I did my next art class on The Red Dress. The theme of canvas painting was MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) to honor and become aware of disappearances and murders of indigenous women and lack of justice and accountability for such. The Red Dress can be found hung in trees, put in windows, and posted as posters to help bring to heightened awareness, this injustice in the broader communities. The Red Dress calls for concrete actions to end this genocide.
“Helen Betty Osborne” by Marilyn Dumont
“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.”
Some of their work was unbelievably beautiful. Although we did not have a huge turn-out, it was satisfying to see the few who did come, and try the different stations of work.
I have been busy, already, this August. I have been caring for our neighborhood angel lady who does such wonderful things for the whole subdivision. She had a knee replacement and does not have family who could help her. I stayed over several nights and during the day, I would run back and forth to dress The Bee Man’s leg wounds and put on his stockings, then race back. I would race back to make lunch...and back to her... and back to make diner, and back to her. It has been wild. As well, I have been teaching these art classes. It is good to keep busy. The grief is lessening and I am coping well.
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