Disability and Latin American indigenous peoples

Abstract

Disability among Latin American indigenous peoples is frequent and has particular characteristics. On the one hand, people understand and experience disability from their own worldview and cultural practices, but on the other hand, these cultural characteristics coexist with the reality of a disability produced by colonialism, colonization and forced assimilation into the states. Additionally, the socioeconomic conditions in which indigenous peoples live, as well as the political violence to which they are subjected, create a complex panorama that challenges disability studies to dialogue with other philosophies. Decoloniality, interculturality, epistemologies of the South, and indigenous thought can be approaches that discuss and problematize the study of disability in indigenous cultures from a more just and situated perspective.

Keywords:

• Disability
• indigenous people
• Latin American
• interculturality
• decoloniality

Some studies confirm that the prevalence of disability among indigenous people is higher than among non-indigenous people. United Nations (2013) has pointed out that this is a reality in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay. In Chile, the same situation has been detected in the case of children and young people. (Servicio Nacional de la Discapacidad 2016).

In indigenous peoples, disability is understood, explained and experienced from their own worldview, inherited cultural practices and ancestral history (Meekosha 2011). Some of them do not have words in their native language to name disability and others have revealed early in their origin stories a link with it (Yarza de los Ríos and Romualdo, 2021). These cultural characteristics coexist with the reality of a disability produced by colonialism and colonization (Grech and Soldatic 2015), but also with life circumstances such as extreme poverty, intra-regional migration, globalization, the economic influence of countries of the Global North, the aftermath of recent military dictatorships, the consequences of Spanish colonization of the native indigenous peoples of present-day Latin America, internal colonialism and the political violence of states against these peoples.

Although Latin American states have implemented intercultural health actions applied to people with disabilities in recent decades, the growing neoliberalization resulted in intercultural health programs functional to the states and that over time showed that interculturality is, above all, a field in dispute (Boccara 2012; Menéndez 2017). To this we can add the capture of the social model of disability by some Latin-American states, and that have derived in weak, confused and accommodated implementations of the model, those that may depart substantially from the robust social, critical and political principles that are at the root of the model.

In addition to this, indigenous peoples also have their own knowledge systems that explain their way of being and living, which includes disability. This scenario challenges the disability studies to dialogue in more depth with other philosophies with which indigenous peoples feel understood in a fairer way. These theoretical encounters will allow the construction of reciprocal intercultural knowledge and practices that demonstrate that disability occurs in a heterogeneous, plurinational and epistemically diverse territory.

One of the most common ways in which the Latin American states has related to disability among indigenous peoples is through the identification of these peoples as socioeconomically disadvantaged, recognizing them as doubly vulnerable, under this logic of difference. From this, a series of subsidiary state actions emerge, such as disability pensions, training for informal caregivers, economic benefits, support for entrepreneurship, etc. Although social disadvantage is a reality, and many of these actions are necessary and demanded by the people themselves, state subsidiarity does not question the causes of this disadvantage and does not problematize the historical role of the state in this causality. In doing so, states prefer to ignore the structures that characterize modern coloniality and the relations of domination, hierarchy and hegemony between ethnic groups. On the other hand, they generate a relationship of economic dependence with the peoples, which contributes to dominating them and controlling the conflicts with indigenous peoples that characterize modern nation-states. This can be seen in the last indigenous consultation carried out in Chile by the Constitutional Convention. The Mapuche indigenous people considered it important to maintain the legalization of the interdiction of persons with disabilities in order to maintain economic benefits for the family, but at the same time advocated for the autonomy of indigenous persons with disabilities (Secretaría Técnica de Consulta Indígena 2022). This paradox is not strange, since in subsidiary economies it occurs as a result of the historical precariousness of peoples and economic dependence on the State.

The cultural particularities associated with disability as a social phenomenon must be recognized and legitimized. In this way, practices such as diálogo de saberes are possible (it refers to the dialogue between different systems of beliefs and knowledge, rationalities and traditions) (Leff, 2006). This makes it possible to relate aspects of the worldview with intercultural health and social care, based on the dialogue between different belief systems in equal hierarchy. It is also possible to raise, either jointly or autonomously, research initiatives on disability and indigenous peoples based on each people’s own methodologies, understanding these not as essentialist, but as situated.

