Resilience, Culture & Community: Honoring Indigenous Experiences of Disability During Native American Heritage Month
Image: An icon with geometric designs is on the left with the words "November Native American Heritage Month" on the right
Every November, as Native American Heritage Month arrives, there is a collective invitation to pause and honor the First Nations People of this land. These are the people whose cultures, languages, and stories shape the continent far beyond what history books have recorded. It is a time of celebration, but also a time of recognition and responsibility: to learn, to listen, and to understand the realities Indigenous communities continue to navigate today.
Among these realities is the intersection of Indigenous identity and disability, where history, culture, resilience, and inequity converge. Indigenous people with disabilities hold stories that illuminate both the challenges of the present and the enduring strength of traditions that long predate colonial borders and definitions of what disability is.
Across tribal nations, disability is an experience woven through relationships to land, to family, to community, and to culture. And during Native American Heritage Month, honoring the lived experiences of Indigenous people with disabilities expands our understanding of inclusion, justice, and what it truly means to belong.
A Landscape Shaped by History and Strength
Image: An elderly Native American woman sits in a wheelchair
To understand disability in Indigenous communities, we must begin with the truth: Native American people experience some of the highest rates of disability in the United States. Studies from the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities (NACDD) estimate disability prevalence at 24% to 30%, the highest of any racial or ethnic group. This statistic reflects the influence of historical forces, many still unfolding today, that have shaped health outcomes for generations.
Historical Trauma has left Deep Wounds
Understanding disability in Indigenous communities requires acknowledging a long history of policies and practices that disrupted traditional ways of life and continue to shape health today. Indigenous scholars describe this as Historical Trauma, a term developed by social worker and researcher Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart in the late 1990s to explain the collective, cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations caused by colonization, forced relocation, and cultural suppression.
Dr. Brave Heart’s foundational papers, such as “The Historical Trauma Response Among Natives and Its Relationship with Substance Abuse” and “Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief: Implications for Native Peoples” (1999), outline how events like massacres, loss of land, and government assimilation policies created a pattern of grief and stress that affects physical, mental, and community health long after the original events occurred.
Colonization did not just remove people from land; it removed them from systems of knowledge, care, kinship, and ceremonial practice that had supported well-being for generations. The establishment of the Indian boarding school system, where Native children were taken from their families and punished for speaking their languages or practicing their traditions, inflicted deep wounds. Many survivors describe harsh discipline, abuse, medical neglect, and intense isolation. These experiences shaped their understanding of safety, trust, and identity.
These harms did not end when the boarding schools closed. They reverberate across generations in what Dr. Brave Heart calls the Historical Trauma Response, which includes increased rates of depression, anxiety, chronic disease, and stress-related illness. Modern studies, such as those published in the American Journal of Public Health and by the National Indian Child Welfare Association, show that communities with a history of forced relocation or boarding school attendance often experience higher rates of chronic illness, disability, and barriers to accessing healthcare.
Other federal policies intensified these wounds:
The outlawing of ceremonies—including the Sundance, the Potlatch, and healing rituals- under the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses.
The removal of Indigenous people from ancestral homelands has led to poverty, food insecurity, and exposure to unfamiliar environments and diseases.
The termination and relocation era of the 1950s which forced many Native families into urban settings without the community support systems that traditionally sustained health.
Each of these policies disrupted the relational, communal frameworks that had supported people with differences, illnesses, or impairments long before Western systems around disabilities existed. Traditionally, care was rooted in family networks, shared responsibility, and interdependence. Colonization fractured these networks, replacing them with institutions that frequently pathologized Indigenous identity itself.
Today, the impacts of historical trauma remain visible in disparities across disability prevalence, chronic disease, mental health outcomes, and access to culturally informed care. Studies from the National Institutes of Health demonstrate that Indigenous populations have higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and mobility impairments. These conditions are directly linked to long-term stress, poverty, environmental dispossession, and lack of access to healthcare
Image: A young man in a traditional Native American outfit dances at a community gathering.
Yet Indigenous communities have also shown profound resilience. Cultural revitalization movements, which include language preservation, land reclamation, community healing gatherings, traditional foods programs, and intergenerational storytelling, play a key role in restoring wellness and identity. As many Indigenous scholars emphasize, cultural continuity itself is a protective factor that supports mental, emotional, and physical health.
