Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
80. How do Indigenous religions approach disability?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Zara Surratt [+]
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD candidate
Zara Surratt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include the religious history of the American West, the intersections of race, disability and religion, ideas of embodied difference, and religion and children.
Description
Experts in Western medicine identify wellness as a matter of individual bodies, but Indigenous models see it in relationship to land, kin, ceremony and tradition. This essay argues that connection and disconnection, rather than ability and disability, are more apt categories for understanding Indigenous approaches to bodily and cognitive difference.