Cover Credit: Artwork “Accessibility is Traditional” by Johnnie Jae (Otoe-Missouria/Choctaw).
“Accessibility is Traditional” features a disabled Native woman in a wheelchair, wearing traditional regalia and hoop dancing on Blue gradient background with a thin white floral geometric pattern.
Amber McCrary
According to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “ Disability justice centers “disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.”
The term was initially coined by queer, disabled women of color in the Bay Area in 2005 by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus and Stacey Milburn. These women would eventually form Sins Invalid, where they defined Disability Justice through ten key principles. The ten key principles consisted of intersectionality, leadership by those most affected, anti-capitalism, solidarity across different activist causes and movements, recognizing people as whole people, sustainability, solidarity across different disabilities, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation.
The Indigeneity and Disability Justice Zine is deeply connected to the vision and dreams of what disability justice is. “When we look at disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism. Each system benefits from extracting profits and status from the subjugated ‘other’ 500 + years of violence against black and brown communities includes 500+ years of bodies and minds deemed ‘dangerous’ by being non-normative” (Piepzna-Samarasinha). Continued…
As Johnnie Jae and I were putting this zine together, we started talking about our own disabilities hidden and seen. I have recently started to become more vocal about my own disabilities and felt a sense of relief talking and learning from Johnnie. We discussed how colonization and certain tribal policies have created a deep ableism within Indian country. On top of that we discussed the stigma of talking about our mental health and disabilities that keep conversations like this hidden in many Native communities.
When I was growing up, my own struggles with mental health and body health kept me bed ridden for a majority of my life. But I was always told, “You are being lazy!” or “Don’t be lazy!” which is very much a Navajo mentality and a big contributor to never taking it “easy” on myself.
But after reading Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinh’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, I learned you can create revolutions from bed, you don’t need to be working your body to the ground (especially disabled QTBIPOC bodies) or you can form Care Collectives in your cities with other disabled QTBIPOC folks who help one another. I know talking to my family about how white supremacy contributes to an ableist culture would go completely over their heads. BUT I do know they will read these beautiful poems by our disabled Indigenous relatives and see the images created by a talented disabled Native artist and will relate and understand the pain many of us have endured in Native country. Many of us in Indian Country are still in survival mode and surviving is all we can do for now, but for those with a voice, gumption, and a dream we can all work together to listen and help our disabled Native relatives.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver BC,
Kimberly Blaeser, Founding Director of In-Na-Po
What is Disability Justice?
Amber McCrary...............2
Foreward by Kimberly Blaeser.............................4
My Body Is An Ill-Fitting Costume
Rachel Johnson...............6
Excerpt From Long Covid Recovery
Chasity Salvador.............7
Definition of Palo Santo Scott Bentley...................9
To My Unborn Daughter
Delaney Olmo................10
Once The Burial Ends
Delaney Olmo................11
How do we understand our disabled relatives in Indigenous communities? How do we trace the impact of intergenerational harm from settler colonialism? With the creation of Indigeneity and Disability Justice Zine, The Future Lives In Our Bodies: Indigeneity and Disability Justice, Indigenous Nations Poets begins an exploration of these questions.
In-Na-Po is honored to be participating in the 2022 Poetry Coalition programming initiative around the theme “The future lives in our bodies: Poetry & Disability Justice.” The line “The future lives in our bodies” is taken from the poem “Femme Futures” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. The aim of the member programs is to demonstrate how poetry can inspire questions in their communities about disability justice and spark increased engagement with this important theme.
In-Na-Po, in partnership with Abalone Mountain Press, issued a call for submissions, inviting Indigenous writers and artists for work that considers this important question: “What does disability justice look like for Indigenous communities?” Representatives from In-Na-Po including Jake Skeets, Janet McAdams, Cedar Sigo, Jennifer Foerester, Arielle Taitano Lowe, LeAnne Howe, and I collaborated with Amber McCrary and Johnnie Jae in the zine-making process.
The CDC describes a disability as “any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do
certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions).” Given the enduring history of colonization and genocide in Indigenous communities, In-Na-Po together with the partners and editors of the zine wanted to create a space where Native writers and artists could offer their own characterization of unique conditions that “impair,” “limit,” or “restrict” Indigenous individuals or communities. We invited creative work that investigates broader factors potentially involved in the conversation around disability including the consequences of intergenerational trauma, environmental contamination, and food risks for Native Nations. We also wanted to feature personal, familial, or tribal stories that explore what disability justice might look like today in Indian America.
