Vivian Delchamps’ “Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality” in Disability Studies Quarterly
PhD candidate Vivian Delchamps has a new article out in Disability Studies Quarterly.
“Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality” explores the rattlesnake’s multiplicity of meanings in diverse Native views as spiritual ancestor, debilitating threat, and symbol for bridging the distance between body and word. These meanings offer opportunities for us to navigate the disparate disciplines of Native American and Indigenous Studies, disability studies, and animal studies with grace. Indigenous understandings of kinship with animals offer the potential for co-existence, a rendering that might help scholars to imagine kinship more broadly, rather than selectively—and to challenge systems of ableism, speciesism, and racism while we reenvision the boundaries of the bodies we claim as our own.
Read the article.