Content Alert

Some of the stories and artifacts in this module use the harmful language and imagery of eugenics. This includes the forced institutionalization of people with disabilities and people labelled with intellectual disabilities; forced placement of First Nations children in Indian Residential Schools (in effect until 1996) and Training Schools; sexual assault, rape, murder, and theft of First Nations and settler children; forced and coerced sterilization; and mass media advocating for the elimination of First Nations and settler peoples who did not fit white settler colonial worldviews.

Harmful words such as insane, lunatic, idiot, moron, retarded (r-word), imbecile, or feebleminded are referred to in the module. Because the r-word continues to be especially harmful, we have placed a Harmful Language warning label directly next to video media that contains that term.

We request that you not use harmful language in or beyond the classroom except when reading and referring to language used in the materials themselves.

Those who have experienced harm from colonial and eugenic violence may have differing and/or heightened responses to this module, including trauma responses.^1(footnote) You may not know in advance what will trigger a trauma response. We strongly recommend you visit the Prepare and Work with Care module beforehand — it is intended to aid learners with engaging with this content. Recognizing the ways settler education has asserted authoritarian and non-consensual power relations within the space of learning, our hope is for learners to engage with maximum informed consent.^2(footnote)

In presenting this challenging subject matter we find disability studies scholar Margaret Price’s advice helpful. She says, “please do what you need […] to take care of yourself. You may need to take up a different position, engage in some manual activity—knitters, feel free to take out your work—you may simply need to leave.”^3(footnote)

What this Module Strives to Do

In this module you will engage with activist and survivor Peter Park’s personal story. His narrative begins with a message of hope, dignity, respect, and inclusion. He shares the dehumanization he experienced at the Oxford Regional Centre. Park provides learners and educators with tools for disability rights advocacy and activism.

This module supports disability rights activists and their accomplices’ ongoing fight to end colonial human race betterment. As part of that fight, the module centres on plain language activism, disability rights-based activism, activist art, lived experience, and ongoing efforts of rights-based organizations to prioritize disability communities and the voices of people labelled with intellectual disability.

There are key threads of understanding that weave through this module.^4(footnote) We have purposefully centred experiential or cultural knowledges that celebrate difference as primary to all life. These act as a counterpoint to the circulation of dominant eugenic knowledges and discourses that seek to narrow and reduce difference. Such counternarratives disrupt and intervene in dominant narratives by telling stories that offer other possible ways of being. This allows us to imagine and build a more just future.^5(footnote)

This module focuses on the relationships between disability, institutionalization, and rights activism. You will be asked to consider how and why certain people and systems aligned themselves with ideas of human race betterment. Also, you will be asked to think about how these “race betterment” ideas evolved in institutions that attempted to control, change, and eliminate people they deemed unfit under the cover of care, therapy, and education.

The experiences presented here relate specifically to epilepsy and labels of intellectual disability. They give one local and context-specific glimpse of the larger harm done to disability communities across this land and globally.

We widen the story of lived experience so learners will gain knowledge of the different institutions and mechanisms that agents of eugenic race betterment have used—and continue to use—in attempts to control, change, and annihilate disabled peoples and their relationships to loved ones. Such institutions and mechanisms include educational spaces (such as museums, universities, colleges, and training schools), disability focused residential institutions, chemical and physical restraints, emotionally and physically abusive and pathologizing approaches to controlling behaviour, controlling and preventing relationships, marriage restrictions, sterilization, exclusionary communication practices, and incarceration in spaces meant to provide care.

You may encounter knowledge that is not necessarily familiar:

• Disability understandings that celebrate difference as opposed to pathologize it;
• Accessible practices for learning such as land-based learning, relaxed learning, and plain language;
• Dreams of a future other than the one given;
• Community-based advocacy and activism, and verbal and non-verbal storytelling.

Proposed Process for Ethical Engagement

This overview offers suggestion for engagement.

We model an approach to learning from the powerful knowledge of survivor-activists. As such, we have woven together many layers or strands that are meaningful to the survivors and the larger team of collaborators who developed this module. These strands include prioritizing lived-experiences, presenting those lived-experiences in multiple accessible ways, justice-oriented and active reflective thinking and learning, and countering oppressive ideas with specific tools. We intentionally foreground land-based learning that challenges unthought occupation and single stories and worldviews. We believe learning is a transformational, process oriented, and life-long journey—not a one-off transaction.

We encourage you to braid, weave, and knit with the many strands you will encounter. Some activities ask you to intentionally weave specific strands. Other activities ask you to reflect on how those strands change what you see and understand.

We want you to feel safe as you reflect on these challenging stories and information. When you reflect, keep in mind that it is perfectly valid to not know how to process this information at this point. Your current environment may impact your opportunities to reflect. Remember that reflective thinking can involve multiple modes of response (land-based, creative movement, written, video, music, etc.) and take place over longer periods of time.

You will build skills and critical understanding of knowledge that has often been erased, silenced, and diminished.

Below are some additional suggestions for how learners might move through the module: