Introduction

Settler colonialism in Canada is a pervasive structure which seeks to eradicate and replace Indigenous sovereignties with settler sovereignty through land dispossession, cultural genocide, and state violence.^[1] Indigenous women in Canada experience disability at a rate 1.5 times higher than non-Indigenous women.^[2] While there is literature which links disability to settler colonialism, this literature tends to be based around the disabling effects of issues like the water crisis,^[3] environmental degradation and resource extraction,^[4] and access to the social determinants of health.^[5] These issue-focused approaches often treat Indigenous communities as homogenous groups, which overlooks the differential effects of settler colonialism which place Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA^[6] people at heightened risk of disability in the first place. These unique experiences are not always evident when understanding the ongoing effects of settler colonialism from the perspective of singular identities, leading to invisibility in domestic policy and human rights discourses.^[7] While Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities can leverage international treaty bodies to draw attention to these invisibilities, research related to the effectiveness of mainstreaming disability or Indigenous rights within United Nations treaty bodies has indicated limited success of such strategies.^[8]

In this paper, we follow our work as graduate research assistants involved in the development of a shadow report for the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons of Disabilities (UNCRPD) conducted by the Live Work Well Research Centre at the University of Guelph, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, and an advisory group of Indigenous women and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities. We use examples from this work to illustrate how invisibility within the domestic policy context re/produces settler colonialism and undermines the human rights of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities, while also shaping how they advocate for their rights using United Nations treaty body reporting. We begin by introducing the project scope. We then identify some of the key tensions between diverse Indigenous approaches to disability and the main theoretical models of disability, finishing by highlighting the importance of using the political model of disability^[9] to understand the unique human rights exclusions experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities.

Following these steps, we use the example of disability supports and service delivery to emphasize how current policy approaches contribute to the cyclical relationship between the disabling of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people and settler colonial logics of land and resource dispossession. This cycle ultimately re/creates the structural conditions leading to heightened risks of disablement in the first place, and in so doing prevents the full recognition of their human rights under the UNCRPD.  However, we argue that while United Nations treaty bodies can represent an important space for advocacy regarding non-recognition of rights, treaty bodies are located around single sets of individual rights.  As a result, they are unable to fully address the intersectional realities experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities, because they require the privileging of single sites of oppression. This ultimately constrained the decolonial potential of our final report because we were unable to fully address the cyclical relationship between settler colonialism, disability, and state policies which underpins the specific human rights issues identified within the report. In our final section, we share personal reflections on how this work has shaped our understanding of reconciliation, decolonization, and our approaches to working in solidarity with Indigenous people as settler-Canadian students with disabilities.

Project Scope

As part of the Engendering Disability Inclusive Development project^[10], the Live Work Well Research Centre was commissioned by the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) to draft a shadow report for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).^[11] This report specifically addresses concerns that impact Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA individuals with disabilities in Canada. The goal of the UNCRPD is “to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity.”^[12] Every five years, countries that have ratified the UNCRPD must submit state reports outlining how they are meeting their responsibilities as signatories. State reports are then reviewed by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, who provide observations or recommendations which should be addressed before the submission of the next report. During this process, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are encouraged to submit shadow reports to the Committee to identify issues overlooked in the state report. Since shadow reports allow NGOs to report on whether the state is meeting their responsibilities as a treaty body signatory, they can represent an important site of advocacy for rights and justice at the transnational level for groups left out of the domestic political agenda.

Guided by the question “What are key potential issues for Indigenous women, girls, and gender-diverse people with disabilities with regard to the implementation of the UNCRPD in Canada?,” this shadow report used document analysis of Canada’s state reports for all five UN international treaty bodies^[13] to identify the main issues addressed by the state with respect to Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA individuals with disabilities. We then turned to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, the Report on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, federal government statements related to the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and reports from the International Lesbian and Gay Alliance (ILGA) to identify gaps within   each treaty body response. These gaps shaped the seventeen major themes addressed in the final report^[14]. In writing the final shadow report, we also included an extensive review of community and academic literature, and feedback from both focus groups conducted by NWAC and an advisory committee of Indigenous women and 2SLGBTQQIA individuals with disabilities. The advisory committee aided in prioritizing the major issues within the report and provided us with additional feedback on draft versions of the report.

