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In In Search of April Raintree, Beatrice Mosionier (formerly Culleton) enables metaphors of enforced acculturation drawn from the material facts of Aboriginal existence. Testifying to the traumatic realities of foster care and rape, she analyzes and indicts the systematic oppression of Aboriginal women and children in Canada.
Early in the morning of 13 November 1971, a nineteen-year-old Cree student, Helen Betty Osborne, was tortured, murdered, and dumped into a field outside of The Pas,Manitoba. Sixteen years later, one of the four men who had abducted her, Dwayne Johnston, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for ten years. Of the other three, one was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony, one was acquitted, and one was never charged. The Osborne case, together with the death of Aboriginal activist J.J. Harper at the hands ofWinnipeg police in March 1988, raised questions about the treatment of Aboriginal peoples by the justice system in Manitoba. In the 1991 report examining these issues, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry (AJI) concluded that "Aboriginal women and their children suffer tremendously as victims in contemporary Canadian society. They are the victims of racism, of sexism and of unconscionable levels of domestic violence" (1: 475). Marginalized on the basis of gender and age as well as race and culture, "they suffer double discrimination" (1: 507). Concerned for the plight of Aboriginal children and women in her novel, In Search of April Raintree, Beatrice Mosionier (formerly Culleton) anticipates by several years the conclusions of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry. Indeed, the motifs of enforced acculturation, abduction, and assault through which she documents the powerlessness of indigenous peoples in Canada necessarily derive, as Jeanne Perreault argues, from the traumatic "social and physical realities" of Aboriginal experience (261). Testifying to the traumatic violence done to Aboriginal women and children, Mosionier arraigns the discriminatory policies of a social welfare system charged with their protection and, in so doing, valorizes individual expression as a means to collective empowerment.
"Written from the need to tell and retell the story of traumatic experience," In Search of April Raintree belongs to the literature of trauma, which, according to Kalí Tal, "serves both as validation and cathartic vehicle for the traumatized author" (21). Describing the novel as a...