Every October 12, Latin America once again confronts its colonial wound. The date refers to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and, with it, to conquest, dispossession, genocidal violence, and the transformations imposed on the many Indigenous peoples of the continent. Over time, how this day has been named and commemorated has changed, reflecting broader debates about memory, colonialism, resistance, and cultural diversity. From my field of research, I also see October 12 as an opportunity to raise a less visible question: what does this history have to do with disability?
This question has accompanied my work for the past 15 years. I first approached Indigenous communities as a mestiza woman and rehabilitation professional and, later, as a researcher interested in interculturality, critical disability studies, and decolonial perspectives. My work in Indigenous territories in southern Chile gradually transformed my way of understanding disability. I began to recognize more clearly that many of the categories we use in health, rehabilitation, education, and social policy are not culturally neutral. Ideas such as independence, normality, functionality, productivity, and even disability itself have a history. That history is linked to colonial projects and to modern/colonial ways of understanding and hierarchizing bodies and minds.
Since the conquest began more than five centuries ago, colonial domination operated not only through the control of territory, the economy, and political power. It also acted upon bodies and knowledge, for example through violence that produced disability, the construction of hierarchies between bodies considered capable and incapable, and the devaluation of Indigenous understandings of health, care, difference, and wellbeing.
These concerns are at the heart of the book Indigenous Knowledge and Practices on Disability in Latin America, published by Palgrave Macmillan, which I had the opportunity to edit and which I developed collectively with Indigenous and mestizo people from different Latin American countries, with and without disabilities, as well as scholars and activists. The book seeks to make visible knowledge and practices that have often been ignored in conventional disability studies, taking particular care not to romanticize or homogenize Indigenous worldviews.
Rather than proposing a single “Indigenous perspective” on disability, the book deliberately emphasizes plurality. Its chapters explore topics that have received little attention in this field, such as the relationships between Indigenous languages and disability, access to land, archaeology, Indigenous childbirth, and the experiences of Deaf Indigenous women. Taken together, they show that speaking about disability among Indigenous peoples necessarily also means speaking about territory, community, spirituality, participation, and self-determination.
Editing this book reinforced something that has become central for those of us who study disability from a Global South perspective: decolonizing disability studies cannot simply consist of incorporating Indigenous peoples as a new population into theories developed elsewhere. It entails questioning the presumed universality of concepts and creating space for Indigenous epistemologies to help define the questions. At the same time, it requires avoiding romanticization. Indigenous peoples are diverse, dynamic, and internally complex; their knowledge should not be treated as a timeless alternative to “Western knowledge,” but as living systems of thought, with their own debates, tensions, and transformations.
October 12 therefore offers an opportunity to ask ourselves how much of that coloniality remains embedded in our own academic categories and continues to shape contemporary knowledge production. Who defines what disability is in the global world and in local territories? What forms of knowledge about disability do we recognize as legitimate? What happens when Indigenous communities themselves understand the body, care, autonomy, or wellbeing from standpoints different from those that our disciplines have treated as universal?
For those working in disability studies, Indigenous studies, interculturality, decolonial thought, health, education, or Latin America, I hope Indigenous Knowledge and Practices on Disability in Latin America challenges readers to transform how we understand the body, care, difference, and life in common. Perhaps this is also one possible meaning of returning to our history every October 12: not only to remember what colonization destroyed or transformed, but also to ask ourselves what we need to unlearn to build more just relationships among peoples, forms of knowledge, and ways of existence.