In-Na-Po and Abalone Mountain Press express our gratitude to all who allowed us the privilege of reading and viewing their work, and hope the writing and art included here will seed further opportunities for Indigenous differently-abled creative writers and art-makers. Our sincere gratitude to the Poetry Coalition for collaboration and programming funds and to our fiscal sponsor Woodland Pattern Book Center. Publication of this zine is made possible in part by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation which were secured by the Academy of American Poets.
Kimberly Blaeser, Founding Director of In-Na-Po
My Body is an Ill-fitting Costume
Rachel Johnson
Three sizes too large— Sometimes, lulled by Southern Comfort, liquid sunlight, I try to disassemble
myself—Later when smokemist clears, they thread the skin back together— I shrug into my suit, a delicate, raindrenched hide, and escape through a sliver of moonlight—
I am an outsider inside my own body—
It’s ironic that I once believed I was defined by anguish and pain. Then, my body, rickety carriage for my soul, broke and reframed itself to fit those beliefs—Now, fire burns low, cooking marrow and searing joints, and ignites along silver charcoal-dust nerves
the seed listened when it blessed my family with a thousand of seed while I processed it, my never ending tears mixed in with its color made a seizable maroon mirage
you can’t have food sovereignty without seed sovereignty is the work I do you can’t have body sovereignty without healing sovereignty is the work I am
- Chasity Salvador, excerpt from Long Covid Recovery
Form after “Definition of Funk” from Too Much Midnight by
Krista Franklin
Scott Bentley
Santo as in saint, or saint-like, as in holy. Palo as in stick, club, wood, or staff. As in a stick of wood from a wild tree. As in fallen branches and twigs gifted by trees to us. As in medicine. As in smudging. As in ceremonial cleansing, sacred rituals. As in to aid the journey of souls into the afterlife. As in outlawed rituals. As in the sticks or clubs padres used to whip their god into the blood of neophytes. As in carvings made by woodworkers and brujos. As in the silty, sugary aroma of pine, citrus, spice, and woodsmoke. As in an ingredient in fragrance, incense, candles, colognes. As in consumer products and corporate industrialization. As in aisle A56 at Target. As in sticks on Amazon, Etsy, Anthropologie. As in directions: “hold the stick downward at a 45-degree angle and light with a candle, lighter, or match and let the stick burn for 30 seconds before blowing out the flame, placing the stick in a heatproof dish to let it burn.” As in colonial appropriation. As in illegally harvested wood buried under bananas and lemons. As in deforestation and climate devastation. As in the sharp, jagged teeth of saws, the cold, edged blade of machetes cutting away at flesh, harvesting the treed heart.
Confide in the skin of a grieving corn snake, beneath meadowed plots still existing beyond sho’ohdihi snarls from the mountain lion will yield the crevicing valley below.
Stand above the echoing canyon, release your medicine surrounding your circled aging hands, arrange te’he until loose braids are fastened
As the wind yearns for salted roots, demonstrating prayers for the future you once lost, of a child you never will know—still you dream her face.
Small bark-colored eyes and her fathers’ unruly hair. In secret, you tell the gods of your contempt for stealing her fire before you readied her first nested home—kolomalli.
Delaney Olmo
Swoon death’s brittle arms release the autumn leaves
Claim the wind to those silkened goodnight lashes,
Until your dream woman is willingly grimaced into her
Final earth bed, forgive your last weakness as disdain
Will only become interference to the earthly perennial storm,
Collect Songs in broken lidded jars, space no longer existing—
Fingers releasing her dancing moonlit skin before fire steals
Her spirit into the ornate mouth of marigold and crimson stars.
Delaney Olmo
Coliseum’s seat twilighted memory extraction configured, bezel the fault
of aches: treaties a series of broken
Homesteads: thistle wet, peeling dirt swallowing toppled skeletons.
Stealing our names: banish customs inherited by ancestral clans over thinning mountains: Now endure.
Do you seed genetic mourning?
Creator always rebels against brethren forged from his rib cage.
Waging oceans still unaware.
Protect su nu nu’ whispering soil, or hanging around an elder’s palms.
We consult with the sun deities humming ceremonial borrowed song words to translate loneliness.
Delaney Olmo
Miss your old life but try not to forget. Throat is infected importing a language imposed on this pale tongue. Wake up and inhabit this.
