Morrison’s Space: A DeafBlind Activist

June is DeafBlind Awareness Month

June 1, 2026

By Morrison

Today marks the first day of DeafBlind Awareness Month, a month that many in the community have fought to reclaim from a long‑standing pattern of erasure. For decades, the last week of June has been designated as “DeafBlind Awareness Week” in honor of Helen Keller’s birthday on June 27. While Keller’s life is historically significant, the exclusive focus on her birthday has overshadowed the presence, contributions, and cultural leadership of countless other DeafBlind individuals. This narrow framing has shaped public understanding in ways that are rooted in audism, ableism, vidism, and distantism, reinforcing a perfectionistic narrative that has never reflected the lived realities of the DeafBlind community.

The insistence on centering Keller alone erases figures such as Julia Brace, whose birthday on June 14 predates Keller and whose life offers a profoundly different account of DeafBlind autonomy and community belonging. It erases Laura Bridgman, whose education in the nineteenth century shaped early understandings of tactile communication long before Keller entered the public imagination. It erases the many DeafBlind leaders, writers, and cultural innovators who have shaped the modern movement, including Doris Callahan, Roderick Macdonald, Patty Starr, Jelica Nuccio, aj granda, Elaine Ducharme, John Lee Clark, Christine Hartman, Rhonda Voight-Campbell, Jonathan LeJeune, Haben Girma, and there’s countless more to name. Their work documents DeafBlind culture, language, and ways of life in ways that are far more aligned with contemporary DeafBlind experience than the narratives imposed upon Keller by non‑DeafBlind educators, institutions, and biographers.

The pattern of elevating Keller as the singular symbol of DeafBlind identity reflects a deeper societal comfort with stories that are controlled, sanitized, and framed through sighted and hearing perspectives (and preference). Keller was selected as a “hero” not by DeafBlind people, but by those outside the community who found reassurance in a narrative of individual triumph rather than collective struggle. This framing has allowed society to celebrate a single figure while ignoring the structural barriers that continue to shape DeafBlind life. It has also allowed institutions to avoid confronting the ways in which they continue to marginalize DeafBlind people, even as they claim to honor their history.

Breaking free from this cycle requires acknowledging the full breadth of DeafBlind leadership. It requires recognizing the person within the American Association of the DeafBlind (AADB) who coined the term “SSP” (Support Service Provider), a concept that later evolved into the CoNavigator (CN) model that the community relies on today. It requires acknowledging Jelica Nuccio and aj granda, who co-founded the Protactile Movement and articulated a tactile language and philosophy that has since been recognized as a full linguistic system. Protactile’s emergence during the COVID‑19 pandemic demonstrated not only its linguistic legitimacy but its necessity for DeafBlind autonomy, connection, and cultural continuity. These contributions represent the living, evolving reality of DeafBlind culture – one that cannot be reduced to a single historical figure.

The continued fixation on Keller also obscures the fact that DeafBlind people today do not live the life she lived, nor do they navigate the world she navigated. The world has changed. Technology, communication, community structures, and cultural frameworks have evolved. New generations of DeafBlind people have developed new ways of being, new forms of connection, and new models of leadership. Yet society remains anchored to a narrative from the early twentieth century, as if the ADA of 1990 and the figure of Keller together represent the pinnacle of progress. This fixation prevents meaningful engagement with the ongoing lack of access, the daily barriers, and the structural inequities that DeafBlind people continue to face.

These inequities are not abstract. They manifest in the fact that sighted and hearing individuals still hold power in spaces that should be led by DeafBlind people. Sighted administrators run SSP/CN programs. Hearing‑sighted leadership continues to dominate the Helen Keller National Center and Helen Keller Services. State commissions, interpreter screening programs, and language‑specific training initiatives are often controlled by people who are not DeafBlind, even when DeafBlind individuals are fully qualified to lead. Yet, there are selected few who meet the society’s norm of being able to “hear and speak” and “lead like Helen Keller” are often chosen over those who do not use oral/spoken languages but are tactile. Helen Keller was often overshadowed by Anne Sullivan and displayed as a poster child. This imbalance reinforces a hierarchy in which DeafBlind people must continually advocate for the right to direct their own services, define their own cultural frameworks, and shape their own futures.

The marginalization is compounded by the fact that both the Deaf and Blind communities often position themselves as adjacent supporters rather than true partners. Often, they become bystanders, sympathetic but disengaged, rather than standing alongside the DeafBlind community in the fight for justice. This dynamic reflects a broader societal pattern in which DeafBlind people are expected to navigate systems alone, despite the fact that meaningful change has always required collective action. The DeafBlind community cannot dismantle these barriers without the active participation of those who hold institutional power, including Deaf and Blind organizations that have historically been granted more visibility, resources, and influence.

To understand why this collective effort is necessary, it is essential to recognize that the DeafBlind community is not a subset of the Deaf community or the Blind community. This has already been said over and over again. The DeafBlind is its own community, with its own language, cultural norms, access frameworks, and lived experiences. Protactile is not a variation of ASL; it is a language born from DeafBlind bodies, DeafBlind relationships, and DeafBlind epistemologies. CoNavigation is not a support service borrowed from other disability models; it is a DeafBlind‑created system of relational access using the concept of co-presence. The community’s history is not an extension of Deaf or Blind history; it is a distinct lineage that includes figures like Brace, Bridgman, Callahan, Macdonald, Nuccio, granda, Ducharme, and many others whose contributions remain underrecognized.

As DeafBlind Awareness Month begins, the call is not simply to celebrate. It is to shift the narrative entirely. It is to recognize that the community’s struggle is ongoing, that access remains inconsistent, and that systemic barriers persist because society continues to center sighted and hearing comfort over DeafBlind rights and autonomy. It is to acknowledge that the world still treats DeafBlind people as less-than, peripheral, third-class citizens – the untouchables, even as they continue to build culture, language, and community in ways that challenge the very foundations of how society understands communication and access. Or how society prefers to understand communication and access. 

This month is an opportunity to honor the full breadth of DeafBlind leadership, to confront the historical and ongoing erasure that has shaped public understanding, and to commit to a future in which DeafBlind people lead the institutions, programs, and cultural spaces that define their lives. It is an invitation to move beyond the narrow narratives of the past and to embrace the complexity, diversity, and brilliance of a community that has always existed far beyond the shadow of Helen Keller.