Historical trauma is not simply a story of suffering; it is also a story of resilience, resistance, and survival. Understanding its impact helps explain today’s cultural landscape around disability for Native American communities. However, it also highlights the strength of Indigenous communities who continue to reclaim cultural practices and create spaces of healing despite centuries of disruption.
Indigenous Worldviews Offer Another Way to Understand Disability
Despite centuries of disruption, Indigenous cultural frameworks have survived, offering profound insight into how many Native people understand ability, wellness, and interdependence. Across hundreds of tribes, beliefs vary, but certain themes echo across regions.
Ability is Relational, not Individual
Understanding disabilities within Indigenous communities requires shifting away from Western medical definitions and toward cultural frameworks shaped by relationships, land, ceremony, and community life. Indigenous scholars and disability researchers consistently note that the Western concept of “disability” as a fixed category based on impairment does not align neatly with the belief systems of many tribal nations. In fact, multiple studies have shown that many Indigenous languages do not contain a direct translation for the word “disability.” Instead, the idea is understood through a person’s role within their community and the relationships that sustain them.
In Disability Through a Native American Lens, researchers John Inglebret and JoAnn Kauffman describe how many tribal traditions historically focused less on what a person could not do and more on who they were, how they contributed, and how the community supported them throughout their life path
This understanding is deeply rooted in Indigenous cultural values of interdependence. Where Western models often position independence as the highest marker of health or success, Indigenous knowledge systems recognize mutual reliance as a source of strength. The First Nations Health Authority describes Indigenous wellness as a shared responsibility, one in which a person is understood not as an isolated individual but as part of a family, a community, a land-based identity, and a generations-deep lineage of responsibility and care. Within this worldview, care is reciprocal, collective, and expected. Community care is not a backup plan for those who “can’t manage alone,” but is embraced as a living practice that sustains everyone.
Image: An elder Native American man wearing a traditional feathered headdress speaks thoughtfully to a group under a tent.
Healing, too, is understood holistically. Across tribal nations, wellness encompasses emotional, spiritual, mental, and communal balance. It is shaped by ceremony, by the land, by ancestral traditions, and by the stories that frame a person’s identity. The National Center for Cultural Competence (NCCC) emphasizes that Indigenous approaches to health often integrate traditional medicine, language revitalization, connection to place, and intergenerational learning. These are elements that nourish wellbeing far beyond what clinical definitions dictate.
For Indigenous people with disabilities, this might involve time on the land, participating in cultural practices, using traditional medicine, or drawing strength from family and tribal identity. These forms of support coexist with Western medical care, offering types of meaning based on belonging, grounding, and cultural continuity that are equally vital to the healing process.
These perspectives reveal a culturally distinct understanding of disabilities in which disability is not seen as a deviation from normality, but as part of the full expression of human diversity. Rather than separating a person based on what they lack, Indigenous worldviews emphasize who they are, where they come from, how they are connected, and how the community, which includes land, family, ancestors, and culture, walks alongside them.
In this way, Indigenous approaches to disabilities invite us to imagine inclusion not as a service or a program, but as a community ethic based on relationships and roles. This approach includes connections, honor, and access that are ongoing, reciprocal, grounded in community, and rooted in a worldview where every person belongs.
Indigenous-Led Paths Toward Inclusion
While Indigenous people with disabilities continue to face real and ongoing barriers, some of the most meaningful progress has come from within tribal communities themselves. Across the country, a growing network of Indigenous leaders, advocates, and organizations is redefining what disability inclusion looks like by shaping support systems that reflect tribal values, cultural knowledge, and community priorities.
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, several tribes and Centers for Independent Living participated in the Native American Independent Living Demonstration Project, a federal initiative that explored new models of independent living support in Indian Country. Although the demonstration grants were time-limited (with activity concentrated from 2018 to 2022), the work seeded important lessons: Native communities benefit most from support services that are culturally grounded, tribally directed, and supported by Indigenous peer mentors who understand community life firsthand. Those insights continue to influence how independent living programs collaborate with tribal nations today.
