ABSTRACT
In the collection Step into the Circle, Busy and other Deaf Indians describe a disability experience in which the desire for re-connection with tribal lands and tribal community is paramount. Indigenous sovereignty and nation are, therefore, inextricable from Indigenous land. Here again, Indigenous people differ from other cultural minorities in their long-standing claims to particular geographic territories – claims enshrined in international law. Indigenous people worldwide have been bedeviled by colonial ideas about “blood,” expressed in bureaucratic formulas for reckoning their descent and identity. Teves and her colleagues explain that, historically, “blood-quantum laws were deployed to racialize Native peoples, replacing Native senses of belonging and kinship, which varied across tribal communities before the twentieth century”. The structure-not-event of colonialism, therefore, with its attendant attacks on Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous lands, has clearly worked to disable Indigenous bodies and nations.
