When Brayden Bushby was charged with the death of Barbara Kentner, Indigenous faith in Canada’s legal system was put to the test

Bushby, whatever his state of mind, had not picked up that trailer hitch in a vacuum. His actions mirrored the society he was raised in, just as our court system so often reflects our failings back at us. In a city where missiles are thrown from vehicles, in a country where Indigenous women are disproportionately likely to be killed, an Indigenous woman was killed by a missile thrown from a vehicle. There’s a cold, causal logic there. When activists say that “racism kills,” this is, in part, what they mean—not a metaphor, not hyperbole. It’s an ecosystem of stereotypes and bad jokes that evolve into slurs and taunts, then eggings and tossed trash, then worse. The Bushby case was, in a way, itself a dense object thrown from a moving vehicle: heavy with velocity and kinetic energy even before its release. Finally, in the trial, it reached the point of impact.