 Thank you for coming. It is my absolute honor and pleasure to introduce to you Ivanova Smith. Ivanova is a well-known disability rights activist with autism. They are a leader in the Washington self-advocacy movement and have held leadership positions with self-advocates in leadership or sale, people first Washington, and allies in advocacy. They meet with state and national legislators to discuss issues that affect the disability community. Ivanova was an adjunct faculty at Highline College and is currently a self-advocacy faculty for the University of Washington Leadership Education and Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities Program, or UW LIND. They are happily married with a beautiful five-month-old daughter Alexandra has here in the audience contributing to this presentation. Thank you very much. Welcome Ivanova. Thank you. I am very excited to be here and today I'm gonna just talk to you about the history of true inclusion, the history of how we got to where we are today in disability justice and disability rights. And it's a long journey and and I also am going to be pointing out that you know what there are still things that we need to improve on. There's still things that are naked so that people with disabilities have been discriminated against and so I wanted to bring awareness about these issues and also talk about the history. And I also have my contact information up there and I also have business cards if you want to talk to me afterwards. So first the history. A big part of why people with disabilities were discriminated against was because of an idea that people with disabilities were seen as inferior and they were seen the genetics, the genes were seen as bad genes that people with bad genes should not be allowed to breathe and be able to have children. The medical model where the model that's been widely used since the early 1800s when science started to become a very popular thing and a lot of different type of popular sciences came out of the woodwork where everybody was talking about all these new scientific things coming out of research. And one of those things with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution with his cousin Francis Glaten took the ideas of Darwin and was like hey this this I like I like your ideas Darwin but I'm gonna twist it to support this other idea that he created called eugenics and eugenics was the idea that there were superior humans and the survival of the fittest that Darwin talked about supported this claim that oh the only the fittest will survive and we should support this so that only the fit get to live on the earth and so that's how we had a lot of science around getting rid of disability fixing disability in the medical model because disability was seen by the eugenics idea as inferior and those are genes that we want to get rid of. Eugenics also was a very racist ideology and I don't know I think I would call it like a fake science or a bigoted science the science that it was used to hurt people and so we even have some ideas about eugenics today like the idea of IQ and certain races have better IQ that is a very eugenics idea. And IQ was used a lot against people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to hinder us from immigration actually. When eugenics area was very popular it was also during the big immigration boom in Europe coming to the US in the early 20th century and the way that they kept immigrants from coming into the country they did these specialized IQ tests and immigrants were not able to get into the country as well because they were very language-based and not respecting the people's languages different languages and so eugenics ideas were very racist. First of all they did himself with a definitely what we would call today a white supremacist. He believed that white people white healthy you know quotation marks there people should be able to breed and that was positive eugenics you know healthy people breed the unhealthy people the what he saw immigrants people with disabilities people of different races those are the people Francis Clinton thought shouldn't be allowed to breed and so because of his research eugenics caught on in the early 20th century and that's where we get a lot of the oppressive policies that hit people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and I'm really going to focus on the developmental disability community because that's where I come from I'm a person with a developmental disability that's why personally my knowledge and who I work with the most but history of the disability community outside developmental you know so the parts where they connect but other parts were the division and I've talked about that but eugenics hurt all people with disabilities so we had also the mental age theory that was heavily supported by the medical model so you had eugenics and the medical mental age theory that was used to say that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were mentally children that we are even after we turned 18 that we still had the minds of a child and so a lot of our rights were taken away because of that aspect as well it was it was because they thought some people would say oh well these people can't breathe because they're mentally children themselves so they didn't have children and so that's when we get a lot of mass sterilization of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities there was a famous case but called Buck versus Bell where this happened a woman named Buck Kerry Buck was forcibly sterilized and she lived on a colony for people with IDD so there was a mass institutionalization and her mother and her were forced onto this colony and because the doctor who was Dr. Bell said she shouldn't be having any more children she just had a child we need to stop this I'm gonna we should forcibly sterilize her and it went all the way to the Supreme Court and it was kind of like a dramatic case it was dramatized to kind of just get all of this approved federally so that people in institutions could just get massively sterilized and the Supreme Court would say oh yeah that's okay Judge Holmes said that three generations of imbeciles is enough so that was his view of people with IDD back in 1920 1920s that was Judge Holmes of the Supreme Court and so that's where a lot of mass sterilization and institutionalization it was that's where the numbers were the highest within that time period 1920 to the 1940s we also had another model with a model