Intersecting indigeneity, colonialisation and disability

Abstract

This special issue sought to open a space for critical debates and reflections on the issues and challenges of bringing together Indigeneity and disability as an intersecting identity. The overall aim was to question and challenge existing approaches to modern Western understandings of disability, how it is regulated, governed and experienced once the cultural identity of being Indigenous is positioned at the fore. As editors of this special edition, we were conscious of our own cultural identities, Karen being first generation Australian of Southern European descent, and John being of the Yuin Nation of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. We engaged our own sense of the possibilities of examining the critical importance of alliances between non-Indigenous and Indigenous researchers working together as a partnership at a time when Australia’s political environment had largely ignored Indigenous and non-Indigenous efforts to further Indigenous claims for national constitutional recognition. Unlike other white settler societies such as Canada, USA and New Zealand, Australia has never had a formal Treaty explicitly recognizing Indigenous Australia as the original owners, nor are Indigenous peoples recognized within our main constitutional instrument, despite more recent combined advocacy for this very realization. Thus, the struggles for Indigenous recognition and rights to culture, kin, and country remain highly contested within the white settler colonial nation of Australia. This political backdrop spurred our interest to bring together researchers, practitioners, and activists who work at the edges of disability and Indigenous practice. We wanted researchers who understand the politics of reconciliation but also the longstanding issues that underpin such politics. This is reflected in the gamut of theoretical positioning and empirical explications that engage with situated local knowledges, spaces and places, alongside the intensive structural political and institutional negotiations of sovereignty, settler colonial nation-state power and its everyday embodied negotiations for First Peoples living with disability. This broad scoping of the special edition henceforth, hopes to reconcile the divergent global representations that are occurring within specific historical, political and geographic contexts, without the privileging or dominance of a particular standpoint.