LanDis soc ia t io n: An autiehistoria

This essay explores the concept of dissociation as a diasporic Indigenous, mixed-race, monolingual, queer, autistic scholar through the "dis- word" in English. It is impelled first by my dissonances in Indigenous academic and community spaces when meeting disparagement (disrespectful talk, or "dissing") of those perceived as ungrounded. I became concerned about the dangers of replicating pathologizing deficit, illness, or eugenic narratives in decolonial discourse around demonstrating Indigeneity and rehabilitating Indigenous "grounded normativity." This includes deployment of disablement metaphors such as dissociation (from one's selfhood, senses, reality, or environment) to describe consequences of dispossession and violent detachment from land. Through vignettes composed around the dis-words displaced, disembodied, disoriented, disordered , and disclosed , I describe dissociative experiences of autistic meltdown and make "dis-associations" between these experiences and musings on the sources of my dissonances, conceived as autiehistoria .