Stories of Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada: Understanding Helen Betty Osborne's Story

From the Author's Abstract, Page iv:

"This MRP [Major Research Paper] examines the story of Helen Betty Osborne’s life and death. Osborne was an Ininiw woman from Norway House, Manitoba. She had dreams of becoming a teacher, but achieving this goal meant leaving her home to pursue her education in The Pas, Manitoba. While in The Pas, four white men brutally murdered Osborne. Canadian historians have spent little time considering the history of Indigenous women in Canada. They have spent even less time reflecting on violence and the role of colonialism in that ongoing violence, and there has been almost no attention given to trying to understand this history from Indigenous perspectives. Helen Betty Osborne’s story raises several important historical questions: What is Helen Betty Osborne’s story? How should historians understand her life and murder? What does her story tell us about the history of Indigenous women in late twentieth to early twenty-first century Canada? To answer these questions I examine both Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources such as police and governmental reports, provincial legal inquiries, newspapers, stories, and poems. I argue that an examination of Helen Betty Osborne’s story, through Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, showcases historical and ongoing power relations between white and Indigenous communities; it challenges assumptions about ‘how things are’ and ‘how things were’ for both communities; and pushes historians to understand Indigenous women’s experiences and stories in different ways. Historians have not told Helen Betty Osborne’s story. This MRP starts this necessary conversation. Currently, there are 1200 missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada. The statistics tell us more than we think. They tell us that Helen Betty Osborne’s story is a story about the past and a story of today; it should not be. This is a second key contribution of this study. The violence and corresponding silence around Helen Betty Osborne’s story is not just situational or historical, but ongoing." (iv).