Given that the diálogo de saberes takes place under ethical, fair and equitable conditions, in a relationship between equals, it is to be expected that the knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples in the field of disability can cross those of non-indigenous society and not only the other way around. Thus, fields as disability studies or the crip theory can be ‘shaken’ by the philosophies and methodologies of the indigenous peoples in Abya-Yala (this is the name that indigenous peoples prefer for the American continent, since it recovers a traditional way of naming it, used by the Kuna people before the arrival of Columbus. It is translated as ‘land in vital blood’) (Del Popolo 2017). This means, for example, that indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, as well as their ancestral practices, can be a theoretical and practical point of reference to update and reconsider the influence and impact of disability studies in Latin America and other territories of the Global South. Thus, disability studies should incorporate indigenous struggles, social demands and worldviews, rather than only feel challenged by them or consider them a complement.

To this, those working on disability in indigenous peoples should join indigenous activism, in order to contribute to the practices of resistance that peoples and collectives carry out. This implies that both professionals and academics also become activists, supporting indigenous resistances. These struggles do not only involve the field of health, disability or inclusion, because the indigenous world-views are based on complex ideas of Buen Vivir (concept proposed by Latin American indigenous peoples as an alternative to the concept of development, based on principles of reciprocity, community and harmony with nature) (Del Popolo 2017). Therefore, disability activism can be transferred to other arenas, such as the struggle for the recovery of land, the protection of sacred territories for ancestral medicine, environmental care, language revitalization, etc., since all of them are highly relevant for well living models that characterize peoples in Abya-Yala.

With the emergence of the numerous and growing indigenous movements in Latin America, we have seen that the common struggle has focused fundamentally on recognition as pre-existing peoples, alive and with legitimate demands; and with this, the possibility of living life as a nation, preserving the language, recovering their usurped territories, having self-determination and autonomy. Along with these, there are other more specific demands related to health, education or the environment, which underlie the main movement. In Latin America, although few in number, there are some leaders or groups of indigenous people with disabilities that have developed an interesting discourse, experience and history on disability that challenges the current models of approach. The discourse on disability can also be found in demands related to the safeguarding of sacred territories for ancestral medicine or environmental pollution. These struggles are at once ecological, cultural, medicinal, spiritual and ethical.

In Latin America there are germinal research experiences that we could understand as part of a critical interculturality (Walsh 2009), and that are framed in an accumulation of decolonial, feminist and intercultural perspectives that manage to interweave critical ethnographic studies with a socio-historical and contemporary linkage of disability (Moctezuma 2020; Yarza de los Ríos and Romualdo, 2021; Lapierre 2022). These research challenges require a process of decolonization of researchers and practitioners that result in a reading of disability in indigenous peoples from the frontiers and that integrates the common struggles of peoples impacted by the modern-colonial world-system. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to raise studies that rescue the world-views, culture and particularities of the indigenous world in relation to disability in coexistence with a research that manages to complexify the phenomenon of disability in a historical moment where indigenous peoples are threatened in their existence and disability is also experienced as a result of colonialism, environmental extractivism and systematic violence. Creating political and militant research that gives control to the indigenous peoples themselves and provides tools for their struggle is fundamental in the present times. At the end of the day, if some indigenous people lose their language through colonialism and forced assimilation, it will never be possible to truly know their cultural experience of disability no matter how much Spanish exists to communicate. Language contains the knowledge and through it, this knowledge is passed on to the next generation. Linguistic loss is, therefore, the loss of knowledge.

According to what is presented here, any practice to address disability in indigenous peoples must recognize that they carry a complex disability experience, which is intertwined with a social-historical process of conflictive relationship with the states and with the neoliberal capitalist model. Therefore, we propose to contribute with actions based on interculturality, decolonial approaches, indigenous philosophies or epistemologies of the South, understanding that these will contribute to an intercultural dialogue on equal terms and that it will be the indigenous persons with disabilities themselves who will lead the reflective, activist and investigative processes on what in the West has been called disability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo, Chile.