Throughout the development of the shadow report, it became clear that the interrelatedness of the issues we were aiming to address could not be fully expressed within the report itself. This artificial separation was due in part to the fundamental disconnect between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems which affects how the issues identified in the final report are experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities. As a result, it was difficult to truly address how settler colonialism continues to shape the unique experiences of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities, but also reinforces the material inequalities that contribute to disablement.^[15] In the following section we will engage more deeply with the tensions which arise between diverse Indigenous and western understandings of disability, and how understanding these tensions help us understand the disabling of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people as a political problem deeply linked to settler colonialism.

Approaches to Disability and Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism is produced, and continues to be reproduced, through the economic, racial, and gender privileging of settler Canadians.^[16] However, discussions about settler colonialism may overlook the important linkages between settler colonialism, gender, and disability. While there are multiple Indigenous cultural contexts, Indigenous approaches to disability are distinct from settler approaches in several important ways. Pointing to how disability is culturally constructed, many Indigenous languages do not have a word for disability.^[17] In these diverse perspectives, disability is not automatically understood as an impairment, but may be understood as holding different gifts from the Creator, as being a valued community member, as being a gift or teacher, or as being closer to the spirit world.^[18] People with disabilities were included both through being recognized for their gifts and leadership and through being cared for as part of their community.^[19] These understandings of disability locate community inclusion, spirituality, and the self-determination and agency of Indigenous people with disabilities as a defining characteristic of their lived experience.^[20]

In contrast, existing Western approaches locate disability within two main theoretical models.^[21] First, the medical model of disability understands disability as a defect and/or medical problem which must be “fixed” to allow an individual to achieve full functioning within society.^[22] This is the main model through which Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities currently receive care and supports. Recent scholarship has drawn parallels between the medicalization of disability and settler colonialism by identifying common threads including the assumption of normative bodies as tied to Judeo-Christian ethics, and the domination of the western medical paradigms in assimilating disabled bodies to those norms.^[23] In addition, the medical model faces significant limitations, with disability rights activists and scholars arguing that it is not the presence or absence of functional limitations which create disability, but society itself which is disabling.^[24] These criticisms are the basis of the second major theoretical model, which is the social model of disability. The social model argues that disability arises from physical or social barriers that prevent those with functional limitations from full participation in society. Again, scholarship has highlighted the limitations of social model of disability in addressing the unique experiences of Indigenous peoples with disabilities because it overlooks the role of settler colonial policy in both the political and cultural marginalization of Indigenous peoples, but also to the bodily effects of those policies.^[25]

During our work on the shadow report, we were introduced to a third model of disability—the political model. Dr. Lynn Gehl argues that due to the political relationship between Indigenous nations and Canada, it is politics—not society—which represents the main barrier to addressing the needs of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities.^[26] From this perspective, we can understand the production of disability in Indigenous communities as a type of colonial violence resulting from policies which led to the residential school system, the criminalization of Indigenous culture, the band system, and land and resource dispossession.^[27] Gehl argues that we can see the ongoing effects of these policies through political processes which continue to uphold sex discrimination in The Indian Act, the continuation of land divestment via the modern land claims process, and Canada’s continued refusal to uphold human rights decisions related to the care and treatment of Indigenous peoples with disabilities.^[28] Ultimately, these types of political processes serve to undermine the political and self-determining authority of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people living with disabilities, therefore reinforcing existing settler colonial structures. This approach to understanding of disability intentionally shines light on the role of state processes and policies and can draw attention to how settler colonialism permeates both disability as a construct and our policy responses related to disability supports, services, and social inclusion.

