"No person who is diseased, maimed, or deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object shall expose himself to public view." My research on this municipal ordinance, a nineteenth-century statute adopted in many U.S. cities, showed me the extent to which U.S. immigration law has been ugly law writ large. The body politic of American democratic citizenry binds itself together through an internal logic that, even as it attempts to manage the incorporation of disabled subjects, drives disability down (...) or assumes it away. But it has never done so decisively, and never without contradiction. Native American history gives us an especially valuable frame for thinking through questions of American citizenship and the ways in which it intertwines with disability, since it reveals so clearly the dizzying array of contestations and confusions about who "has" citizenship and what responsibilities the state has to those who do not. This essay centers on a Yavapai man who lived in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century in a vortex of conflict about citizenship: Carlos Montezuma, physician and a prominent Native American intellectual, cofounder of the National Society of American Indians, and radical critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I explore some of the ways in which Montezuma developed not only theories of citizenship but also theories of disability based on what he called "the standpoint of actual circumstance," ideas that speak to our understandings of the body of the citizen today. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that the notion of inclusion derived or evolved from the practices of mainstreaming or integrating students with disabilities into regular schools. Halting the practice of segregating children with disabilities was a progressive social movement. The value of this achievement is not in dispute. However, our charter as scholars and cultural vigilantes is to always look for how we can improve things; to avoid stasis and complacency we must continue to ask, how can we do it better? (...) Thus, we must ask ourselves uncomfortable questions and develop a critical perspective that Foucault characterised as an 'ethic of discomfort' by following the Nietzschean principle where one acts 'counter to our time and thereby on our time... for the benefit of a time to come'. This paper begins with a fundamental question for those participating in inclusive education research and scholarship—when we talk of including, into what do we seek to include? (shrink)