April Raintree Reviews

In Search of April Raintree

What the book lacks in literary polish is more than made up for in compassion, understanding and beautifully controlled emotion.

- Norman Sigurdson, Winnipeg Free Press, July 30, 1983

Gut-wrenching tale of Indians in city

Culleton’s guided tour through part of the urban native’s environment provides an emotional and chilling insight into a human tragedy that many people talk about and few people understand.

- Brian Maracle, Montreal Gazette, 1983

Beatrice Culleton – Poetic Justice au Genre D’Metis

“It is a powerful story, because with gentleness, it deals with the sickness in our society and our people. It is the kind of writing that will begin the healing of our people and help a dominant society understand and feel the lives of a people it almost destroyed.”

This is what Maria Campbell had to say about Beatrice’s first novel, In Search of April Raintree. Her writing has also been described as “unflinchingly honest.” Her writing is a song of joy and pain stepping across time, space and racial barriers that ached to be sung, and Culleton sang it.We now have one song with the power to heal, what would many more do?

- April Boyd, New Breed Journal, November 1983

Metis author speaking here

The most impressive thing about the book – and it is a wonderful book – is its honesty. The white people are not all bigots and the native people are not all, either strong and heroic, or weak and victimized. You believe what this woman tells you because all her characters are allowed to be human.

THE BIRTLE EYE-WITNESS, May 1987

A search for belonging, identity and self...

Consistently realistic, Culleton’s novel reflects Native people’s history with the child welfare system. April and Cheryl Raintree symbolize the thousands of Native children who were part of the “Fifties and Sixties Scoop” – a period when our children were literally scooped from their families and placed in non-Native foster homes, usually only because of misunderstandings of our culture, values and belief system on the part of non-Native social workers.

Culleton, however, had the guts to not keep her story quite so simple. She does not let us off that easy. This is not merely a “let’s blame all our problems on the white people” story. To begin with, April and Cheryl Raintree’s parents are alcoholic as are many of the Native people on Winnipeg;s Main Street whom Culleton vividly describes. She does not romanticize or minimize Native people’s reality. The message for both Native and non-Native readers seems to be that we all need to take a degree of responsibility for what has happened to Canada’s Aboriginal people.

Not only does In Search of April Raintree look at the problems and issues of Native people dealing with a white society, but it also looks at the personal dilemma of being Metis. Being of mixed blood can often create an identity crisis in itself. Where do the Metis people belong? With the Native people or the white people? Or are they a separate race?

I believe a good book makes the reader feel. Culleton’s novel achieves this all the way through. It makes you feel anger, horror, despair, embarrassment, hope and pride. As a Native or non-Native reader, you will experience these emotions for different reasons, but you will experience them. Rarely have I felt such powerful, intense feelings from reading a book, especially after the third time.

- Cindy Baskin, Beedaudjimowin, Spring 1992

April Raintree

Basically, this is the story of a woman, April Raintree, her sister, Cheryl, and their search for their identities. But it’s far more than that, providing a look at the frustrations of Canada’s native people in their pursuit of an uplifting self-image. It’s a moving story, one that has a ring of honesty about it.

This book explores a number of avenues – foster care, growing up as a native woman in Canada, the problem and images of Metis in this country. The story is well-wrtten, the characters well-defined, and the difficulties of being Metis handled with understanding and empathy.

It’s a good, interesting story, one that should be read for the entertainment it offers and for the insight it provides.

- Fred Loader, Starlight, October 1985

In Search of April Raintree, Critical Edition

The ten essays cover a variety of issues:

• the nature of identity as a Native person in a largely racist white culture;
• April’s story as a document of cultural displacement from one’s heritage;
• the legacy of cycles of abuse, violence and denial of human rights;
• the story as the lived experience of foster care, alcohol abuse, family violence, and suicide;
• history, as written by white historians and as told by First Nations tradition;
• censorship and the revision of the original text into April Raintree;
• and the book’s place in Canadian Aboriginal literature.

As well, Beatrice Culleton Mosionier contributes a short essay, which details some personal family history and the story’s raison d’etre.

With the exception of Mosionier, all of the contributors are academics, most with interests in gender studies and/or native studies. As a result, the essays are definitely high-level discourse and are intended for an audience with more than average knowledge of textural reading. At the same time, the serious attention these critical essays pay to the book validates its importance as a central text in Native literature. The book certainly deserves a place in public and academic libraries, as well as in high school collections where the book is studied in upper grades.

Joanne Peters, CM, Volume VI, Number 11, February 2000

Old favorite gets new treatment

The fact that I’m reviewing this book that was published nearly 17 years ago attests to the longevity and influence of Culleton’s novel. And the importance of In Search of April Raintree in the annals of Aboriginal literature is confirmed by this new critical edition.

• Margarey Fee discusses the question of identity that the novel brings up,
• Michael Creal looks at racism, commending the novel for presenting an aspect of Canadian history many Canadians, past and present, “have failed to confront or preferred to ignore”,
• Helen Hoy and Heather Zwicker bring their academic disciplines to the fore in their look at the novel. Hoy deconstructs the novel in the trend of today’s English literary criticism, while Zwicker gives her feminist interpretation,
• Peter Cumming criticizes Culleton’s decision to tone down the language and rape scene to make the novel supposedly palatable for high school students, calling the changes to April’s rape the worst case of “bowdlerization.”

Even if people have read In Search of April Raintree before, I would recommend giving the critical edition a try. And for those who haven’t read the book, it will undoubtedly be a revelation. I strongly suspect we’ll be talking about Culleton’s novel 17 years from now.

- Todd Lamirande, Arts & Books, the DRUM, February 2000

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