of pity and I kind of think the infertilization of people with IDD the whole that mentally children kind of plays into this because it gives the idea that people with IDD oh we should pity them those poor children those poor children and I've actually seen people do this even today you know we see some ads or some inspirational type thing that kind of makes the DD person look very much like a child and innocent and really people with IDD we're just like anyone else but there's this historical stigma that oh we should be pitied and we were not capable of contributing and being successful and being professional we're always the same as the pitiful child that that's another historical aspect of and that comes from the charity model and then the criminalization of people with IDD so the reason why and you may not be able to see it down there because captions but I have mass sterilization and mass institutionalization there and so in the institutions and I've actually looked at the documents for this it during the eugenics era the institutions would actually call the patients their inmates they use the same language to talk about prisoners in a jail as they would talk to about people with IDD in a colony or an institution and they were these institutions were here they was like mass institutions and they were paid by the state to incarcerate these people with IDD just because they were people with disabilities and everybody thought oh well let's just hide them away and not allow them to reproduce and then they would just disappear and that was the idea and that's all we can just you know and the other aspect of it is some of them we could try to fix the higher functioning ones we can train them to work and oh that'll make us look good because we'll try to say our school the training school and so a lot of these institutions that you see today in Washington we actually have four of them mass institutions that imprison people and they're called schools they're called state schools they're not called this institution it's called a state school because they try to have the idea that oh we're gonna train these people to not we're gonna train these people out of here and just train these people but that never happened in a lot of these places became warehouses for people because of the abuses at these institutions because they're starting to just be warehouses and the they they were thought to be signs of neglect and that's really a famous news story of exposing the abuses at Wallerbrook school in Pennsylvania and that story triggered the mass de-institutionalization movement and so a lot of people that were institutionalized and mental institutions people that were people with physical disability they were institutionalized started advocating against these institutions and started demanding them being closed we had the exposer of Wallerbrook and then there was an exposition of Penn State and also and so you start getting a lot of these exposition of these institutions where there's horrible abuses happening and there's still abuses in these institutions today so that's when institutionalization movement really came in and just doing that that time with the 1960s 70s time and so we also had like president this time period in 1960s 1970s was there was a big boom for civil rights for people with disabilities and people of all different types of marginalized identities the biggest thing for people with disabilities was that we started to say we thought there was a media attention about these institutions one example would be one flu or the cuckoo's nest that movie came out and so the abuses of mental institutions for people with mental illness and that's where we get the mad pride movement for people with mental illness against these institutions and we also during that time president Kennedy before he was sadly killed started developing programs for people with developmental disabilities and he actually created the association of back then it was called the Association of Mental Retardation it was like the National Association and then it changed its name now to AAIDD and it's a national organization that was funded by Kennedy and a lot of other programs were funded in that time to support people with IDID and but it was still using that institutional model that medical model and so we didn't really get the the institution for people with IDD until the 1980s and late 70s because even Kennedy was like oh well I don't see the Tuesdays being bad we just need to give him more funding but he also divided about community based options as well so he supported both in a way but I don't know what his full angle was because there's actually evidence that his sister that had a disability was giving a lobotomy it's a really interesting story there's also other national group that advocated for people with disabilities in other ways adapt the national organization they got this start advocating for public transit their buses did not have accessible that in the area that they lived at an east coast where ADAP originated they there was no accessible buses and so ADAP the original ADAP protested and blocked the buses and blocked the street to protest that there was no accessible transit for people with disabilities and now they are a national organization and they have chapters all over the country and they do protests and they were also infamous for the protests with crawling up the stairs with the fighting for the ADA and also implementing the real rehabilitation act which allowed for people with disabilities to get into general education and to get employment we also in Washington in 1980s we started 1990s we started the idea legislation that allowed for special education in our schools and Washington was actually the first state to one of the first states to implement that now for in the disability civil rights movement there was some conflicts and one of the things that happened is the head of the civil rights for people with disabilities where people was physical disabilities and sometimes they kind of were like drawing the intellectually and developmentally disabled and mentally people with mental illness under the bus like oh our brains are fine it's just our bodies that have an issue but our brains are fine and so they kind of allowed for the the oppression of people with IDD and said well we shouldn't be oppressed because our brains are fine it's not I didn't say oppressed but they said like you know they would use that idea of our brains are fine