Indigenous gestural languages) are the same, or mutually intelligible dialects; but it is also worth noting that what motivates Indigenous people to elevate AISL over ASL is not necessarily a rejection of Deaf culture and identity. In cases where AISL is still practiced by tribal members, some Indigenous activists find that it “is much easier and faster to learn [than ASL, and] is more functional and might be appropriate in a rural or an isolated family situation” (Lovern and Locust 103). Moreover, they may assert that “hand sign systems specifically tie themselves to Earth” (Lovern and Locust 23). This insistence on tribally specific, grounded disability practices can be seen as another way of asserting sovereignty.

In the collection Step into the Circle (2002), Busy and other Deaf Indians describe a disability experience in which the desire for re-connection with tribal lands and tribal community is paramount. Recounting the founding of the Intertribal Deaf Council in 1993, Walter P. Kelley (Northern Cheyenne) recalls that organizers believed it critical to host the first conference on Native land, so they chose Oklahoma City, mindful of that state’s history as an Indian territory. Conference topics centered on Native heritage, language, and culture more than on Deaf issues because so many participants “had to leave their native homes due to the lack of nearby educational and vocational services for deaf and hard of hearing people. They also indicated that they had lost their Native American roots due to leaving home at an early age and growing up in the ‘Deaf World’” (Paris et al. 7). These writers do not discount the idea of Deaf Gain; but they do suggest that it is perhaps more complex for Indigenous people to negotiate. While attendance at a school like Gallaudet and the embrace of a distinct Deaf culture has been central to much Deaf culture and pride, Indigenous people also bring with them long histories of removal from their home communities precisely for purposes of education – education meant to assimilate and exterminate them.

Thus, it might be just as important for Indigenous people to assert the Indianness of sign language as it is to embrace sign language as a disability cultural practice. The editors of Step into the Circle characterize AISL as “broader in meaning than ASL…made against the background of the sky (toward nature), whereas ASL makes signs closer to the body. AISL can be read at a much greater distance than ASL” (Paris et al. 37). This is not a claim that AISL is superior (many Deaf Indians use both), only that it is distinct, and can be held up as a marker of sovereignty. Step into the Circle does resonate with many Disability Studies tenets, including a resounding rejection of the notion of victimhood or cure: “in Indian Sign Language, we have no words for help or rehabilitation. We can sign WORK-TOGETHER. Deaf Natives want partners, not saviors. That’s the Traditional way – equality in the circle” (Paris et al. 39). AISL is now considered an endangered language like other Indigenous languages; and, as Jeffrey Davis illustrates, it is now the subject of language revitalization efforts, like those other languages.

Language revitalization is a critical practice in tribal nation (re)building; and tribal nationhood – “a term freighted with authority and…reflecting the political structure and organizational principles of Native social and cultural experience” (Teves et al. 157) – underwrites even Indigenous texts that do not seem overtly political. Sherman Alexie, for instance, has never made a secret of his childhood hydrocephaly, nor his alcoholism, but in his recent memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (2017), he “came out” as disabled: “I was officially diagnosed as bipolar in 2010, but I think my first symptoms appeared when I was a child” (7). Alexie recounts a childhood wracked by surgeries and stints to drain the fluid from his head; seizures and medication (“I was a kindergartner on phenobarbital,” 7); nightmares and hallucinations; and family violence. Personal though this story may be, Alexie returns again and again to a major abrogation of tribal sovereignty that haunts his family and lurks behind illnesses and disabilities: in the 1930s, the U.S. government built the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington State, territory traditionally inhabited by the Spokane and other tribes. The dam destroyed salmon spawning grounds, in turn decimating not only a major source of sustenance for the tribes but also their important burial and ceremonial sites. The loss of salmon has far-reaching effects, contributing, as Alexie sees it, to his family’s vulnerability and illnesses, which he calls “salmon-grief” (139).

My mother and father were members of the first generation of Interior Salish people who lived entirely without wild salmon.

My mother and father, without wild salmon, were spiritual orphans.

My father was also orphaned by war and contagious disease.

My siblings and I were conceived, birthed, and nurtured by orphans – by the salmonless and parentless and non-immune. (138–39)

Alexie’s mother, whom he believes to have been “an undiagnosed bipolar grandiose fabulist,” tells him a story about once walking across the pre-dammed river on the backs of salmon. Alexie thinks she’s lying, but he also thinks “it’s a lie in service of scientific and spiritual truth” – that “the Grand Coulee Dam is an epic gravestone,” the site where his nation’s history and future were “murdered” by a colonial government (133). In Alexie’s case, then, disability is not only a product of colonialism, but the standpoint from which colonialism may be best understood.

Land

Indigenous sovereignty and nation are, therefore, inextricable from Indigenous land. Here again, Indigenous people differ from other cultural minorities in their long-standing claims to particular geographic territories – claims enshrined in international law. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Article 25, asserts that “Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters, and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard” (United Nations). Teves and her colleagues note that what is critical in this formulation of land claims is not the “temporal framework of prior occupancy,” but rather the “spatial framework of radical relationality to land” (67).

This radical relationality resonates with themes in Disability Studies, and also in Ecocriticism. In this sense, Native American and Indigenous Studies and Disability Studies seem to be heading toward some mutually informative kinds of inquiry, as each is dedicated to thinking through notions of interdependence and reciprocity – both to analyze the ways that bodies cannot be understood apart from their environments, and to imagine the ways that we might make bodies more mutually interdependent with other bodies and with more progressively constructed environments. Recent work on disability in the Global South, for instance, has trained attention on how colonialism, poverty, and racism help produce disability, materially and discursively. Scholars including Nirmala Erevelles, Shaun Grech, Helen Meekosha, and Karen Soldatic have shown that, on the most obvious level, cutting off access to traditional foods and polluting waterways produces bodily impairment for Indigenous and poor people. As Grech puts it, “the privatization of property, the introduction of an economic value on food, and the exploitation of land beyond sustainable use meant environmental and land degradation, reduced food availa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability
• Part I New directions in the field
• Part II Novels and short stories
• Part III Poetry
• Part IV Drama
• Part V Life writing
• Index