Settler Colonialism, the Re/Production of Disability, and Human Rights Frameworks

In using the political model of disability to analyze our work on the shadow report, we were able to recognize where tensions between Indigenous understandings of disability, settler understandings of disability, and existing human rights and policy frameworks overlap. This makes visible the cyclical relationship between the creation of disability and the reproduction of settler colonial logics. While this relationship was evident in the interconnections between the key issues identified in the shadow report, we found that some of the limitations to the shadow reporting process made it difficult to capture this relationship within the report because of how we were constrained both to individual articles of the UNCRPD, and to a single treaty body.^[29]

To illustrate this difficulty, we will look at one of the issues outlined in the shadow report: access to supports and services. This theme is tied to UNCRPD Articles 19, 23, and 25. Article 19 requires states to recognize that people with disabilities have an equal right to live independently while being included within their community. Article 23 recognizes the right to have access to family life, maintain family relationships, and have the freedom to make reproductive choices. Article 25 recognizes the right to access the same overall quality and type of health care and services received by non-disabled people.^[30] However, Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities face significant barriers accessing the services and supports they require to meet their needs, including difficulty accessing health care which includes access to community care and/or homecare within their communities, access to employment and training services, and youth in care.^[31]

These barriers to service provision arise from   several different (but related) root causes : tensions between diverse Indigenous worldviews and settler conceptualizations of disability; government funding and service delivery models which are not tailored to Indigenous peoples; and lack of access to land and resources due to historical and ongoing land dispossession. As discussed earlier, Indigenous understandings of disability centre meeting the support needs of people with disabilities as part of meeting the needs of the community as a whole. These caring traditions rely on family and community inclusion as central to meeting the support needs of community members with disabilities.^[32] However, in Canada, disability care and supports are provided through a medicalized understanding of disability, where expert care is required to “fix” people with disabilities, ensuring social participation through physical and mental health. As a result, government funding is directed towards “expert” care such as urban institutionalization rather than towards the necessary health and social services required for the existing community.^[33] This diverts funding for meeting the care and support needs of Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities away from family and communities and towards centralized disability services. While there may be some services available locally, access to services often requires travel, or in the case of specialized care, may remove people from their home communities.^[34]

This centralized funding model, combined with the need to travel to access services requires that we also address a second issue from within the report—disability supports and social protection. Access to disability supports and social protection is tied to Article 28 of the CRPD, which requires states to recognize that people with disabilities have the right to achieve an adequate standard of living, which includes access to disability-related needs and access to poverty assistance.^[35] The conditions of poverty under which many Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities live results in multiple barriers to accessing the social determinants of wellness^[36] including access to: food security;^[37] housing;^[38] education;^[39] health care;^[40] and heightened risk of physical, psychological, and sexual violence.^[41] The political model of disability brought forward by Gehl shows that these barriers to wellness are inherently politicized because they are understood within the context of Canada’s political relationship with Indigenous nations. This exposes the common threads between these barriers as being directly related to colonial policies such as land rights treaties created in bad faith by settler governments, the Indian Act, and ongoing land dispossession via the modern treaty process.^[42] These policies resulted in the residential school system, criminalization of Indigenous culture, the band system, and on-going land and resource dispossession, which forced Indigenous Peoples into poverty. Thus, these political barriers create further sites of disablement, meaning that they create and re/produce opportunities in which disability can and does occur. These are intrinsically linked to settler colonial policies of land and resource dispossession, ultimately resulting in Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people having one of the highest rates of disability in the country, with over 30% of Indigenous women and girls living with a disability^[43] in contrast to 22%^[44] of the total Canadian population.^[45]

Canada’s second and third periodic reports on the CRPD indicate that government responsibility for providing access to supports and services has been met on both federal and provincial/territorial levels through policies such as the proposed Canada Disability Benefit, ^[46]  which (once passed through Parliament) will be a national transfer program for people with disabilities.  While policies like this are often hailed as a great first step towards poverty alleviation, they do not consider the unique experiences of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA individuals with disabilities. In the case of the Canada Disability Benefit, access to funds does not imply access to services and supports. In rural and remote Indigenous communities, services are chronically underfunded and understaffed;^[47] even if disabled Indigenous people are given monetary disability benefits, this does not ensure that the supports in their communities have adequate funding to keep them in service. While disability benefits may allow disabled Indigenous people to travel—where travel is possible—for supports and services, forcing Indigenous Peoples to leave their lands to access supports often has long-lasting negative impacts on their mental health due to the disconnect between disability services and cultural supports.^[48]

