I recently wrote an article about the critical reception of Ducks over at SOLRAD Magazine.
As a footnote, I debated whether to get into the sexual violence in Ducks and decided (1) the article was already too long and (2) Beaton clearly did not want there to be a focus on the book’s most disturbing details – it is conspicuously absent from the reviews and interviews. I do understand how harmful and reductive it would be to say Ducks is about this topic when it is about so many things and how bringing it up risks eclipsing all the complexities of the book.
However, I am still shocked that I’ve yet to see one person citing the direct ties between mining work camps and sexual violence against women. Much of Ducks is about the unreported human costs of our fossil fuel dependence so I do not understand why no one has brought up the well documented connection between mining sites, rape and missing/murdered Indigenous women. This seems to me to be directly relevant to any discussion of Ducks. I am still waiting for someone to publicly connect the dots. It’s just one more reason why I think reviews of Ducks written by Indigenous writers would be different.
Kawai Shen 