1 I have chosen to spell “antisemitism” without the hyphen and capital “s” in order to emphasize that the word implies hatred, hostility, or prejudice against Jews rather than against speakers of Semitic languages in general.

2 See, for example, reports on hate crime statistics in Canada (Statistics Canada) and the United States (Federal Bureau of Investigation), as well as the Human Rights Campaign’s list of transgender and gender-nonconforming people in the United States. The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has also documented the violence faced by Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada. Since 2015, the Washington Post has kept a log of police shootings in the US (“Fatal Force”), demonstrating that Black and Latinx Americans are killed at a disproportionately higher rate.

3 To this day, I recall and am still influenced by some of the comments or observations that Ruth-Ellen made in class, such as the importance of Freud’s use of footnotes in subsequent editions of his studies to reflect on, re-visit, and reshape his earlier writing or the question as to why we most often refer to Goethe and Schiller by their last names but female writers such as Bettina von Arnim or Christa Wolf by their first names. Now every time I write about Ruth-Ellen, I ask myself what name I should write and why I would do it that way.

4 The word “Minnesota” is derived from the Dakota Sioux name for the Minnesota River, which can be translated as “sky-tinted water.”

5 From DoVeanna S. Fulton’s Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery (2006) to Emma Dabiri’s Don’t Touch My Hair (2019) as well as the work of many other Black scholars on this topic, the importance of black braided hair as well as the cultural transmission that occurs during hair-braiding sessions themselves have been well documented. The oral traditions passed on through the process of braiding hair, or what Nadia Prendergast has termed a “pedagogy of learning” (122), are moments of transmission and dialogue that are significant for understanding history and for negotiating life’s current challenges and demands. It is during these hair-braiding sessions, which in Prendergast’s own experience occurred between mother and daughter in different locations and contexts, that the individuals involved not only work through the entanglement of hair but also “the entanglement of their lives and share the care and attention they give to their struggle to survive as Black women” (122).

6 A revised written version of their WiG conference presentation, published for the first time, can be found in Chapter 9 of this book.

7 This grant project on historical injustices and current realities was funded by the President’s Strategic Framework Impact Fund at the University of Victoria in 2019. At this point in the project, we have seventeen members from a wide range of disciplines, over a third of whom are Indigenous scholars. During our final meeting of the first year, we agreed that our research would focus on examining the history and legacy of historical injustices at the University of Victoria itself.

8 See, for example, the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.