Indigenous Community Views of Disability in Canada: Protocol for a Scoping Review

Indigenous people do not necessarily view disability in the same way as do other groups. Indigenous concepts of disability are connected to their ancestral history, cultural customs, and environmental context. Some Indigenous languages do not contain a word equivalent to disability. Western approaches to disability seldom reflect the voices of Indigenous people.

The objective of this scoping review is to collate the perspectives, concepts, and understandings of disability in Indigenous communities in Canada and to map the factors that influence social approaches to disability from an Indigenous perspective.

Following the methodological framework for scoping reviews of Arksey and O'Malley, we will search electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCOhost ProQuest, Autochtonia, and APA PsycINFO. We will search gray literature through the Google search engine, conference abstracts, dissertation databases, government documents, and Indigenous organization websites. We will include quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies in English and French. The included studies will describe Indigenous approaches to disability, as they are understood based on personal, cultural, and historical contexts. Two reviewers will use Covidence software (Cochrane) to remove duplicates, screen articles, record the step-by-step selection process, and extract data from the included articles. We will follow the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines. We will present the findings in tables, charts, narrative summaries, and through fuzzy cognitive mapping. We will contextualize the literature's findings by comparing them with the stakeholders in Quebec and provide a discussion to explore potential solutions for the identified factors.

An initial limited search was conducted in January 2024. The study will be conducted in 2025. Publication of the results is expected in late 2025.

We anticipate that the findings from the scoping review will be useful for professionals, researchers, policy makers, and Indigenous communities themselves interested in co-designing and implementing evidence-informed disability programs and services, which will prevent mismatches between the programs and the sociocultural context. We will disseminate the results of this review through workshops with the participating communities, direct engagement with relevant local stakeholders, and through conference presentations and publications in scientific journals.

OSF Registries osf.io/9rzkx; https://osf.io/9rzkx.

DERR1-10.2196/57590.