There is a question I keep coming across when researching disability history:
How did Indigenous people view disability before colonization?
It sounds like a simple question.
It isn't.
Because there was never one Indigenous culture.
There was no single Indigenous belief system.
No universal Indigenous language.
No single family structure, spiritual tradition, community organization, or way of understanding the human body.
Hundreds of distinct nations existed across North America, each with their own histories and cultures.
So before we can talk about Indigenous disability history, we have to be careful about the question itself.
Instead of asking:
How did Indigenous people understand disability?
a more historically responsible question is:
How did particular Indigenous communities understand bodily difference, illness, care, participation, and community roles?
That distinction matters.
Disability is partly shaped by culture
A body can have an impairment regardless of culture.
Someone can be blind.
Deaf.
Chronically ill.
Injured.
Unable to walk.
Neurodivergent.
Living with pain.
Experiencing cognitive or developmental differences.
Those human experiences are not new.
But the meaning a society gives those differences can vary dramatically.
What counts as disability?
What counts as independence?
What makes someone valuable?
What kinds of support are considered normal?
What roles are available to someone whose body works differently?
Those questions are cultural.
Scholar Hilary Weaver has examined disability through Native American cultural perspectives and notes that disability is socially constructed in important ways: what disability means can vary across cultures, including through beliefs about wellness, balance, roles, and responsibilities. She also emphasizes that colonialism shaped both the experience of disability and the services available to Native people.
That does not mean every Indigenous society was perfectly inclusive.
History is almost never that simple.
But it does mean we should be cautious about assuming modern Western disability categories existed everywhere in the same form.
Western systems tend to categorize disability through deficit
Modern disability systems often ask what someone cannot do.
Can you walk?
Can you work?
Can you dress yourself?
Can you prepare food?
Can you communicate in the expected way?
Can you live without assistance?
Can you perform a task at the same speed as someone else?
Sometimes those questions are necessary for determining support.
But they also reflect a particular framework.
A person is measured against an expected body or mind.
The further they fall from that expectation, the more "disabled" they may be considered.
Other cultures may understand bodily difference through different relationships to family, responsibility, participation, spirituality, community, or collective care.
Research involving First Nations communities in Australia offers an important example of why Western categories cannot simply be treated as universal. A 2022 systematic review found that Western disability constructs did not resonate with many of the First Nations people represented in the studies reviewed. Researchers found greater emphasis in many communities on human diversity, caregiving, family, and participation, while also noting that stigma around some conditions could still exist.
That research concerns First Nations people in Australia, not Indigenous nations in North America, so it should not be used to make universal claims about Native Americans.
But it demonstrates something important:
The Western concept of disability is not culturally neutral.
Colonization changed the conditions people lived under
Colonization did not simply replace one government with another.
It changed land.
Food systems.
Languages.
Families.
Economies.
Community structures.
Movement.
Healthcare.
Education.
And survival itself.
Indigenous communities experienced epidemic disease, warfare, forced displacement, starvation, land theft, violence, family separation, boarding schools, and cultural suppression.
Many of those things can create disability.
Disease can create disability.
Malnutrition can create disability.
Violence can create disability.
Unsafe labor can create disability.
Trauma can have lasting physical and psychological effects.
Loss of access to food, medicine, land, or community support can worsen health conditions that might otherwise have been manageable.
That matters because disability is often talked about as though it simply appears inside individual bodies.
Sometimes disability develops because of genetics, illness, injury, or natural variation.
But societies can also create disabling conditions.
War creates disabled people.
Unsafe workplaces create disabled people.
Environmental contamination can create disability.
Poverty can worsen disability.
Inaccessible healthcare can turn manageable conditions into serious ones.
Colonization belongs inside that conversation.
Colonization also brought new ideas about productivity
European colonial economies brought their own expectations about work.
Land ownership.
Labor.
Property.
Dependence.
Economic productivity.
And whose work counted.
Over time, Western institutions increasingly measured people according to their ability to participate in particular forms of labor.
Those expectations became deeply connected with disability.
Who could work?
Who could support themselves?
Who was dependent?
Who was considered economically useful?
Those questions eventually became embedded in laws, institutions, welfare systems, medicine, and disability policy.
We still live with versions of them.
Disabled people are still asked to prove how much they can or cannot work.
Support systems may require someone to document everything their body cannot do before they receive help.
People who cannot participate in paid labor are sometimes treated as though they contribute less to society.
Caregiving, community participation, emotional labor, creative work, knowledge, parenting, relationships, and simply being human can disappear beneath one question:
Can you work?
That question has a history.
Colonization disrupted care too
Disability is never only about the body.
It is also about whether support exists around that body.
Imagine two people with the exact same impairment.
One lives in a community where housing is accessible, food is available, family support is nearby, transportation exists, healthcare is accessible, and they are expected to remain part of community life.
The other lives somewhere where transportation is inaccessible, medical care is hours away, housing doesn't meet their needs, support services are difficult to obtain, and participation requires constantly proving their worth.
Those people may have the same impairment.
But they do not have the same experience of disability.
Colonization disrupted community structures that had developed over generations.
Forced relocation could separate people from land, food systems, healers, family networks, and community supports.
Boarding schools separated children from families and interrupted the transmission of language, cultural knowledge, and caregiving practices.
Medical and government systems frequently replaced Indigenous authority with outside institutions.
When those systems are disrupted, disability can become harder to live with.
Indigenous disabled people still navigate overlapping systems
This history isn't only historical.
Indigenous disabled people today may navigate disability alongside racism, geographic isolation, healthcare disparities, poverty, inaccessible services, and systems developed around cultural assumptions that don't reflect their communities.
Weaver's work on Native American disability specifically emphasizes the importance of understanding disability within the context of culture and colonization rather than assuming mainstream disability services automatically fit Native communities.
That changes what we mean when we talk about accessibility.
Accessibility isn't simply whether a clinic has a ramp.
It can also mean:
Can someone get to the clinic?
Do they trust the institution?
Does the provider understand their community?
Can someone receive care without leaving the people and place that support them?
Are family and community relationships respected?
Is communication accessible?
Who controls the services?
Who decides what help should look like?
Those are disability questions too.
We do not need a romantic version of history
There is a temptation when learning about colonization to replace one oversimplified story with another.
Western societies treated disabled people badly.
Therefore Indigenous societies must have treated disabled people perfectly.
History doesn't support that kind of certainty.
Indigenous nations were and are made up of human beings.
Human communities can contain care.
Exclusion.
Belonging.
Conflict.
Adaptation.
Stigma.
Support.
All at once.
The goal shouldn't be to turn Indigenous cultures into a utopian comparison to Western society.
The goal is to recognize that Western assumptions about disability are not universal truths.
There have always been other ways to organize community.
Other ways to understand dependence.
Other ways to define contribution.
Other ways to care for one another.
History can change the questions we ask
The more disability history I learn, the less interested I am in simple answers.
Disabled people weren't treated one way throughout history.
Indigenous nations did not share one universal understanding of disability.
Colonization did not affect every community identically.
And disability itself has never existed separately from culture, economics, politics, family, environment, and community.
That doesn't make the history impossible to understand.
It just means we have to ask better questions.
Not:
Were Indigenous people good to disabled people?
But:
How did this particular community understand human difference?
What roles were available to people with different bodies and minds?
How did people care for one another?
What changed when colonial systems were imposed?
Those questions leave room for complexity.
They also leave room for Indigenous voices to tell their own history.
And that is a much better place to start.
I'm continuing to explore disability history alongside Indigenous history and colonization, especially where these histories complicate the ideas we now treat as normal. Follow along with the blog for the deeper research behind my short-form content.