Aboriginal women's voices within literature

Abo Fem

Towards Hearing and Understanding the Voice of the Female Aboriginal in Canadian Literature

The Canadian literary tradition often receives less than its deserved attention in school curricula and by many English-language scholars, especially outside of Canada. British and American literary works and authors are generally more well-known on an international basis due to their dominance of world trade and politics and thus the more successful exportation of their culture, but Canadian literature provides a unique and often understated view of many of the same issues and through-lines dealt with in the fiction of these two closely related countries and should not be so easily overlooked. The somewhat in-between nature of the nation -- a part of the British Commonwealth and the United States' largest trading partner and immediate neighbor -- gives it a unique history and literary perspective.

Within the canon of Canadian literature, however, a more significant marginalization has occurred that blurs the truth of the Canadian experience and indeed makes it clear that this experience cannot be simply and singly codified. Though the aboriginal peoples of Canada fared far better than their counterparts in the United States, they have been a consistently subjugated and suborned group whose very identities have been all but eradicated by the encroachment of Europeanized Canadian culture. This has extended to a large degree to the attention paid to literature produced by native Canadian writers, and especially female writers that identify as members of the aboriginal peoples of the continent.

This paper will examine one very well received piece of literature from a native Canadian female writer, Beatrice Culleton Mosionier's semi-autobiographical in Search of April Raintree, and the context of writing as a female aboriginal in Canada through several secondary sources that examine this unique position an perspective. Through this examination, it is seen that marginalization is taken for granted as a standard for both the feminine and native status that female aboriginal authors are labeled with. This marginalization and narrow labeling are not exactly accepted by the authors discussed herein, and in fact their literature stands out as a rejection of such marginalization and an explicit attempt to assert their own individual identity within the context of Canadian history and current trends. The attempt alone shows a great deal of success and the eloquence and depth of the literature makes it clear that these women are in no way subordinate to larger trends in Canadian literature or in English-language literature as a whole.

The Native Female Voice

The basic story of in Search of April Raintree makes the dynamics of the aboriginal female experience in Canada quite clear, even to an alarming degree. The story focuses on two sisters, Cheryl and her older sister April, the latter of which narrates the story from a first-person perspective, as they grow up in various settings. From their mothers proudly clean house to a series of foster homes and eventually to widely divergent adult paths, it is clear that choice is not something there is an abundance of, nor is the importance of the choices that are made always recognized.

At one point in the novel, the two sisters are to be split up and sent to live in two different homes. April takes her younger sister aside and tells her, "Cheryl, we can't fight them….This won't last forever. When we're old enough, we'll be free. We'll live together" (Mosionier 66). In later life, Cheryl has become a prostitute and April ends up raped while being called a "squaw"; though both are indeed more free than they were as children, the scope of choices available to them are quite narrow. This book serves as a testament to the difficulties of living as an aboriginal Canadian female, but it is not simply an expose of injustice: as the title states, it is the narrator's search for herself. By recounting the injustices experienced throughout each phase of reaching adulthood and her own place in society, April (and indeed, Beatrice Mosionier as well) is claiming her past as part of her identity, and refusing to admit to being simply a pawn that is acted upon. She makes it quite clear that she was dealt an unfair hand, yet the novel is more concerned with how she played that hand than it is with who was dealing and why the deck appeared to be rigged.

It is in this way that fiction from female aboriginal Canadian writers both empowers the authors and their people and brings to light better understandings of what native Canadians have faced and must continue to face. One native scholar on the subject has been quoted as saying, "our task…is two fold. To examine the past and culturally affirm toward a new future" (Armstrong, in Acoose 227). It is not simply a rumination on past injuries that this literature provides, but a way of analyzing the past that allows for forward movement.

It is also impossible to consider the literature produced by members of this community as pure fictions, but rather some historical knowledge is necessary to fully appreciate the intricacies and events of stories like in Search of April Raintree. The largely negative nature of the events of the novel and the rapidity with which they take place is easily misinterpreted as literary heavy-handedness until one examines some brief statistics and historical details regarding life for indigenous Canadians in the twentieth century (Perreault). In this way, the literature of authors like Mosionier also provide a direct understanding of the practical realities faced by indigenous peoples, directly educating readers while at the same time exploring the human impact that these statistics, events, and realities have in a way that is arguably the hallmark of any decent work of fiction.

Even leaving the details of the works of indigenous authors aside, there is an importance in the fact of their existence as the genre of emerging fiction by Metis -- and especially female Metis -- writers marks an important shift in Canadian fiction. These works present a hybridization or "creolization" that does not maintain a simplistic (and false) concept of "separate but equal" as liberal pluralism might suggest, but that shows the emergence of a new claimed identity, that of the native-in-Canada (Groening 120-3). That is, novels like the Search for April Raintree do not merely show the difficulties of a culture clash and resulting oppression, but they show how these clashes result in the emergence of new peoples, new ideas, and new philosophies that do not belong directly to either culture.