Follow clay worlds that are barely recognizable. Mourn the people who died, appoint deer dancers to occupy discovered feathers sold in giftshops.
Reduce the land to property consumed and women living freely is not allowed. those castles are small, but their wills are traced back to all their descendants.
Remind the sick living spirited people this way is the only way. I try to find ways other to exist, I’m excluded into undesirable molds that do not fit my body.
I think about these memories embedded early on, the comments of my lineage, my mother’s people, this blood, being pale while Indigenous, while this human.
And some say my portrait is not enough when I’m light like my father with a Pomo hair and eyes. They say I don’t look ‘enough blooded’ or like any of their colonizers.
Tomorrow, ask Creator to loan me a body like the one I had in dreams, the woman I was before being consumed and placed into a Western world; I find myself no space.
Banish unwanted presence. Open the windows, and peer onto the moon, shaded by its evening skin, and with such privacy I can finally hover in and annually orbit.
Tamika Gauronskas
“grief. loss. youth. I feel it in my chest. grief are mountains and mountains have names to them.”
-Chasity Salvador, excerpt from Long Covid Recovery
Jessica Mehta
Lady, let me look between your folds, delve into the deep of those hidden waters. That serpent-fruit split like tongues, like teeth— all your paradise for this knowing … eat with me from your plane of mars, paper wasps burrowed to cardinal center. A prison of starvation is nothing, nothing, a pittance to bow like a beast below pale and lonely moons.
Jessica Mehta
Nooses hang loose deep in the Bad lands. Use them, Tall Man urges. Lynchings upended and treaties denied, we are no longer killing Indians, saving men. Our children are both: prisoner and executioner.
Beetling like ornaments on branches, these halos are head cages, crushers gilded in fool’s gold. Contagion does occur 1 here, even below the halcyon skies & enameled plains2 of your so-called milk and honey. This is not your Israel, we are not your converts, lost tribes for saving. We are the enlightened—suspended in ancestors’ arms, well fed & full, hung sure on good medicine.
Jessica Mehta
These wings are ablaze, prepped for flight—not every Phoenix is built of empty bones. We’re covert, down under feathers. I wish, Iris, to bloom from end to end, to drink of your cup as you empty your salt self into me. I once saw a lake so pre-contact clear its stones shone, cut like teeth. We filter our own sustenance, wring out the wrong to conjure something potable. With our backs to the sun, Icarus denied, our span stretches black as Birdashes 3 at our feet. There is no other like me—will not be for half a millennium more. Drink of this, my flowing self, the teal that tames the flames, the only thing keeping my inferno from terrible combustion.
1“Contagion does occur with teenagers” is what Stephanie Schweitzer Dixon of the Front Porch Coalition said regarding the mass suicides of young people living on the Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota.
2“Halcyon skies” and “enameled plains” were the words used in Katharine Lee Bates’s original poem “America the Beautiful” (1893) before it was changed to the more well-known song lyrics “spacious skies” and “fruited plains” in 1904/1911.
3“Birdash” is one of many derivatives of the term “Berdache,” which was used to describe Two-Spirit Natives. By Will Roscoe in his “Bibliography of Berdache and Alternative Gender Roles Among North American Indians” (1987).
Adrienne Leddy
My body cracks, splits, ruptures, A bleeding daily rebirth.
My land is my body is carved out from seismic churning
And a deep, aching pain
Echoing over millennia.
Ripping itself open and gives way to: Nothing.
Our creation from darkness, life through death, Molded from red earth and saltwater And a deeply aching grief which gave us our first breaths.
My strong people hardened by clay And born to withstand the centuries.
So –
While I lay here broken and shattered, My pieces laid out on my bed, Carefully wetting my shards of clay to get back to something I can recognize,
I ask myself:
Did Fu’una mold me wrong?
Is it a mistake that leaves my red earth cracking, splitting, rupturing?
Am I still split like our mountains, do I need a millennia more to form beautiful?
These questions when I’m once again decaying alone with a heating pad Like amot of ancestors’ hot oil massaged in skin Unknowingly sculpting my own urban tradition... And I remember.
No, this can’t be a mistake...
This pain can raise mountains and draw rainbows in the sky.
This lonely island, one I’m sure I’ll die on, Lies surrounded by my relatives in the ocean of our ancestors.
And this insurmountable grief is a wave that breathes life back to me.