Even when Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities travel to access services, there is no guarantee that the services and supports available will be culturally appropriate. This sets up a dynamic which undermines Indigenous caring traditions, and the role of family supports in meeting the needs of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities, but also privileges western approaches to health. The results here are two-fold: first, casting access to traditional medicines as something “backward” and lesser-than Western medical approaches; and second, divorcing the relationships between land access, access to traditional medicines, and the service and support needs of Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities. As a result, governments meet their obligation to provide “adequate” access to healthcare and services under Article 25 of the UNCRPD—but do so in a way which removes Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities from their communities while also preventing the government from needing to provide access to land for the purposes of obtaining traditional medicines and community-supported care.^[49] This inadvertently results in the non-recognition of UNCRPD Articles 19 and 23, the rights to live independently while maintaining family relationships and to being included within their community.

This dynamic also perpetuates colonial logics around land dispossession and access to landed resources because it ignores the root causes of inequity—here, settler colonialism—by downplaying how essential access to land and resources is for the wellbeing and survival of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities and their communities. This is clear both in terms of the heightened risk of disablement due to climate change, resource extraction, and other barriers to the social determinants of wellbeing which result from the forced removal of Indigenous peoples to poor quality and remote lands as part of settler colonial policy, but also through urbanized and inadequate service provision. These forms of service provision are rooted in capitalist and colonial understandings of disability, which ignore the importance of community and land access in meeting the support needs of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities. The ability to access culturally safe care, created by/for one’s own community, and located within that community are deeply linked not only to individual rights as a disabled person, but also to the collective right to self-determination as an Indigenous people s. Defined in Article 3 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, self-determination includes the collective right to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”^[50] Self-determination requires that Indigenous peoples have access to a healthy economic base including both land rights and federal support^[51] to ensure service delivery. This includes the provision of culturally relevant disability supports and services in all Indigenous communities. Combined, these policy dynamics are both produced by and reproduce settler colonial logics which seek to empower the settler state   through the eradication or assimilation of Indigenous peoples by way of land and resource dispossession and the undermining of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.

These barriers are further complicated by both the domestic and international human rights context, because existing human rights approaches struggle to balance individual rights such as gender (or disability) with collective rights such as self-determination.^[52] In Canada, people   with disabilities have the constitutionally protected right to live without discrimination based on their disability under Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Meanwhile, all Indigenous people have their Treaty and Indigenous rights protected under Section 35(1) of the Constitution, which includes the right to self-determination. However, in both cases, these constitutional protections only apply to single identities—disability in the case of Section 15 rights, and Indigenousness in the case of Section 35 rights—meaning that Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities hold human rights in a way which compartmentalizes their multiple identities. This forces them to pick and choose which identity to mobilize in response to which rights are under scrutiny, making it difficult for domestic human rights frameworks to address human rights issues which arise from being both/and Indigenous; disabled; a woman, girl or gender-non conforming person; and/or a 2SLGBTQQIA person.

