“Through White Man's Eyes”: Beatrice Culleton Mosionier's <em>In Search of April Raintree</em> and Reading for Decolonization

"Through White Man's Eyes":Beatrice Culleton Mosionier's In Search of April Raintree and Reading for Decolonization Aubrey Jean Hanson (bio) In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier (now Mosionier) is a text that continues, over twenty-five years after its initial publication, to call its readers to reflect on racism in Canada and beyond. It is precisely this call that must incite readers also to exercise a vigilant critical consciousness and to seek out spaces in the text that require—in Sherene Razack's words—"unmapping" ("When" 5). In her essay "Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George," Razack challenges, or unmaps, the naturalization of violence in the social space of Aboriginal womanhood and the converse naturalization of the violent and colonial brutalization of Aboriginal women by white men. In this essay I employ aspects of Sherene Razack's formulations on race and space in a decolonizing reading of In Search of April Raintree, with a twofold purpose: first, to demonstrate and advocate for a decolonizing approach to reading and, second, to locate readers' social responsibility to read with a decolonizing approach within the context of relations of domination in North America. This essay is particularly concerned with the teaching of Aboriginal literatures and emphasizes that such teaching is an endeavor embedded within a broader social context.1 The dynamics of power and domination—rooted in North America's colonial history (and present)—that shape interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples necessarily come into play when teaching Aboriginal texts. As such, this pedagogical endeavor is and must be tied to questions of social responsibility, as it is a political project [End Page 15] with material consequences for Aboriginal people (Episkenew 65; Womack 14). In my work, it is also fueled by personal responsibility; I am, as a Métis educator, working to envision anticolonial education and to employ literature as a tool for challenging Eurocentrism and racism.2 Teaching Aboriginal literatures in a socially responsible manner entails exercising critical reflexivity in reading. Further, it entails a decolonizing approach to Aboriginal literatures. In building my decolonizing approach to In Search of April Raintree, I have drawn upon the work of theorists and literary critics who advocate socially responsible and "Indigenizing" approaches to Aboriginal literatures, which entail their own, anticolonial ways of reading.3 I agree with Sharron Proulx and Aruna Srivastava that, without a critical approach, the potential exists to perpetuate or exacerbate systems of oppression targeting Aboriginal people, particularly in that Aboriginal literatures often examine such oppression (189). As I have stated, the basis for my own critical approach in this essay is Sherene Razack's 2002 collection Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. In this book, Razack analyzes relations between race, space (both material and social), and the law in order to enable the "unmapping"—or denaturalization—of the dynamics that constitute "the racial structure of citizenship [in] contemporary Canada" (5). In her analysis of the rape and murder of Pamela George, an Aboriginal woman working as a prostitute in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1995, Razack delineates and challenges the naturalization of violence in the social spaces of Aboriginal womanhood and prostitution. The violence enacted against Pamela George, she argues, must be seen within the broader context of Canada's "colonial project" with its intrinsic racializations and racialized hierarchies (126). (I echo this insistence below in my discussion of the violent brutalization of April in Mosionier's novel, which strikingly parallels that of Pamela George.) I wish to take up Razack's constructions, particularly as represented by the concepts of "degeneracy" and "civility," used to characterize racialized social and material spaces. Razack's contention is that when whiteness is characterized by civility and Aboriginality by degeneracy, Pamela George comes to be seen as "a rightful target of the gendered violence inflicted" by [End Page 16] her white killers (144). Consequently, the significance of the murder could be diminished within the legal justice process (126). Razack thus employs these concepts of race and space to challenge the legal articulation of "justice" shaped through the trial of George's murderers. My intent in this essay is to use these...

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