and that was that kind of divided the communities because people with IDD and people with mental illness like wait a second we want to have civil rights too and so now we're starting to actually overcome that in respect to intersectionality of disability and understanding that it doesn't matter what type of disability you have you deserve civil rights so I think so I did not miss anything sorry Alexandra's need an emergency so instead so another so a big this another so we had the Americans with the Disabilities Act that was in 1990 and that was passed and that allowed for the buses had to become accessible ramps all that now had to become accessible but how do we make things accessible for people with intellectual disabilities how do we think things accessible for autistic people and so that's that's kind of the policy way that people with IDD and intellectual disability kind of left out and even with idea and special education there's still cases of people being put in self-contained classrooms and not being fully included and so these these policies that happened they still need to be approved upon they still have issues because we still have can tell self-contained classrooms we still have subminimum wage we still have a lot of these things that just allow for the discrimination of people to be allowed to live in the community and they should not be forced to live in an institution and that the state is responsible for providing alternatives to institutional care now that I'll say that is and so that that decision allowed more community-based options for people with disabilities and we can use it to help get people with disabilities out of the institutions if they want to get out of the advocacy movement was directly people with IDD and it was and for Washington State specifically the biggest self-advocacy organization we have is people first of Washington and they've been around since 1978 and they were made up of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that lived in the institutions and they a lot of them just got out of the institutions and they were starting their own organization for the rights of people with disabilities and they used people first language because they felt like their label was used to oppress them the label of mental retardation which was the label at the time was used to put these people in the institutions and so they wanted the world to always remember we are people first and so that's why people first God's name and that's why they're very passionate about people first language now the DD act is another policy that happened recently and it created the DD network partners which helps guide policy for people with IDD in around the country and around this around the state and for us in Washington here our DD network partners is the Developmental Disability Council the AUCD or actually our USED of the AUCD so the AUCD is a national organization that got over the USED and the USED is the University Centers of Excellence on developmental disabilities and they're basically centers that focus on research specifically for developmental disabilities and they are a network partner with the Developmental Disability Council which is a governor appointed council and then you have P&A which is a type of law firm that advocates for civil rights of people and they do law cases a bunch of lawyers work for P&A's and our P&A is disability rights Washington and they are the ones that go to for if a person is violating the ADA and you need a lawyer to help you with a case so if you had a case of discrimination as a person with a disability disability rights for Washington is a resource okay so we have to put a case in act here in the Americans with Disabilities Act okay I'm sorry to decide I met I had already discussed these two acts I thought they run as I'm sorry about that but just to say a little bit more about the Americans with Disabilities Act is that act has been around for 27 years and they it had to be updated recently it got updated to ADA AA which was like a modification that they needed I think it added like negative so they get these sensible people with sensory disabilities like I said earlier we need to have universal design in our education we need to be able to have everyone included in the same classroom and stop this excuse of oh well some kids can't be in the same classroom our universal design says that we teach everybody and we use different learning styles teaching styles for different type of students and we have the support be in the classroom well all the students can get support if they need support and we don't have these gatekeeping things so only this student gets to have this and only I mean that causes so much confusion and resentment and awkwardness for the disabled student universal design we wouldn't have those issues so I I always advocate for universal design and I even wanted in academia and in university because I think people with IDD deserve to get the same degrees and the same opportunity to get educated could come into university and to express their knowledge and so that's my biggest passion and that's why I love programs like Achieve and others that do promote helping people with IDD get into a higher education but we still have a long way to go and we need universal design to do it correctly we need affordable housing we want to live in the community we don't want to live in institutions and if we don't have affordable housing we're forced to live in institutions and so we need apartments that are affordable we need transportation so that people with IDD can get around in their communities and not being able to use the bus at night they think difficult for people who want to do things in the evening and so we really need to get that taken care of and we also need to fund support services so that people who need caregivers can participate in their communities too and not have to stay home because they don't have a caregiver to help them go out in their communities and so these are all things we really need to approve upon we need to stop for sterilization of people with IDD sadly this actually still happens today it's not you know as much as we did back in the eugenics era but we still do it a recent example in 2006 a little girl was forcibly sterilized against her will at children's hospital in Seattle and the ethics board did not do anything about it and this little girl now can never have children they can never hit puberty they they they the chemicals that