Activity 2.5.3 - Canadian Aboriginal Post-Colonial Perspective

Make a submission

Carefully read the poem Helen Betty Osborn by Marilyn Dumont. 

Note: Helen Betty Osborne (1952–1971), was a Cree Aboriginal woman who was kidnapped and murdered while walking down Third Street in The Pas, Manitoba.

Marilyn Dumont is a Cree and Metis writer based in Alberta.

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.

Create a document which you will title “A Glossary Of Definitions And Images for the poem Helen Betty Osborn.”  This Glossary will be used later in the course when we study the novel Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese.

Your document should have brief explanations of the following words and images copied from the Internet.

  1. Photo of Betty Osborn
  2. Definition of Aryan Nations 
  3. Photos of Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall or Richard Cardinal and brief explanation of who they are
  4. Indicate three standards in the “British Standards of Womanhood” 
  5. Define the meaning of the lines “in a town with fewer Indians / than ideas about Indians” 
  6. Besides being written from a Post-Colonial Perspective, from which other perspective is Dumont writing 

Submission: PDF format. (file size can't be more than 20 MB)