Classic book draws attention of scholars

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Beatrice Culleton Mosionier's 1983 classic of Native Canadian literature, In Search of April Raintree, is still drawing 6,000 new book buyers a year with its powerful narrative about two Metis sisters from Winnipeg. It has been translated into French, German and Dutch and has never been out of print. A revised high school edition appeared in 1984.

Last September, In Search of April Raintree became the first Native Canadian text to be published in a critical edition. Edmonton editor Cheryl Suzack explained the process of putting that together at a free public forum at Orlando Books in Edmonton on March 17.

"I think the novel was brilliant and tremendously exciting and smart," Suzack said, "and [there should be] a critical edition available."

Her assignment was to find and incorporate material from scholars who have drawn emotional, historical, political and cultural threads from Mosionier's novel and have woven a connection to society as they see it.

Mosionier herself wrote one of the 10 critical essays for the new edition, which provides insight into why she wrote the novel and to what extent it is autobiographical. The other essays came from contacts that both Suzack and Catherine Lennox at Peguis book publishers made among academics working in the field of Native Canadian literature.

Suzack said Portage & Main Press [formerly Peguis] got the idea for the critical edition as a result of numerous people asking the author for a teaching manual to accompany the novel.

"Their interest was in taking up some of the dominant themes that the novel addresses, like identity, discrimination, racism and the story of Metis people," she said, "and bringing that into focus through critical essays.

"The interest was to kind of bring the novel into the moment of the 1999s, where there seemed to be a lot of questions right now around issues of sovereignty, Native history and the place of Aboriginal people in Canadian society," Suzack added. "It seemed to me that one of the things the novel really does is to pick up on all those strands and to talk about them in really important ways. The other thing I think is really smart about the novel is that it points to a time when a lot of those questions weren't dominant or taken up in the way they are now."

The critical edition is aimed at undergraduate students in a range of departments such as Native studies, women's studies, Canadian studies, English literature, history and education.

"There are more and more academics that are turning to Native literature and teaching it in the universities," Suzack said.

Some may think it is a weakness that most of these academics are non-Natives. Suzack, an Ojibway, explains that part of what she wanted to do is "think about how the novel is popular to a number of different constituencies. And because it has its own literary historical archives in terms of criticism, I thought it was important to see how non-Native critics continue to read the novel and to find it valuable in this moment."

Scholarly debate of the book's meaning and merits alongside a typographically improved text have added to the appeal of the original. Minor editorial changes included adding the corresponding page numbers of earlier editions in the margins.

Native scholars, other than Mosionier, who contributed essays are Janice Acoose and Jo-Ann Thom. Both are affiliated with Saskatchewan Indian Federated College. Suzack is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Alberta.