Orange Shirt Day

Composed September 30, 2024

Introduction

The following is a personal reflection on the nature of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and those two structures' relationship to digital accessibility. I'm doing this because it's the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, or colloquialy, 'Orange Shirt Day.' It's a contemplative holidary where the nation nominally recognizes the legacy of residential schools and nominally honours residential school survivors.

A Primer on Residential Schools

Now, this is a public post, so I am obligated to give some context here. As a settler-colonial state, canada naturally wants to get rid of its Indigneous peoples and has pursued this objective variously throughout the course of history. This logic of elimination is fundamentally connected to the nature of settler-colonial ventures: unlike 'traditional' colonies where the native population is used as labour to support the needs of the metropol, settler colonies depend on the elimination of the native population in order to gain complete control of the natural resources that the native population has the first claim to. As long as 'canada' continues to exclude the rights of Indigenous peoples to their land and continues to enforce corrupted treaties that were drafted with this logic of elimination in mind, this fundamental tendency to create new systems to eliminate the Indigenous populations will persist.

The residential schools were one such system. Nowadays, they are viewed as a system that was exceptionally evil. This is because they found hundreds of dead bodies of children in unmarked graves underneath many of these residential school sites. Settler like me hear about this, and they can't cope with the idea that their own nation could have done this. So in narrativizing the event, they often suggest that there was something potentially super evil about the pastors and nuns that were charged with these so-called schools. The truth is actually more scary than that.

Residential schools were only one manifestation of many kinds of banal institutions that were built to eliminate Indigenous people from public life. There were others. Indian TB hospitals. Day school. Jails and prisons. Mental hospitals. Institutions for 'the feeble and infirm.' And in the modern day, the Child Welfare system/foster homes, hospitals, mental hospitals, continue this legacy. Truly horrific things continue to happen in these public sectors. In the private sectors, many non-profits also unwittingly use practices that facilitate the logic of elimination. And the state continues to absorb the land and resources of Indigenous peoples who are disabled by these systems.

When Two Oppressions Interlace

Yes, you may have forgot that I am talking about disability and A11Y here. For Indigenous peoples struggling against a settler colonial state, the experience itself can be incredibly disabling. The rate of disability is much higher amongst Indigenous population than the white settler population. The Indigenous population also has a much higher occurance of poverty than the white settler population does.

The digital divide has already been identified as a key problem area that reinforces inequality. Even if they have regular access to devices, lots of folks in the inner city (predominantly Indigenous people and refugees) do not have access to good internet infrastructure. Many folks who do not have this are restricted to using computers at libraries and drop-ins. They are often restricted by time-limits and content blockers. Many of them don't have assistive technology loaded onto the devices. When it's a public device, personalization options are limited. The digital literacy that many people who grow up in these conditions have tends to be lower than the mainstream, compounding the problem. Sometimes, these marginalized folks are denied entry at libraries and drop-ins.

So What Now?

Here's where I abandon the illusion of expertise and fully admit that I don't have a good solution to give to a11y professionals who want to be able to advocate for Disabled Indigenous people, poor Disabled people, poor Disabled Indigenous people, and unhoused poor Disabled Indigenous people. Here are some ideas that I have, but I'm not Indigenous and I'm not an expert in digital accessibility. This is mostly here so I can measure my knowledge in a year from now:

Conclusion

Crip activism has the key axiom: We don't leave anybody behind. As the field of digital accessibility gets more formalized and we see it becoming more part of the natural neoliberal order of things, let's keep this in mind.