"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. But these are the most common qualifiers I read about Loretta’s life and death. Loretta herself expressed the patterned, structured ways of colonial violence very clearly in her work, which I reread last night before falling asleep. It is an organized terror of the everyday. And it must stop."