Indian Horse

Indian Horse is a novel by Canadian writer Richard Wagamese, published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2012. The novel centres on Saul Indian Horse, a First Nations boy from Ontario who survives the residential school system and becomes a talented ice hockey player, only for his past to catch up to him and cast him away from the sport he loves. It follows Saul on his journey to self-awareness and self-acceptance.
Wagamese's best known work, "Indian Horse" won the 2013 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature, and was a competing title in the 2013 edition of "Canada Reads".
A film adaptation, "Indian Horse", was directed by Stephen Campanelli and premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
Plot.
In 1961, the Indian Horse family—an Ojibway family consisting of eight-year-old Saul, his grandmother Naomi, and his Christian parents John and Mary—live in the wilderness of Northern Ontario, hiding from the authorities, who previously took Saul's siblings, Benjamin and Rachel. When Benjamin suddenly returns after escaping from a residential school, the family heads to Gods Lake, a remote region where their ancestors lived before they were all killed by a collapsing cliff. Benjamin soon dies of tuberculosis, and his parents take him away on a canoe to be blessed by a priest, leaving Saul with his grandmother. The parents don’t return, forcing Saul and his grandmother to travel through the fierce winter towards Minaki for shelter. They eventually lose their canoe and run out of supplies, and Naomi dies at a railway depot outside Minaki while huddling with Saul for warmth. Saul is found by the authorities and taken to St. Jerome's Indian Residential School in White River.
At St. Jerome's, headed by Father Quinney and Sister Ignacia, Saul witnesses horrific, brutal abuse daily, and many children die, take their own lives, or are traumatized. The same year Saul arrives at St. Jerome's, Father Gaston Leboutilier joins the faculty, and he proves to be popular with the boys. He constructs a hockey rink outside and forms a hockey team composed of older boys. After watching "Hockey Night in Canada" on a television, Saul begs Father Leboutilier to allow him to play, but due to his young age, he is not allowed to. However, Father Leboutilier allows Saul to clean the rink each morning, and Saul uses that time to practice hockey using frozen horse turds and pieces of linoleum. After a player injures himself during a scrimmage, Father Leboutilier allows Saul to play, and is astounded by his high skill level. Father Quinney, noticing Saul's talent, allows him to join the team. St. Jerome's plays against the White River team, and Saul leads his team to victory. Father Leboutilier begins to practice and train with Saul while teaching him tricks, and Saul is invited to play for the White River midget hockey team, though he is soon kicked off due to his ethnicity.
In 1966, when Saul is thirteen, he is invited by Fred Kelly to live with the Kelly family, an Ojibway foster family from Manitouwadge, to play for the Manitouwadge Moose junior hockey team (nicknamed "the Moose"), coached by Fred and captained by their son Virgil. Though Sister Ignacia disagrees, Father Quinney and Father Leboutilier allow Saul to leave St. Jerome's. Saul is given jersey number 13, the same jersey number he had while playing for St. Jerome's. Saul, Virgil, and the rest of the Moose get along quickly, and Saul, despite his small size and younger age, leads the team to numerous victories in their games against teams from reserves across Northern Ontario. Saul reunites with Father Leboutilier after a game in Pic River, and they share one last exchange before Father Leboutilier leaves. Saul never sees him again.
Eventually, the Moose are invited to play against the Kapuskasing Chiefs, a senior A team from the Northern Hockey Association and their first non-Indigenous opponent. They win, and are invited to play against teams from towns and cities along the Trans-Canada Highway and across Northern Ontario. Due to their ethnicity, however, they are often heckled by the audience, and the opposing players mock, fight, and intentionally bodycheck them during games. At one point, while eating at a café near Chapleau, the team has an altercation with a group of men who, one by one, beat and urinate on all of them except Saul, who they spare due to his young age and his hockey skills. After the Moose beat the Owen Sound Clippers in a rough game where Saul manages to show considerable restraint, Saul is scouted by the Toronto Marlboros, a feeder team for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Despite his initial protests, Virgil and the Moose persuade Saul to join the Marlboros.
Saul, sixteen years old, arrives in Toronto to attend the Marlboros' training camp. He makes the team, keeping jersey number 13, but he is viewed as an outsider by news reporters, who discriminatorily describe his actions using Indigenous cultural terms; the audience, who insult him and do war chants whenever he goes on the ice; and other players, who subject him to racist name-calling. Saul starts to react violently to these, and he begins to spend more of his time benched and in the penalty box than on the ice. When he gets benched entirely, he leaves Toronto and returns to Manitouwadge. Saul becomes a logger, where he is harassed by his coworkers to the point that he snaps and viciously attacks a Swedish coworker in response. He rejoins the Moose, but he plays very aggressively. When Saul realizes his teammates have stopped talking to him as a result of his violent playstyle, he leaves Manitouwadge once he turns eighteen.
Saul travels across Canada for several years, taking any low-level labor job he can find. He becomes an alcoholic and ends up back in Redditt in 1978, the same town where his family reunited with Benjamin seventeen years prior. Saul meets Ervin Sift, a farmer who offers Saul a job and a place to stay. However, Saul feels empty inside, and he leaves for Winnipeg, where he has a seizure and is hospitalized. He is accepted by the New Dawn Centre, an Indigenous rehabilitation center. While there, he meets his counselor, Moses, and he has a vivid spiritual experience where he sees his deceased family and his great-grandfather Shabogeesick, the first "Indian Horse". This prompts him to return to White River, where he revisits St. Jerome's, now long closed and in severe disrepair, and he breaks down in the abandoned hockey rink as he finally acknowledges a difficult truth: Father Leboutilier routinely molested and raped Saul, who used hockey as a means of escaping his trauma and personal guilt. Saul returns to Minaki, rents a boat, and travels back to Gods Lake. He has another spiritual experience where he sees his family, as well as his ancestors, and he has a brief discussion with Shabogeesick.
Saul returns to Manitouwadge. He reconnects with Fred and his wife Martha, both residential school survivors who also endured abuse. He also reconnects with Virgil, now coach of a bantam hockey team at the town's new rink. Saul suggests that he coach the bantam team, of which Virgil's son Billy is a member, and Virgil invites Saul for a game of hockey with his former teammates. Later that night, waiting for Virgil and the Moose, Saul notices a ball of tape on the rink, and he begins to practice with it, much like he did at St. Jerome's, as Virgil, the Moose, and their families arrive.
Writing and development.
"Indian Horse" is written as a memoir written by Saul at the New Dawn Centre, as an alternative to him telling his story to the group there.
According to Wagamese, he originally intended to write a novel about hockey, but the legacy of the residential school system gradually became a focal point of the story. He said that writing the book took about five times longer than it typically would have taken him to write a book "because of the emotional territory it covers". Although Wagamese himself did not attend a residential school, he was still affected by that system because his mother, aunts and uncles were residential school survivors.
Reception.
"Indian Horse" won the 2013 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature.
"Indian Horse" was a competing title in the 2013 edition of "Canada Reads". It was advocated by Carol Huynh. It lost to "February" by Lisa Moore.
In 2020, the novel's French translation, "Cheval Indien", was selected for "Le Combat des Livres", the French-language edition of "Canada Reads", where it was defended by Romeo Saganash.