Intimacies and Aftermaths: Indigenous Relationalities of Care, Disability, and Healing from Trauma

Abstract: This article interrogates how trauma culture and therapeutic governance reproduce the "Indian problem" by reducing colonial violence to individualized pathology, cure, and resilience. Settler states frame Indigenous suffering as legible only when converted into data, diagnoses, or grant-funded "healing," turning grief and disability into spectacles of disposability and containment. Against those enclosures, I return to Diné philosophies and Indigenous feminist refusal as frameworks that foreground relational care, refusal, and sovereignty over recognition. Drawing on interdisciplinary Indigenous and feminist scholarship, disability justice, and memory work, I theorize intimacies and aftermaths as method—intimacy as the dense labors of kinship and grief, aftermaths as terrains where empire consolidates power and where Indigenous refusals take form. Through a personal narrative of my experiences with grief and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), I show how medicine, policing, and neoliberalism coproduce anti-Indianism, while Diné epistemologies of care and Sandra Yellowhorse's framing of disability as relation generate a different ground for justice. In doing so, this article insists that grief is not deficit, disability is not crisis, and care is not a settler commodity. To narrate grief is to insist on accountability. To name disability is to name relations. To practice care is to build sovereignty. To refuse is to commit to life against disposability. Indigenous struggles, related to inter/national movements, insist that care is an infrastructure of resistance, reminding us that liberation will not come through state recognition, but through the collective worldbuilding already underway. This is how "disability" lives in the intimacies of Indigenous kinship.