"A Double Assault": The Victimization of Aboriginal Women and Children in in Search of April Raintree

In In Search of April Raintree, Beatrice Mosionier (formerly Culleton) enables metaphors of enforced acculturation drawn from material facts of existence. Testifying traumatic of foster care and rape, she analyzes and indicts systematic oppression of women and children in Canada. ********** Early in morning of 13 November 1971, nineteen-year-old Cree student, Helen Betty Osborne, was tortured, murdered, and dumped into field outside of The Pas, Manitoba. Sixteen years later, one of four men who had abducted her, Dwayne Johnston, was convicted and sentenced life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for ten years. Of other three, one was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony, one was acquitted, and one was never charged. The Osborne case, together with death of activist J.J. Harper at hands of Winnipeg police in March 1988, raised questions about treatment of peoples by justice system in Manitoba. In 1991 report examining these issues, Justice Inquiry (AJI) concluded that Aboriginal women and their children suffer tremendously in contemporary Canadian society. They are of racism, of sexism and of unconscionable levels of domestic (1: 475). Marginalized on basis of gender and age well race and culture, they suffer double discrimination (1: 507). Concerned for plight of children and women in her novel, In Search of April Raintree, Beatrice Mosionier (formerly Culleton) anticipates by several years conclusions of Justice Inquiry. Indeed, motifs of enforced acculturation, abduction, and assault through which she documents powerlessness of indigenous peoples in Canada necessarily derive, Jeanne Perreault argues, from traumatic and physical realities of (261). Testifying traumatic violence done women and children, Mosionier arraigns discriminatory policies of social welfare system charged with their protection and, in so doing, valorizes individual expression means collective empowerment. Written from need tell and retell story of traumatic experience, In Search of April Raintree belongs literature of which, according Kali Tal, serves both validation and cathartic vehicle for traumatized author (21). Describing novel therapeutic exercise, Mosionier has said that she sought in its composition understand suicides of her sisters, Vivian and Kathy, and to find answers questions relating [her] own family (Special Time 248). Jade Bar-Shalom astutely notes, however, that text situates its audience as witness group traumatic experience by eschewing autobiography for the protective distance of fiction (133). Thus, inasmuch Mosionier, former foster child and survivor of rape, testifies systematic oppression of women and children, novel possesses significance that is much political it is personal. As Inger Agger and Soren Jensen observe, the word 'testimony' has in itself double connotation of both something objective, judicial, public, or political, and of something subjective, spiritual, cathartic, or private (qtd. in Tal 200). For this reason, act of testifying and of bearing witness involves a decision embrace conflict rather than conformity, endure lifetime of anger and pain rather than submit seductive pull of revision and repression. Its goal is change (Tal 7). At same time, this transformative discourse actuates recovery that not only elevates expression over repression but also links memory health. Identifying the conflict between will deny horrible events and will proclaim them aloud the central dialectic of psychological trauma, psychiatrist Judith Herman asserts that remembering and telling truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for restoration of social order and for healing of individual victims (1). …

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