About:
Our creation story is of the siblings Puntan and Fu’una whose lives were sacrificed to create life. Through their loss came all of us as Chamorro people, and in processing the harsh reality of chronic pain I find comfort in relating my own journey to our creation story, and a renewed love for my body despite the pain it can bring me.
Christina Gilley
A trickster sneaking around in the dark
Stealing joy & happiness, it tears all of the good apart
Overwhelms with despair, negativity & ownerships of blames
Towards your own self
Towards everything
Like a reflection, a mirror of shames
Anxiety filters in, “hey let’s get into this game”
Like a thief into the night
Coveting & projecting
Wins & Failures with delight
The hearts now thumping
The beats are misaligned
Breathe,steady - breathe
My minds chatter speaks “Leave it all behind... “
Yet how can I?
When it’s shaped my very life?
Created the monsters,I carry inside
The shakiness ,tunnel vision & near blind-sight!
Fear is a feeding bottomless pit
That controls my tarnished outlook
On every aspect
Reporting back to me
Of why I should never trust...
Instead take flight or stay inside
Designed to make one feel absolutely stuck
At times, drained or lifeless
Without no one to love,
Including that, for myself
“Whoa, when did I adopt this?”
Hold in balance, the slow steady steps
Often stopped in its irradiated tracks
Heck, I’m Reminding myself
Of everything I believed, I lacked No!! I scream, I’m not looking back!!
Yesterday’s bitterness is now sweetly gone
Tomorrow’s a cultivated chartered journey
Unexplored, I’ll book my way onwards & beyond
More than I expected, & how did I ever get here?
While traumas trickster games
Had me locked in for years
If only I could just get a little further along
Take the courage to begin today
A new way of challenging my adopted perspectives
To stand tall, in the resolution of my self destruction’s
The conflicting fire that rages to the ground
If only I could just get a little further along
Take the courage to begin today
A new way of challenging my adopted perspectives
To stand tall, in the resolution of my self destruction’s
The conflicting fire that rages to the ground
My inner self roars, I scream all around!
“Trauma, Anxiety and Fear!
You are all demoralizing liars!
You are not wanted here!
Leave me alone, & let me be
The trickster master of stealing my dreams
Trauma,you bastard trickster
You’re everything, I will, one day beat!”
Free from the grips of your strangulation
You gloated to have defeated all of me
Within your triangulation!
“Go back to your den
Of absolute misery of shit, I repeat your fathom words
“You’re nothing
You’re not even worth it!!”
How does that feel?
Does it churn your guts, twisted or bent?
Does it tear you up inside?
Like it did,when I once took it all in?
Today’s a new day
I’m built for this charade
Fearlessly walking
Into & from your parade!
Face me, you spineless glory of sins!
I’ll remind you of all that I am
You took like a coward,with a shady grin
For I am nothing, in the image
You conformed of me
Instead -” I am everything!”
I scream wholeheartedly!
You wanted to believe
That you could break me down
Spiraling like your drunken clown
All in one great performance & circus act
Yet you’ve forgotten I’m everything you lack!!
Compassionate,caring, kind, unselfish,filled with moral empathy,
I have decided, I’m just not your type, you see?
I’ll never be matched to your Souls void of loveless,dark & empty!!
Thirsting on my love
That’s the kind of thing, you feared most of Ahhhh, I found your weakness Like you’ve played on mine Better yet, best to leave it all behind... Traumas a trickster
It steals every sparkling light, Covers it’s unmapped tracks
Like a haughty self entitled knight Armored, thick skinned.. A mere empty shell..
I’ll be more than any of those things I know damn well, I will For I am filled with a fiery light
Of a true heart & a gentle insight
With a destination of cultivated self love
My swaying sword will rise far above!
I Will be your greatest fight !! Challenged, defeated I stare your beast down within your eyes
You see, you’ll never own The immeasurable good, I have in me!!
I win!
Joaquín Lara Midkiff
Come in
Speaks woman me
Blue white body right
Sit down
Says the woman
Crimson pools the vial
Don’t move
Sighs the woman
Ink bleeds the paper
Go ahead
Points the woman
Handy eyes pushed shut
Come in
Speaks father me
Earth skin sit site
Sit down
Gestures father me
Air the throaty hide
Be free
Speaks woman me
Down isles of immortality
Don’t move
Breathes father me
Rock the rainy vapor
Go ahead
Offers father me
Grass tufts finger tug
Be free
Speaks father me
Sky high hummingbird see
For more information on disability justice resources and readings go to: https://projectlets.org/disability-justice