Other progress comes from ongoing partnerships where tribes themselves guide the work. The University of Montana Rural Institute, for example, has spent decades collaborating with tribal communities to gather data on disabilities, support program development, and understand the realities of disability in rural and remote regions. Because many Indigenous communities live far from major service hubs, these partnerships help shape approaches that are responsive to local context, where community relationships, traditional support systems, and cultural practices are just as important as clinical services.
Another major source of leadership comes from Tribal Vocational Rehabilitation (TVR) programs, formally known as the American Indian Vocational Rehabilitation Services (AIVRS) Program, which operate in tribal nations across the United States. These programs are funded under Section 121 of the Rehabilitation Act and are designed specifically to support Indigenous people with disabilities in securing meaningful employment, assistive technology, training, and workplace accommodations. Because these services are tribally operated, they reflect community values and cultural expectations far more accurately than mainstream programs.
These programs reveal a fundamental truth found in Independent Living Philosophy: Indigenous communities already hold the knowledge needed to support their members with disabilities. The most effective disability initiatives are those that listen to tribal leadership, uplift Indigenous frameworks of care, and recognize that inclusion grows from culture, land, kinship, and sovereignty, and not from the replication of systems developed elsewhere.
These Indigenous-led paths show how disability inclusion flourishes when it is shaped by the people it serves: grounded in cultural continuity, guided by community wisdom, and rooted in the understanding that every person belongs.
Stories of Indigenous Resilience: Leadership at the Intersections
Across the country, Indigenous people with disabilities are sustaining culture, shaping community life, and pushing for a more just future. They are artists, caregivers, athletes, parents, elders, and advocates. These roles rarely make headlines but quietly carry enormous influence. Their lives illuminate a truth that Indigenous communities have long understood: disability is not something that pulls a person away from community; it is something lived within community.
Image: Pictured is Sarah A. Young Bear-Brown, a member of the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa—the Meskwaki Nation, and an ASL storyteller and beadwork artist.
In many places, the work of Deaf and hard-of-hearing Indigenous artists offers a powerful example. Profiles documented by organizations such as Disability Rights Florida highlight creators who use beadwork, dance, spoken word, and film to explore the intersection of Indigenous identity and Deaf experience.
Through their art, they reclaim stories that were historically silenced by reviving signs, teachings, and cultural expressions that exist at the crossroads of language, land, and embodied experience. Their work challenges stereotypes, celebrates the beauty of Deaf Indigenous identity, and affirms that cultural expression is a form of sovereignty.
Advocacy, too, is a central part of Indigenous disability leadership. In the Southwest, the Native American Disability Law Center stands alongside Indigenous people with disabilities as they navigate systems never designed for them. From fighting for equal access in schools to addressing discrimination in housing or guardianship, the Law Center ensures that Indigenous people with disabilities are not only protected by their rights but empowered to assert them. Their work bridges legal advocacy with cultural understanding by recognizing that justice must honor tribal identity, not erase it.
And everywhere from Alaska to Arizona, from the Northern Plains to the Great Lakes, Indigenous elders with disabilities continue to hold communities together. Many elders live with mobility challenges, chronic conditions, or sensory disabilities, yet they remain the keepers of story, language, memory, and tradition. In countless tribal nations, elders are not sidelined because of disability; they are valued for their wisdom, their lived experience, and the cultural grounding they provide. Their presence teaches younger generations how to carry heritage forward and how to honor bodies and minds across the lifespan.
Together, these artists, advocates, caregivers, and elders offer a fuller picture of the Indigenous experience of disabilities that is founded in cultural continuity, leadership, and the ongoing development of community life.
A Call to Honor, Learn, and Act
Native American Heritage Month is an invitation to deepen our relationship with Indigenous history, sovereignty, and community. And when we honor Indigenous people with disabilities, we honor stories that embody resilience, resistance, and profound cultural strength. We recognize that building a more accessible, equitable world requires listening to those who have carried wisdom through generations of challenge and change.
This month, and in every month that follows, may we learn, listen, uplift, and act in ways that honor Indigenous resilience and support Indigenous people with disabilities in living full, connected, culturally grounded lives.