2 'Fourth World' refers to the indigenous people who were displaced by European and other settlers in Second World situations (Slemon 31-32). 'Third World' refers to countries like India, where the British did not dominate by expropriating land for their citizens to settle on, but, rather, remained a ruling class imposed upon a reluctant people. But instead of the term 'Second World' designating socialist countries, 'it now refers to 'settler'' cultures, that is, former colonies that were settled by colonizers, primarily from the First World, as in Africa, Australia and Canada. 'First World' remains the designation for the dominant exploiters (usually capitalist European) of foreign lands.

Some postcolonial critics now suggest that we consider four redefined worlds. Wiebe's position in postcolonial discourse should first be described in terms of the paradigm that has displaced the obsolete notion of First, Second, and Third Worlds. This essay will clarify the complex variety of ways in which Wiebe is a postcolonial writer and suggest some ways of regarding, if not resolving, these contradictions.

Wiebe's complexity includes two apparent contradictions: the difference between the way he represents his own people and the way he represents indigenous people, and the difference between his Christian position and the theory and criticism of mainstream postcolonialism. The result is that the full complexity of his postcolonial perspective has been obscured since Wiebe's representation of his own people's experience of oppression has been excluded from discussions of his postcoloniality.

Unfortunately, criticism of his work has tended to divide into two different streams: one concerned with the religious content of his fiction about Mennonites and one concerned with his representation of indigenes. In addition to his originary position, Wiebe represents a special achievement in postcolonial literature because of his unusual success, according to most critics, in depicting indigenous peoples. Recently Tony Tremblay has even claimed that the tendency for Canadian literature to become 'consciously postcolonial' is due 'in large part to Rudy Wiebe's cultural programme of re-imagining the West' (159).

The fiction of Rudy Wiebe is increasingly being studied in terms of postcolonial discourse, an intellectual inquiry that has developed almost simultaneously with Wiebe's writing career. Postcolonial Complexity in the Writings of Rudy Wiebe In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

And by peace shall destroy many