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
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".