This siloing of specific sets of human rights also exists at the international level due in part to how engagement at the treaty body level is limited to the particular set of human rights which the treaty body engages with, making it difficult for international treaty bodies to address intersectional oppression.^[53] This tension was evident while creating the shadow report for the CRPD. While the shadow report was able to capture the importance of accessibility for disabled individuals under Article 9 of the CRPD^[54], we were unable to fulsomely express the difficulty in achieving accessibility for Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA individuals with disabilities resulting from both interpersonal and systemic racism as is discussed in Articles 2 and 5 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Similarly, while the report tackled the intersection of gender and disability through Articles 1-6 of the CRPD,^[55] we were unable to discuss specific impacts on disabled 2SLGBTQQIA individuals using the CRPD alone as it does not make any mention of the marginalization faced by or protections for 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities. As a result of these types of tensions, engaging solely with the CRPD prevented us from fully capturing how settler colonialism shapes access to disability rights in Canada for Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA individuals with disabilities. These findings were consistent with the data we collected while drafting the shadow report, when we found limited documents which specifically acknowledged Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities. Instead, the Lists of Issues would consider Indigenous people, or Indigenous women and girls, or women with disabilities, which masks the unique experiences of those who live at the intersection of gender, race, disability, and sexual orientation, as well as Indigenousness. These erasures at the international level limit the effectiveness of Shadow Reporting for addressing the circular relationship which reproduces both disability and settler colonialism at the state level.

Reflections on Research

Graduate students are often encouraged to participate in research assistant roles to help us advance our “practical” scholarship skills like writing, conducting literature reviews, and qualitative data collection. As students engaged in human rights scholarship, this work drew our attention to how pervasive settler colonialism is, while also drawing our attention to some of the limitations of using human rights based approaches to address systemic issues. But it also reminded us that we are settler students, and we are still trying to figure out what reconciliation and decolonization within research and partnerships (and within our own lives) looks like. For both of us, this project represents one of our first (hopefully of many) experiences as student-researchers in partnership with Indigenous organizations. Participating in this work has also created space for us to engage in personal reflection about working within an Indigenous rights sphere and provided an avenue for meaningful allyship with Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities. In this section, we would like to share some of these reflections.

Thinking about Language Critically

As students, we often used human rights-based language such as “the right to self-government” and “Indigenous government” in our literature reviews, reports, and writing. This language seemed standard when talking about Indigenous rights. Both of us understood self-government as defined by Article 4 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, where self-government means that Indigenous communities have full autonomy over their own communities, along with the financial support to offer the types of programming and services their communities need. The right to self-government flows from Article 3, which affirms that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. This includes the right to determine their political status and pursue economic, social, and cultural development. However, in the final shadow report, advisory committee members drew attention to how, in their view, “modern treaty and self-government processes perpetuate the colonial agenda of genocide.”^[56] In the case of self-government language, we learned that “self-government” as a policy recommendation requires careful definition, because self-governance can lead to detrimental impacts for Indigenous Nations when operationalized in ways that prioritize self-administration over self-determination, and often represents what is viewed as the Crown’s refusal to take responsibility for the effects of colonization.^[57]

While self-government should be linked to self-determination, in practice self-governing arrangements can result in the off-loading of services to Indigenous communities, without proper training, funding, or attention to existing power dynamics within a community.^[58] This argument is also represented within the literature, which notes that the Canadian state has a habit of recognizing Indigenous rights and pursing decolonization in ways which affirm the identity of Indigenous peoples through “self-administration”, which includes negotiating cultural rights, municipal-style self-government, and land claims packages. This practice happens at the expense of addressing the social structures which empower settler colonialism in the first place.^[59] This reminds us to be more cautious in our use of “self-government” without first identifying and thinking critically about the tensions which are inherent within these discourses, and then ensuring that we are explicit in how we use the term.

Similarly, we were reminded about the importance of using specific language when talking about Indigenous governance, because “government” implies access to the land and resources required to be self-sufficient—access which has been stolen through settler colonialism. In addition, “Indigenous governance” means different things in different contexts—“Indigenous governments” could mean band councils, traditional pre-contact governments, or organizations such as the Assembly of First Nations, and conflict between these different sites of governance has been used historically to undermine the self-determination and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples.^[60] These pieces of knowledge were meaningful to both of us, as they reminded us that the ways in which we use the language of human rights can silence the jurisdictional issues and lack of access to land and resources required for meaningful governance.

