Indigenous Peoples and Disabilities
Margaret King and son Hudson Francour.
Navigating Everyday Life in a Pandemic
Margaret King (Onʌyota’a:ka)
S
hekoli, my name is Margaret King. I’m a Tribal member of the Oneida Nation, a federally recognized Indian Nation in the United States. I live in my community, otherwise known as a reservation, which is located near a growing urban area in Wisconsin. I am an Indigenous single mother of five children and grandmother of three. I grow our own Indigenous food seasonally, which is important to our family. I am a member of the Lotinuhsyu?ní (People of the Longhouse) and belong to the Turtle Clan.
Margaret King’s son, Hudson Francour, collecting maple syrup, a traditional food for Oneida people. 20 • www. cs. org
For work, I’m a Tribal Disability Benefit Specialist with Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council, which is an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization in Wisconsin. We support Indigenous people with disabilities to gain access to food, housing, and economic opportunities through government benefits. My job has allowed me to connect Indigenous Peoples from all Tribal backgrounds in Wisconsin to appropriate social and human services to meet their basic needs. This includes food and housing, in addition to regaining cultural identity and language that sustains self-preservation. While I wear a few hats both personally and professionally, my most important job is taking care of my son, who has special needs. During this pandemic, it has become more challenging as our entire household is mandated to stay home. I am both a mom and an employee in the same space, serving my clientele from home, facilitating my teenager’s online education and other daily activities. I teeter on the needs of work and teacher at any given moment in time. Most days I say, “School’s open, at home!” I first prepare my son, who has autism, to organize his education. This is more than checking his email and reading it together; it’s picking up on social cues to see if he can sit or concentrate. If he is not feeling awkward, overstimulated, or just tired of everyone being home, we work together to finish his schoolwork. Checking in on emotional and readiness cues and validating them are now a part of our daily opening. His emotional health is more important than getting things done. I often ask myself, Is he happy? What can be done to build his confidence? Recently, he’s more relaxed and not so anxious. His work comes before mine as we lay out his schedule in his home workbook, glancing at the next online reading assignment, school video chat, exercise, and of course, our chore chart at home. My son grew up nonverbal, and in order to get him to a place where I felt he could function among us, I put him in therapy so he could learn to speak and communicate his needs to function in society. This meant years of outcomebased treatment and attaining “correct” language. He is not able to fully communicate his needs as someone is always there to correct him or prompt him on appropriate responses. In between these times, he also had much anxiety. My anxiety was heightened also as I wondered who would accept him and how he would be able to work in society. Today, he has limited speaking abilities but often looks to me to assist him on how to respond to questions. I am working on freeing him of this “correcting” and allowing him to All photos courtesy of margaret King.
