From “Burden” to Gift: Re-storying Disability through Indigenous Worldviews in Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman by Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson

Abstract

Through the forced implementation of rigid colonial expectations, colonizers have generated the conditions for disability to become part of the oppressive apparatuses that operate to control Indigenous peoples. For Cree author Yvonne Johnson who was born with a cleft palate, her life writing is a journey in and out of disability. Although scholars have drawn attention to Johnson breaking her silence through her narration of her life story, their examinations have primarily addressed concerns around the “disabling” of Johnson’s voice through the co-authorship of the text—specifically, the active role that white co-author Rudy Wiebe takes in the construction of her autobiography. This paper focuses on Johnson’s own perception of her disability as she moves from a colonial framework of disability to a Cree worldview. I argue that Johnson’s achronological rendering of her healing narrative in her co-authored autobiography with Wiebe, Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, transcends Western modes of time imposed upon her, disrupting mythic narratives of linear progress that have emerged through settler ideologies. While crip theorizations of temporality have emboldened Critical Disability Studies scholarship, this article mobilizes Indigenous voices to present an alternative theorization of time—spiraling time—that offers the potential to overwrite the pathological colonial narrative of disability to reorient focus toward community-based interventions.