Susan Burch gives her audience a privileged look at American Sign Language (ASL) poetry, a genre in which the body
rather quite literally is the text. The hands, facial expressions, stance, and movements of the signer are critical ingredients
of the language and the meaning of the poem. Living only through embodiment, ASL poetry signifies that moment in
which language circulates through the writer and emerges as a corporeal signification as well as a metaphorical one.
Burch brings us to the state of affairs in which metaphor, gesture, meaning, and corpus are one. The work of Bernard
Bragg, Clayton Valli, and the Flying Words Project serve as examples.
Disorderly Pasts" centers on life stories from South Dakota's Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric hospital for American Indians. Between 1902 and 1933, the Asylum detained nearly four hundred Indigenous men, women, and children from more than fifty Native nations. Focusing especially on the experiences of Menominee people collectively stolen from their homes in Wisconsin to Canton in November 1917, this article exposes contested understandings of kin, diagnoses, and remembering. Complex relationships between the three concepts also emerge: medical diagnoses were used to undermine Indigenous kinship, and they complicate remembering. At the same time, remembering-recalling and repopulating the past-offers a way to challenge pathological diagnoses and affirm Native selfdetermination. Motivated by disorder, the desire to "disrupt the systematic functioning or neat arrangement of" historical work, this project unsettles the projected objectivity and commonsense logic of U.S. medical diagnoses and institutionalization. It brings to light the violent entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, ableism, and patriarchy and their impact on Native sovereignty, Indigenous kinship, and remembering. Collaborating with relatives of those incarcerated at Canton, and drawing on decolonizing and disability studies methodologies, this work seeks to generate meaningful historical knowledge and new theoretical strategies and perspectives.
The factors driving research into disability history methodology in its practical dimensions (such as finding and analyzing sources and presenting findings), the cultural values that inform it, and who populates intended audiences all contribute to the invisible infrastructure of historical production. When historians of disability access a rich source of data, they also must ask who created it, who benefited from its preservation, and whose stories are left untold. Sharing knowledge—through preservation and dissemination—equally shapes disability historical work. In all of this, access and accessibility—from built spaces and source types to research aids and scholarly products—remain paramount. Ways to proceed with sensitivity and creativity in the exploration of disabled peoples’ and disability’s pasts are presented from the perspective of the United States.
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