Citation :
« [In The Wake, Norma] Bailey and [Sharon] Riis deploy the conventions of the Western, melodrama, and romance genres to render visible white complicity in the colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples. Bailey constructs white complicity in the figure of Jim, the RCMP officer. In many ways, Jim functions as the contemporary version of the lone Western hero, a cop substituting for a cowboy. Jim's partner, Officer Crawford, a racist bully, is the bad guy who obsessively patrols the roads, seemingly looking for opportunities to harass and beat up on Indians. Bailey and Riis are evoking the sympathetic or pro-Indian Western in which the viewer empathizes with Indigenous peoples. The difference here is that there will be no white male hero riding to the rescue, as epitomized in Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990). Most Western narratives are driven by the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, but Bailey dismantles such binaries. Though Jim is positioned as the good cop to Crawford's bad cop, he is part of the problem, representing colonial oppressive power as an RCMP officer. »
-- Kathleen Cummins

Source :
CUMMINS, Kathleen. Herstories on Screen: Feminist Subversions of Frontier Myths, New York, Wallflower, 2020. [en anglais] (pp. 92-93)