Helen Betty Osborne
Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you
it might turn out instead
to be about me
or any one of
my female relatives
it might turn out to be
about this young native girl
growing up in rural Alberta
in a town with fewer Indians
than ideas about Indians,
in a town just south of the 'Aryan Nations'
it might turn out to be
about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall or Richard Cardinal,
it might even turn out to be
about our grandmothers,
beasts of burden in the fur trade
skinning, scraping, pounding, packing,
left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,'
left for white-melting-skinned women,
not bits-of-brown women
left here in this wilderness, this colony.
Betty, if I start to write a poem about you
it might turn out to be
about hunting season instead,
about 'open season' on native women
it might turn out to be
about your face young and hopeful
staring back at me hollow now
from a black and white page
it might be about the 'townsfolk' (gentle word)
townsfolk who 'believed native girls were easy'
and 'less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence.'
Betty, if I write this poem.
Copyright Credit: Marilyn Dumont, "Helen Betty Osborne" from A Really Good Brown Girl: Brick Books Classics 4. Copyright © 2015 by Marilyn Dumont. Reprinted by permission of Brick Books.