were given to them makes it so the body cannot grow any larger than a seven-year-old what medical issues is that gonna cause for that little girl and this was all done without her consent and it was all to just make things more convenient for the parents and I mean as a parent myself I can imagine ever doing that to my little girl but there's some people that think that that's okay to do to people with disabilities and it's okay to do against the consent and that happens today and we actually in Washington just had to fight a situation where they were wanting to make court ordered for sterilization easier in Washington to do and make the process smoother and so a lot of advocates including myself for itself advocates the leaders of sale we at we wrote letters to the commissioner saying we we cannot we do not want this we don't support this we don't think that people should be forcibly sterilized in the process that we have now we should make it harder not easier we so people even today can be forcibly sterilized by the guardians by court order today and these are the type of battles we fight against because I don't think anyone should be forcibly sterilized against their will we need to end discriminatory practices like some minimum wage some minimum wage at the eye is it's a law by FDR he made the minimum wage law and he dated exemptions in that law and one of those exemptions was for people with disabilities that they could be paid less the minimum wage if you use the C14 certificate and so people with IDD have been put in sheltered workshops and even in private businesses been paid less than 30 cents an hour even at places today people are being paid 75 cents an hour I even heard of a case of a person being paid 20 cents an hour and these are people who work just like you and I and but they're not being paid equally and so some minimum wage is something they've actually been we've actually been able to get it out of Seattle this the mayor of Seattle we could go signed into law that they can no longer pay some minimum wages but nationally and statewide it can still be done and it is still done in this state and so we're wanting to get that change since we want to get the change federally nobody should be paid less wages because of the disability disabled workers work it's just as valuable and the last thing that is a huge concern of mine is House Bill 620 I actually heard thank goodness that actually almost I think it is a permanently almost stopped but I'm not 100% sure but this bill would weaken the Americans with disabilities act it would actually make it so that businesses did not have to comply to the ADA as soon as possible as it is now and it makes it so that people have to people with disabilities have to wait longer to get the accessibility suits through and so it puts an undue burden on people with disabilities because it also requires them to write down their complaint and physical writing and for people with disabilities who can't write they can't do that so they're not able to even advocate for themselves if they are not being able to access a public accommodation so that law that that bill it hasn't passed it passed in the house but right now it's a kind of a limbo in the Senate and we're hoping it won't pass in the Senate and I think it because of senator Duckworth she may have been able to hold it for a while but those are the biggest policy concerns that we're really working on we really want to close the institutions you know people have been gained abused just recently DRW disability rights Washington that P&A I told you about they wrote a huge report about the abuses that those institutions it's called no more excuses and they go into how people are being neglected on neglectful death like staff not paying attention and the person like rolls into the water at a deck like that the staff person leaves them on a deck and they roll off in their wheelchair and almost drown like that's what happens at the institutions like it's people have been sexually assaulted in the institutions there has been a lot of abuses and neglect and it's even today and the biggest reason why we can't get them shut down is because people think oh there's a safety net and we don't have a lot of community options and when I was talking about the de-intitutorization movement the big problem with it was when Reagan saw it president Reagan was like oh I like this idea but the problem was he didn't fully listen to the people and he thought oh let's just get rid of the institutions but not he did not provide the community-based funding just to help those people that are leaving the institutions get into the community that's why we have the mass homelessness of people with mental illness in this country it's because Reagan only did one part and now we need to do the other part get that community funding and the biggest thing for Washington is Washington is spending billion billions of dollars in the institutions and that money be way better served in a community and so that's what we really advocate for at the legislator and if you're interested in advocating for that I would highly recommend you join groups like people for the Washington and self advocates in leadership sale we those are the things we really focus on and we need everybody on board because these are issues that are still going on today and it needs to be changed and so that's why I'm here today to tell you about all of these important issues and how we can make it happen I believe in this country I believe in the people that we can do this I lived I lived in the first five years of my life in the institution and I was adopted and I came here and this country was amazing for me because my family really fought for my inclusion I was able to be included and I want that for everybody with IDD I want that for everybody not just for myself not just for people like me that can speak I want that for everybody I don't care if you're nonverbal I don't care what type of disability you have you have the right to be able to go to college get married have a child get a house you have that right to and I want you to have that opportunity to do those things you know it may not be right away you know and you have to fight for it and you have to advocate for yourself and you have to and you got to have support we got to have our allies in the room and I really appreciate the allies who can fight for us and help us be able to have the same opportunity that everybody else all means all thank you