Listening to the Silence: Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Gaps We Still Don’t Name

October, 13, 2025 

By Julie Bolduc DeFilippo, PhD, MSW LICSW

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I find myself thinking about what we still don’t know — and what that means. 

We don’t have reliable data on autism in Indigenous communities. That silence speaks volumes.

It’s not an absence of need or difference. It’s a reflection of systemic inequities — of histories of colonization, forced assimilation, displacement, and trauma that have shaped who gets seen, who gets heard, and who receives care.

When entire communities are underrepresented in research, their stories and needs risk being misunderstood or erased altogether.
For Indigenous autistic individuals and families, this means fewer diagnoses, fewer supports, and fewer chances for professionals to understand their lived realities.

It also means that the stories we do tell about autism — the frameworks we use, the language we privilege — often come from Western, white-centered systems that don’t account for cultural ways of knowing, healing, or relating.

True equity requires more than awareness.

It requires us to:

• Listen to Indigenous voices already doing this work — community researchers, clinicians, and advocates leading from within their nations.

• Acknowledge that trauma, displacement, and systemic racism shape how health, identity, and neurodiversity are perceived and supported.

• Fund and follow Indigenous-led research — studies that ask culturally grounded questions, use community-defined metrics, and reject deficit-based narratives.

• Expand access to care that honors both neurodiversity and cultural identity.
  
  

This silence — the lack of data — is not neutral. It’s the outcome of centuries of decisions about who matters and who is studied. And as a social worker, researcher, and clinician, I believe that our responsibility begins with noticing that silence and then asking:  What can I do to make space for the voices we’ve yet to hear?

As I continue my work exploring autism and neurodiversity across marginalized populations, I am committed to centering lived experience — not only as data, but as truth.

May today remind us that acknowledgment is not an endpoint — it’s a beginning.