Healing Through Imagination:A Study of Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April Raintree

Beatrice Culleton is a Native Canadian Woman novelist who belonged to the productive literary age of 1980. With the objective writing autobiographical account of her experiences, she wrote the history of Raintrees, a fictional Native Family, in the most popular fiction, In Search of April Raintree. Creating two fictional characters-April Raintree and Cheryl Raintree-She has combined imagination with experiences to articulate the experiences of Natives. Reposing her trust in the healing process of fictional narratives, she makes the novel a vehicle of healing and provinces an opportunity for critical elucidation and and catharsis of the socio-cultural experiences of Natives. The article adopts a different approach and provides an opportunity the reasons for the failed parentage of April and Cheryl. It exposes the cultural enslavement imposed by colonial policies of assimilation in making Alice Raintree and Henry Raintree become victims of helplessness and addiction which inflates into the accepted failure of their children. Culleton provides the imagined lives of the native characters and their down fall from determination to deterioration. Empathizing with all the characters, Culleton believes that healing comes through empathy and understanding.