Analyzing Poetry

Marilyn Dumont: Helen Betty

Osborne (1996)
Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you
it might turn out
instead to be about me
or any one of
5 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
10 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
15 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,
20 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,
25 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
30 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.

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 1. Research & Presentation
Helen Betty Osborne Ann Mae Aquash Donald Marshall Richard Cardinal Aryan Nations

• Prepare a short 5-minute presentation (Google Slides or PowerPoint) presentation on

your assigned topic. The presentation will be graded.
• There are 3 simple rules for your presentation:
o cite your sources
o don’t read off of notes or the slides
o don’t use too much text on your slides, work with bullet points/images

2. Vocabulary

In order to understand the poem better, a few phrases need clarification:

Phrase
beasts of burden (l.16)
“British Standards of Womanhood” (l.18)
white-melting-skinned women (l.19)
bits-of-brown women (l.20)
colony (l.21)
easy (l.31)
sexual proposition (l.32)
Explanation
It is an alliteration that refers to the indigenous people
who are the beasts carrying their burdens. ‘their’ refers
to the white people. The indigenous people were
treated
as animals by the white people.
This phrase means that women were supposed to just do
domestic, house-hold chores and perform motherly
duties rather than complete their formal education which
here tells us that the indigenous women were made to
do the same tasks and ‘left behind’ to do them as they
could
not seek formal education.
This means that the native women were ‘left behind’
that they had to become a part of the British colony and
had
to adapt ways of ‘British Standards of Womanhood’.
This refers to what remains of the identity of the brown
women who are the indigenous women after they had
to
adapt to ‘British Standards of Womanhood’
Colony refers to the place the remains of what used to be
the home of these women, what is now an alien place.
Easy here refers to how the indigenous women were
viewed and looked upon as females with much lower
hierarchal and social status than other women.
People
would pay less attention to sexual assaults on them.
This refers to the indigenous women being assaulted
sexually which here is termed as the sexual
proposition since white people would believe ‘brown’
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 women were open and more perhaps rather
interested in sexual
activities.

3. Discussion: Questions to the poem

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Come up with three questions to this poem. Which parts do not make sense? Which concepts are hard to
grasp? Which images are confusing?

• Why did Marilyn Dumont really write this poem?

What impact did she believe this poem would really
create?
• What effect does this mention of different people
create that would have been any different if they were
not mentioned?
• Who inspired or what inspired Marilyn Dumont to
write the poem if apart from Helen Betty Osborne?

Now let’s try to answer those questions together!

4. Marilyn Dumont

Even though the poet him- or herself usually plays a very limited role in how poems are interpreted, it is
important to know a little bit about Marilyn Dumont in this particular unit of poetry.

Poet and writer Marilyn Dumont earned her BA from the University
of Alberta and MFA from the University of British Columbia. She is of
Cree and Métis (pronunciation: “may-TEE”) ancestry. Her first
collection of poetry, A Really Good Brown Girl (1996), won the 1997
Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets.
Other collections include green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that
tongued belonging (2007), winner of the McNally Robinson
Aboriginal Book of the Year; and The Pemmican Eaters (2015), which
won the 2016 Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson
Award.

Dumont’s poetry explores how the structural legacies of Canada’s racist and colonial history
continue to be lived realities for First Nations and Métis communities. In an interview
with Room magazine, Dumont says, “Writing has saved my emotional, spiritual, and intellectual
life in a country where I wasn’t supposed to exist, let alone thrive. It allows me to sort out the
mess of structural inequity, bureaucratic obfuscation, colonial racism, and sexism. It allows a
space for my voice and sense of self.”
Dumont has taught at the Banff Centre for the Arts and served as a mentor in its Aboriginal
Emerging Writers program. A former writer-in-residence at the Edmonton Public Library and
numerous Canadian universities, she serves on the board of the Public Lending Rights
Commission of Canada. She is an associate professor in the Arts and Native Studies Program at
the University of Alberta

5. Interpretation

Take notes on the results of our discussion.

Discussion:

a) What is the main message of the poem?

b) What is special about the form of the poem and how does it support the message?
c) How does the imagery in this poem support the message?
d) Why is the poem directly addressed to Betty Osborne?
e) Why does the speaker use conditional clauses to start the 1st stanza, the 3rd stanza, and at
the very end?
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