“Lying in a ditch along the Trans-Canada Highway. I simply cannot get this image out of my mind. …I refuse to speculate about Loretta’s death. What I do know is that our society has discarded indigenous women and girls in much the same manner for generations. These people were playing out a script that we all know intimately, but never acknowledge. I told a good friend of mine yesterday that there’s no conspiracy, there’s no mystery, Loretta will show up in a ditch like so many indigenous women before her. He was taken aback. I am devastated that the pattern proved true. It’s our doing, which Loretta articulated so clearly in her writing — theft of land base, legalized segregation and racism, residential schools for several generations, continued dispossession = social chaos. It is a recipe for disaster for indigenous peoples, and especially indigenous women. Who suffers most when access to land, to the ecological order at the basis of most indigenous societies, is limited, controlled, or outright eliminated? Is that not what’s at the basis of a settler society like our own, eliminating indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land (and/or their actual bodies), so that can we plunder it for our gain? …I ask my students, who are you meant to care about in society? The answer is always clear to them – I have been taught in such a way that I’m mostly incapable of caring about indigenous peoples. It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that it takes years of hard work. And who has that much time or is willing to be vulnerable in the face of the seemingly unending gulf that lies before them? And so we continue to look to indigenous peoples like the savages we imagine them to be. Meanwhile, Loretta is dumped in a ditch in a province that once paid European invaders for the scalps of Mi’kmaq women, children, and men, repeating a centuries-old pattern in ways that are much too familiar to be a coincidence, to be irony, to be senseless…It is an organized terror of the everyday. And it must stop.” — In Honor of Loretta Saunders Rest in Peace.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 21:58:02 +0000
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