Honoring Loretta Saunders by Annita Lucchesi
As news of Inuk student Loretta Saunders’ death sends waves of grief through indigenous communities across Canada and the US, I have been reflecting on her story and how best to honor her, or do justice to the violence she experienced and was fighting against. Many have remarked on the disturbing fact that Loretta Saunders was doing her academic work on the very same violence that would take her life, yet what is perhaps most disturbing to me about Loretta Saunders’ story is that she is not alone—it is not uncommon for women outspoken on these issues to not only be survivors, but, like Loretta, to go on to experience violence as well.
A large fraction of the people that are active in the movement to end violence against indigenous women and support survivors of violence are survivors themselves, or have relatives who are victims. These are women that have been battered, abused, violated, traumatized and re-traumatized, and they go through with the work because they are driven by the conviction that none of their sisters deserve to go through that too. They soldier through triggering materials and situations, they courageously provide knowledge and testimony, they bring their work home and their home to work (oftentimes caring for children at the same time), they hold people accountable in their communities even when it’s unsafe (from the mother who beat a would-be child rapist with a baseball bat, to the women who drove a man through the entire reservation while honking and yelling to everyone that he’s a rapist), they spend countless late nights working at the kitchen table, they learn the law like the back of their hand, they open up their homes and their lives to sisters who need support in escaping or healing from violence, they make incredible use of thin dollars and resources to do grassroots work in communities from Iqaluit to Nogales, they deal with the exhaustion and frustration and hurt and pain and grief that comes with this work, they have built and maintain networks of support and sisterhood that span colonial national boundaries and thousands of indigenous communities, and they put their minds, hearts, and souls into one of the most powerful and awe-inspiring assertions of love and solidarity that I have ever seen.
READ MORE HERE: http://lastrealindians.com/honoring-loretta-saunders-by-annita-lucchesi/