Mia Walker is a storyteller.
She loves to read — she reads around 100 books a year — and she’s written a few books herself, though they have yet to meet a publisher’s pen.
She’s passionate about telling her story — a story she said is often misrepresented, overlooked or treated as a side plot in many stories told by authors who don’t understand her experience.
As a blind senior attending Wasatch High School, she’s had to tell her story several times, and not just within the pages of her fiction.
“I guess I would consider myself an activist for disability rights and being able to talk about that and to advocate for myself and other disabled people,” she said. “My goal is to share my story and others’ stories so that people are more aware of disability.”
The beginning of that story predates her, she explained, and goes back to when her mother, Merrie Walker, had to advocate for her older brother who is blind just so he could attend school without a long bus ride for a young child. He was 7 at the time.
“It was more than two hours,” Merrie said. “So it would be two and a half hours there, two and a half hours back.”
The challenges the family faced with the education system came early.
“They basically told him that he was never going to be able to learn to read Braille and that he should just listen to books on tape,” Mia said. “My mom was not going to just settle for that. She knew that he could succeed.”
His rocky path paved a smoother way for Mia, and helped her find her early enthusiasm for reading, she said.
“That kind of led me to reading a lot of books and realizing that disability in books and movies is very misrepresented,” Mia said. “I turned a certain age, and I realized that I didn’t have to just write like everyone else wrote.”
She has yet to find many stories that accurately portray the perspective of someone with a disability. As a disabled person with a love of all things storytelling, she became passionate about filling that space.
Mia was chosen as Wasatch High School’s Sterling Scholar in the statewide academic competition’s Vocal Performance category, and she has progressed to win the regional level of the competition for Utah’s Northeast region.
In this year’s statewide Speech and Debate tournament for 5A high schools, she gave a speech inspired by Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
The performance, Merrie said, left her with an important message — it’s impossible to adequately and accurately address the harms that befall a minority group unless the messenger is a member of that minority group.
Mia said the speech was in part inspired by Amanda Leduc’s “Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space.”
“It was the first book I had read by a disabled author that was talking about ableism and how it had affected society,” Mia said. “She talked about fairy tales and how the portrayal of disability in fairy tales was affecting the way that we were seen in real life.”
Mia called the hunchback a prime example of a character portrayal of a disabled man with pity and sorrow, but not joy.
“For some reason in this media, disability and joy don’t coexist,” Mia said. “So that was what my speech was about is having this very real example of me, a blind person who is happy and who is also sad and who is angry. And it’s just all of this humanity that’s brought to it if you have the right and the ability to tell your own story instead of just being the subject of someone else’s pity or their story.”
Recently, she had to advocate for herself to the ACT test’s governing group — also named ACT — for the same access to the exam as her peers with vision.
She had long been told of ACT’s rumored difficult stance on accommodations, its unwillingness to alter its test and test-taking resources for blind students.
Still, she said the school district fought hard for her, and after a carefully composed email, she was granted accommodating access to a calculator — otherwise, she would have had to do complex problems in her head when other kids could use a paper and pencil — and a test in Braille.
Still, not everything went smoothly. To Mia’s dismay, she opened the math section of the test to find it was written in an outdated form of Braille. She also found the science section had the same issue.
Eventually, ACT allowed Mia to retake the math and science section. Still, she wasn’t told what her updated score was and didn’t find it until she was applying for colleges about six months after she took the test.
Merrie said she’d like to see ACT offer correct choices for disabled students ordering tests that would allow them to pick the form of Braille they want to test in.
More accessible test preparation material at the beginning of a student with a disability’s junior year, she said, would also be a helpful change.
Even after all the work she put in just to receive an ACT test that was accessible and accommodating to her disability, Mia said, she still gets comments from people who say her blindness will get her into any school she wants to attend and that she receives special, favored treatment.
“That is really insulting,” Mia said. “That is not true.”
Next year, Mia will attend Brigham Young University to study English. And while her writing might not include any blue skies, one thing is clear — she won’t let her personal experience be written off as someone else’s side character.