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Abstract
This chapter explores how Indigenous perspectives on disabilities of the brain and mind can relate to and inform Western-normative understanding of disability. It explores who has and who does not have a disability and how that question is determined mainly by Western medicine. It is with great difficulty that, for many years, biomedical and social sciences have been trying to establish where the cut‐off point is between brain and mind variation and disability. The lines are blurred. Today, Western literature describes disability as an inter-relational phenomenon. Disability results from the interaction between an individual with a health condition, e.g., cerebral palsy, and personal and environmental factors. The impartment of the body or the brain may or may not determine the possibility of exercising personal agency and self-determination. Furthermore, to different people, the same brain impartment often results in diverse experiences of disability, personhood and well-being. Indigenous scholars call for better integration of their lived experience of disability into Western medical practices and theoretical models. This goes beyond addressing the role that colonisation has in the exorbitantly high rates of disability across Indigenous people. The social precarity and violence endured by indigenous communities have shaped the environmental conditions that shape the health of these populations; high rates of disability are explained as part of a historical continuum. By unveiling biomedical norms of how bodies and minds ought to be and how they will benefit from engaging and learning about the epistemologies of disability, views about brain and mind from Indigenous persons from the global south can be appreciated in their full complexity.