Freedom and Oppression Essay

Some personal experiences are not based on our own choices. In Beatrice Mosioner’s fictional autobiography In Search of April Raintree, the two sisters, April and Cheryl Raintree show how much of an impact oppression and racism followed by freedom and love can make in their emotional and psychological state. This leads to proving incorrect the myth that Aboriginal people must accept and follow European values as a model to ascend to a better life. The experience of racism with the exposure of the colonial system including colonial control and oppression also brought self-hatred, the suffering of internal racism, and self-isolation to the sisters with the assimilation to white cultural standards. The racism encourages white cultural control and the oppression strengthens the white dominance of the sisters. The freedom of internalized oppression with self-acceptance and personal freedom with embracing their ancestry and culture by the enjoyment of acceptance and rewarding love that holds their ancestry close to them. White dominance gets disrupted by personal freedom and no longer being self-isolated, self-acceptance overthrows white cultural values. The sisters experience difficulties in their lives but ultimately ascend to a better one by embracing their ancestry, self-acceptance, and personal freedom.

Cheryl and April Raintree’s life was full of repeated racist remarks which persuaded their minds to believe the racist ideas. Therefore, this is the cause of disempowerment and racism affected their lives very impactfully. Since the sisters are Metis and were taken from their parents when they were young and put in foster care, they had to comply with the white culture's ways. The sisters suffer when they are in foster care, but April suffers the most, especially when living at the orphanage and with her second foster family. The DeRosiers are severely oppressive and racist. In reaction to their profound disempowerment, both sisters suffer despair, internalized oppression, and loss of dignity. They are also subjected to racist and hateful meanings, rejected, and treated as the inferior other, all of which lead them to internalize racism and suffer negative self-meanings and self-hatred. Yet, at times, the sisters, and especially Cheryl, also experience personal freedom and love. Enjoying unconditional love, they move towards embracing their Aboriginal identity. Aboriginal people serve as clear evidence of the emotional upheaval and the physiological conditions of internalized racism and broken self-esteem that some have suffered as a result of being taken from their families and living in a racist environment.

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Self-acceptance is a difficulty when one goes through racism, disempowerment, and oppression of colonialism. Many Aboriginals lose control over their personal lives when they have to comply with the white cultural ways. The Aboriginal children of many families were taken away and put into residential schools or white foster homes. April begins to reconsider her culture when at the Radcliff home “April survived by clinging into romantic stereotypes, but the stereotypes collapse when confronted with reality and they ultimately set in motion a reformation of identity and reconsideration of culture” (233). For Creal, April decides to “escape the prejudice” and to “invent her own identity” by choosing the “white’ world and all its material benefits” (253). Cheryl, in contrast, takes up an aboriginal identity as a result of experiencing positive affirmations of her heritage through books, and her idealized image of her parents is destroyed (Creal 225). Acoose argues that Cheryl “ feeds off of romantic stereotypes of her heritage and “begins to construct an identity by unpacking the antiquated colonial boxes, which contain romantic notions of Indians and Metis” (229, 231). For Acoose when Cheryl “opens the box filled with family documentation provided to April by colonial authorities,” “fantasy meets reality,” and she stumbles (232). Likewise, Creal asserts that “it was the total contradiction between the idealized picture of her parents that she created in her mind, and the reality she eventually confronted, that shook Cheryl to the core of her being” (225). According to fee, Cheryl takes up an Aboriginal identity “to resist and survive negative identities imposed on” her (212). For Fee, Cheryl idealizes her culture and parents to resist racism, but “Cheryl’s courage falters when she can no longer sustain her fantasy about her parents” (221). Mary Gillis argues that Cheryl stumbles because April lets her believe her fantasy about her parents (63). Thom argues that Cheryl is “proud of her heritage,” but also argues that Cheryl’s “identity is built on a ‘fragile foundation’ (Hartmut Lutz 100) because the acquires it from books and has little contact with real-life Metis until she approaches adulthood” (299). Without an understanding of the sister's emotional and physiological states, we cannot begin to understand how exactly oppression and racism harm April and Cheryl, how important freedom and love are for their well-being, and how love allows for the sisters ' self-acceptance and, thus their acceptance of their identity.

Personal freedom is a two-way road for the sisters. Growing up oppressed and suffering from internalized oppression and acculturated to white standards by internalized racism, April experiences being exposed to racism or negative meanings of Aboriginal people after being disliked and rejected by white people. April experiences profound internalized oppression at the orphanage, becoming physically ill because of her despair and oppression. April experiences deeply internalized racism after being exposed to the DeRosiers and others' racism. Wanting to be rid of the negative meanings she has internalized about herself and Aboriginal people in general and her self-hatred and wanting to experience the acceptance of white people, April embraces white values and decides to live as a white woman. In this way, she is cut off from her valuing process and is acculturated to white values. She becomes defensive when she is threatened with the fact of her ancestry, and at times, she steps away from her white identity and behaves by her valuing process. April's behavior, then, is contradictory after she assumes a white identity. Cheryl isn't able to hold the weight of her past. Therefore, this leads to her killing herself due to the feeling of oppression and being assimilated by racism in the white culture. She is greatly affected by the internalized oppression caused by her past. The people she thought she knew showed a deep racism which affected her very heavily. She experiences a dislike towards her father because she sticks a racist meaning on him, which leads to her connecting herself with him by applying everything negative to herself. Cheryl internalized oppression she turns to alcohol to try and cope with it, but it doesn't work because she experiences rejection and racism in court from April causing the show of internalized racism. Great love isn't found within her reach to Friendship Centre to rid of the internalized racism. This leads to proving incorrect the myth that Aboriginal people must accept and follow European values as a model to ascend to a better life. Since Cheryl fails to live up to the white culture standards by living as a white woman with internalized racism, the decision to take her own life away is made.

The story establishes the identity of the Raintrees and other Aboriginal characters in that they are not white and have Aboriginal roots. Although the family never embraced their ancestry by referring to themselves as the Métis to Aboriginal characters, the sister's identity transforms with their attitudes towards their Aboriginal identity and their internalization of racism. Their emotional and physical state results from these experiences. The sisters suffer internalized oppression, despair, and self-hatred after being exposed to colonial control and methods of pacification and suffer internalized racism, self-hatred, and self-isolation and are acculturated to white cultural standards after experiencing racism. The sister's oppression strengthens white dominance, and racism promotes the development of white cultural control. April and Cheryl also are freed from internalized oppression when they have personal freedom experience self-acceptance and embrace their ancestry. The sister's personal freedom destabilizes white dominance, and their self-acceptance and desalination work to de-center white cultural values.