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.