| In September of 2001, three white men from Tisdale, Saskatchewan drove a bleeding and intoxicated 12-year-old Indigenous girl to her friend's home in a nearby rural municipality. She had been, in the course of the evening, sexually violated and needed medical attention. After Dean Edmondson, Jeffrey Kindrat and Jeffrey Brown were charged with three counts of sexual assault, both provincial and national news media outlets eagerly reported the story, as its salacious narrative provided fodder for front-page news articles. As part of reporting the story, a ban prevented media outlets from publishing the girl's name and any information that might lead to her identification. Despite this court-ordered protection, however, reporters constructed her image using description or enactments of naming, which, in essence, framed a textual photograph of the girl. In the first national story written about the incident, reporter Krista Foss of the Globe and Mail describes the 12-year-old as a "Cree version of Jennifer Lopez" and that the men saw her as a physical manifestation of the cartoon, "Pocahontas" (2001, November 12). Such descriptors, which derive from her marked or signified position as an Indigenous girl, situate her as a debased "Indian Princess" and a "sexual aggressor", a sexualized Lolita responsible for the men's downfall. Thus, journalistic construction sexualizes and denigrates the 12-year-old girl through, for example, the use of language to represent or describe her body, enactments of naming, such as titles or descriptors, and the reiteration or reproduction of colonial mythologies within the textual account of the trial. Language constructs potent evocations and images that not only manifest discursive positions but also incite injurious action. As a result of journalistic naming, her ekphrastic body, a textual rendering representative of the visual, emerges within news narrative. Using this instance as a case study as well as an entry point into a larger discursive formation, Raping Pocahontas: History, Territory, and Ekphrasis in the Representation of an Indigenous Girl examines how news media represent Indigenous women in a proscribed and pre-formulated manner that reflects racial bias and the influence of colonialism in Canadian history. The thesis also explores how certain injurious images of Indigenous women appear in news text, as historical representation recurs and informs contemporary constructions of Indigenous women. As part of this analysis, the research draws upon the genre of ekphrasis, which melds visual culture with textual culture. |
