This paper aims to read Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree in terms of internal colony, fantasy, and sexual politics. This work is the first modern novel published by a Canadian aboriginal writer. To approach aboriginal writings focusing only on their common distinctive features such as affinity with nature, oral tradition, ritual, anti-materialism, etc. can be an effective way to introduce them but may alienate and separate them in a museum of literary history. The aboriginal life, culture, and literature have been involved in the contemporary capitalist society, in itself a part of it, and existing as the living present. Therefore the aboriginal literature should be treated as the present not as the past and as a kind of contemporary minority literature. Internal colony in this paper means the phenomena and the space in which the colonizer who monopolizes the capital and the power keeps on exploiting and repressing the colonized continuously in a nation, in a territory, and in a society by eternalizing its colonization. In Culleton’s novel, the internal colony is entangled with various fantasies of the colonizer and the colonized. These fantasies form the identities of both the colonizer and the colonizer, distorting their identities at the same time. April and Cheryl is the typical characters who show the case of the colonized in this internal colony. Internal colony is basically a political concept but cannot be understood in isolation from gender and sexual politics. Culleton’s novel shows this especially with its long and detailed scene of sexual rape and the concept of “native girl syndrome” which is the colonizer’s, etc. In conclusion, Culleton’s novel is the typical text which shows the contradictions of internal colony and for reference its discursive transparency matches well its content which is obliged to be discussed in an other paper.

This paper aims to read Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree in terms of internal colony, fantasy, and sexual politics. This work is the first modern novel published by a Canadian aboriginal writer. To approach aboriginal writings focusing only on their common distinctive features such as affinity with nature, oral tradition, ritual, anti-materialism, etc. can be an effective way to introduce them but may alienate and separate them in a museum of literary history. The aboriginal life, culture, and literature have been involved in the contemporary capitalist society, in itself a part of it, and existing as the living present. Therefore the aboriginal literature should be treated as the present not as the past and as a kind of contemporary minority literature. Internal colony in this paper means the phenomena and the space in which the colonizer who monopolizes the capital and the power keeps on exploiting and repressing the colonized continuously in a nation, in a territory, and in a society by eternalizing its colonization. In Culleton’s novel, the internal colony is entangled with various fantasies of the colonizer and the colonized. These fantasies form the identities of both the colonizer and the colonizer, distorting their identities at the same time. April and Cheryl is the typical characters who show the case of the colonized in this internal colony. Internal colony is basically a political concept but cannot be understood in isolation from gender and sexual politics. Culleton’s novel shows this especially with its long and detailed scene of sexual rape and the concept of “native girl syndrome” which is the colonizer’s, etc. In conclusion, Culleton’s novel is the typical text which shows the contradictions of internal colony and for reference its discursive transparency matches well its content which is obliged to be discussed in an other paper.