"Disability" in the indigenous and native peoples of Abya Yala: on the occasion of 530 years of conquest
530 years after the invasion, conquest, dispossession, colonization and genocide of the indigenous peoples of the territories of Abya-Yala, from the CLACSO Working Group on Critical Studies in Disability We recognize all the struggles, resistances and alternatives that have been led from the times of Manco Inca, Tupac Amaru, Kuruza Llawi, Tupac Katari, Bartolina Sisa, Cuauhtemoc, Yoeiko, Berichá, Galvarino, to the vital and insurgent indigenous movements of the 21st century.
The concept of "disability," conceived and socially produced by capitalist industrial societies, also has its roots in colonialism. Conquerors, invaders, and plunderers used mutilation as a colonial tactic of domination. In the heart of the Caribbean, in the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu) and in Tenochtitlán, hundreds and thousands of children of the sun, moon, and stars were dismembered. With the enslavement of Africa, the heirs of warriors and the descendants of wise healers continued to be mutilated and severed. All of this took place on sugarcane plantations, in the colonial forced labor systems (mitas), and on haciendas.
We strongly urge recognition that the dehumanization of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples was central to colonialism, with mutilation serving the conquest to colonize their bodies as territories through cruel dismemberment and to dominate them, ultimately using them to serve capital. But colonization has also manifested itself through spectacle, with human zoos, "universal" exhibitions, and freak shows, in which Indigenous people with deformities or defects, as defined by the conqueror, were displayed as symbols of barbarism, savagery, and subhumanity.
Today, we want to denounce how the abyssal line of subhumanization, or the zone of “non-being,” unified the monstrous, the savage, the indigenous, and the abnormal, exacerbating this even further in the “deformed Indians,” in the “mutilated Indian women,” in the children “without feet, without tongues, without eyes, without ears.” They also sought to sever and mutilate all cosmic, communal, and ancestral wisdom, their understanding of the body, nature, energies, their own therapies and care, their own spaces and institutions, their principles, values, and ways of relating to all living things. And even today, we only repeat the dominant narratives of disability from the Global North, becoming complicit in its concealment, invisibility, and contempt.
Colonization has also been spiritual, epistemic, related to power, sex/gender, pedagogical, health/illness, economic, cultural, political, legal, informational, genetic, erotic, territorial, and so on. In particular, today we want to denounce new neocolonial modes of producing "disability" in Abya Yala: extractivism, agrochemical contamination, hegemonic schooling and healthcare, disability resulting from political violence, among others; despite signing international human rights conventions and declarations, which must also be reviewed and harmonized to a new level, as instruments of struggle and coalition in these times of planetary catastrophe.
From our Working Group and the Indigenous/Native Peoples and Disability subgroup, we remain committed to a decolonial, anticolonial, critical, and emancipatory intercultural praxis, from the Global South, with the Earth, from and with the Indigenous and Native peoples of Abya Yala, in deep connections with other peoples and nations of the Global South. As a Working Group, we are committed to the recovery, defense, and dignification of the wisdom and practices surrounding the lives of Indigenous people with disabilities, based on ancestral worldviews, ancestral roots and laws, and against all forms of colonial-modern-Western violence, discrimination, and oppression.
Likewise, we will promote dialogues and collaborations between indigenous organizations and people with disabilities, with multilateral organizations and with national and plurinational states to advance towards policies that guarantee the rights of indigenous people with disabilities, from the perspective of good living, ancestral indigenous thought, the dialogue of knowledge, practices and ways of living, and the decolonization of the Americas, of Abya Yala and Ladino Africa, and Mother Earth.
As with Caliban, one of the insurgent symbols of Abya Yala, that deformed Indian reclaimed by the Caribbean thinker Roberto Fernández Retamar, in these 530 years we have taken the words Indian and disability and redefined them to decolonize ourselves. Never again Indigenous shame. Never again Disabled shame. Never again.
12th October 2022
CLACSO Working Group
Critical studies in disability
This statement expresses the position of CLACSO Working Group on Critical Studies in Disability and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
