|
||||||
|
||||||
Five Unknown Schoolgirls at St. Mary’s
Missing from the image parents, grandparents the voices of five year-olds thinning into winds, taken They stand shorn in white smocks, Over and ended taking up their sisters’ hair, their mothers’ how to soften buckskin, to patterns of quill Cropped out with dances, ancestors whose like shawls, like stars, like stories. Five unknown girls, measured arranged and photographed, Eighty years later, hanging relatives find them, uneasy but unbroken When they leave, an attendant in a ragged line on each, in Niitsitapi, a name. This poem is drawn from a 1925 photograph taken by Oxford anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood on the Kainai First Nation reserve in Alberta. It is also endebted to an account of the Lost Identities photographic exhibition presented at Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre in 1999. Laurelyn Whitt has poems in Nimrod International, Tampa Review, and Rattle. Her first book, Interstices, won the Holland Prize. Her new book Tether is forthcoming from Seraphim Editions. She lives in Minnedosa, Manitoba. contact
|
Copyright 2River. Please do not use or reproduce without permission. |