ABSTRACT

As archivists devote attention to the reparative description of harmful language associated with racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, the question of whether the profession has done enough to equally identify and repair language documenting disability histories and identities in our collections arises. This study outlines the results of a survey of more than two hundred finding aids at archives across the United States for terms that have been historically associated with Down Syndrome. It identifies how offensive and traumatic language that has been used over time to label, criminalize, institutionalize, and segregate individuals with intellectual disabilities, including those with Down Syndrome, persists to an alarming degree in archival finding aids for what the author calls “legacy” collections, or collections documenting Down Syndrome histories before the disability rights movement of the 1970s. It explains how the roots of such terms lie in the fascist, eugenicist othering of individuals with Down Syndrome and the ways in which such terms in archival description actively obscure scholarship of disability histories and cause harm to disabled researchers. The results of the study indicate that archivists must better understand the socio-historical contexts of individual disabilities so as to identify and repair the traumatic terms associated with them in legacy collections. It also offers practical pathways for archivists to do this work, including the application of current reparative description practices to disability histories, the inclusion of sensitivity statements that address the presence of ableist language, and the development of reparative description glossaries for terms documenting disability.