Reflections on Community Action and Knowledge Creation

As white settlers who are trying to acknowledge our privileges while breaking down colonial barriers, we have both struggled with trying to be transformative in our research while operating within the settler colonial academic framework. How can we contribute to decolonization while continuing to operate within its bounds? This research project drew our attention to how important community action and praxis are. When looking at the colonial/capitalist nature of academia, there is often a push for competitiveness and individualism. Individual scholars are often rewarded for pursuing research topics that are particularly new or original, and the rewards are generally few and far between. Many of the avenues for receiving these rewards are structured in a way that keeps marginalized individuals at the fringes. For example, many scholarships and bursaries for research projects for students require enrollment in a post-secondary institution, however this requirement fails to consider that Indigenous, disabled, and/or 2SLGBTQQIA individuals may not have resources available to take on the financial burden of post-secondary studies but are still researchers within their communities. As well, the requirement of participation at a settler colonial institution such as a public university implies that knowledge produced under or within a post-secondary institution is inherently more legitimate than community knowledge production, which ignores the immense importance of community-driven knowledge production. Ultimately without partnership between community members, NWAC, and Live Work Well, both the shadow report and this article would not be possible. We hope to continue contributing to the decolonization of academia through our participation in critical community engaged projects that collaborate with organizations outside of the academic sphere.

Reflections on the Praxis of Solidarity and Allyship

Overall, this research project has reinforced the importance of grounded and community-engaged research as a path towards solidarity and allyship. Working in solidarity means making sure that research is guided by the people whom the scholarship claims to serve. True transformative decolonial research must be coupled with community praxis; without an understanding of whom your research will impact, how can a researcher know whether their research may cause harm? In the shadow report, we used an apt metaphor provided by Dr. Lynn Gehl “following the turtle.”^[61] Lynn uses the idea of the turtle to discuss marginalized individuals with many support needs, specifically referring to disabled Indigenous women. She argues that many privileged individuals—namely white, able-bodied scholars—take what they need from marginalized peoples (whether it be resources, interpersonal connections, or other data) and then discard marginalized peoples when it is no longer convenient for the scholar or their research to maintain the relationship or continue to work towards meeting community goals. For Lynn, the best way for privileged academics to participate in decolonization is to “follow the turtle,” which is to allow the turtle (in this case, Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA individuals with disabilities) to drive the research agenda. In this way, the “turtle” can voice their own needs and wants and is simply uplifted or supported by those with privilege. We both recognized that we struggle with “following the turtle” in our own work, because in our desire to contribute to decolonial research, we were taking up space without being asked, and at times were standing in the way of the turtle by privileging knowledge gleaned from our own scholarship. In future projects, we hope to take this teaching with us by participating in work that prioritizes the knowledges of those in which we hope to follow.

Conclusions

To conclude, Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities have unique experiences with settler colonialism, which may be made invisible in traditional policy and human rights discourses. Using the example of disability supports and service delivery, we emphasized the cyclical relationship between the disabling of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people and settler colonial logics of land and resource dispossession, which re/create the structural conditions that lead to heightened risks of disablement. While Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people with disabilities have a long history of transnational advocacy with the United Nations, we found that the shadow reporting process pushes groups to prioritize certain aspects of their identities (such as gender, race, or disability) over others, because the reporting process requires engaging with single sets of rights, as addressed by the individual treaty body. As a result, it was difficult to encapsulate the full experience of multiply marginalized individuals, which affected how clearly we were able to illustrate the relationship between settler colonialism and disability within the final report.

On a personal level, this project also represented an opportunity to think through how our research can reproduce settler colonialism through the language we use and the research practices we engage in. As white settler students, working on the shadow report has shaped the way we perceive settler colonialism and impacted our ways of thinking and knowing as we move forward through the academic sphere. This project has given us space to reflect on tensions surrounding self-government and colonialism, how we understand community action, and knowledge creation and praxis in community-engaged research in real time. Ultimately reminding us of the importance of engaging in relational solidarity and allyship which privileges community voices. We hope these reflections will serve as a helpful tool for other settler students who are on their journey towards decolonization and reconciliation.

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