"Indian Horse" by Richard Wagamese
As Richard Wagamese shares in a 2013 lecture about his novel Indian Horse, this was a hard novel to write, and he was glad it was over.
If you’ve read the book, it’s not surprising to hear this. Horse’s protagonist, an Ojibway man named Saul, narrates his personal journey from a horrific Canadian residential school to a career in hockey, and everything in between and beyond.
History has made no secret of what residential schools were. I timed my reading of this book in a moment when I was familiar with the topic, and was emptied the more news came out about the recent and ongoing discoveries of mass graves of murdered children in Canada.
With the explicit intent of bringing Native American culture to an end, the system that constructed and implemented these schools from the late 1800s to the middle of the 20th century was operated by different Christian denominations, which were funded by the Canadian government. Inadequate responses from the same government and religious officials has been consistent.
So to do action items, like equal representation in government and increased support for current Native American communities, remain items without action.
With that, it is heartening to see the witnesses to these crimes grow and gain traction across a variety of mediums, from photography and social media to podcasts and novels.
In Indian Horse, fiction rises, then fearlessly dives with the occasion.
Every move Wagamese makes, from a poet’s eye on syntax to a story structure that is at turns inspiring and infuriating, puts us in a narrator’s situation that is utterly unique and, more often than not, dire.
“If we want to live at peace with ourselves, we need to tell our stories,” our protagonist, Saul, tells us out of the gate. It’s an effective grab, immersive in Saul’s processing of pain, loss, and anger, a passage in motion that, we hope, brings peace to a person we quickly learn is without any.
Some of Saul’s earliest memories are of him and his family on the run from hunters employed by “the school,” an ominous presence that once took his mother, then returned her to a place where “she sometimes ceased to exist in the outside world,” where others are set upon by a “sorrow that could not be reached.”
The hunters come for Saul and his family. Pursued into winter in the forests of northern Ontario (re: deadly), Saul is caught, and Wagamese opens the terror of what’s to follow with searing clarity.
“I read once that there are holes in the universe that swallow all light, all bodies. St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world.”
What follows is nightmarish and inhuman.
The abuse perpetrated by the school’s staff escalate into some of the worst acts one can read about. And they are all the more devastating to read not only for their historical accuracy, but for how frequently they happened.
The burial grounds are described as crowded with small bodies.
A six-year-old boy commits suicide, and several other children do as well.
Saul tells us, “She was nine years old and all I felt was hollow,” a sentence that does as good as any to define the reader’s experience.
Wagamese exercises a master’s discernment when presenting these scenes, adding nothing, and leaving nothing out.
The reader, as always, does what they will with what they take in. Clarity and the backing of real-world history give us plenty to sit with, and take to heart.
Saul suffers silently, shrinking his pain, and in effect shutting off who he is, until he finds a skating rink behind the school.
“It was a purple world with only the varying degrees of light from the moon that allowed me to see,” Saul tells us. “The idea of the game hanging in the frost.”
A priest from the school, Leboutilier, becomes an ally of sorts by pulling the game out of a vision and giving Saul a new reality. To tend the rink, to practice every movement of the sport to his heart’s content, he finds a world in which “every time I skated I felt as though I had created the act. It was pure and new and startling.”
While skating in the rink, Saul recalls his grandmother speaking to the certainty that we can’t know everything within reality’s parameters, and the “awe and wonder” we are gifted with by this fact.
Natural talent might be one’s innate ease in channeling action within a particular unknown. Within the world of hockey, Leboutilier calls this “the great spirit of the game,” an underlying essence that not everyone can see, or have the privilege of acting on if they do.
And, he sees in Saul “that spirit within you.”
Saul’s spirit continues to grow on the ice. Remarkably so.
In time hockey gives Saul his first taste of autonomy, giving him the choice to play for a team on a reserve outside of the school.
The hero’s calling is talent as escape. Saul answers, and soon he earns names like “a bag of antlers” and “secret weapon” on a new team, the Moose. Together they cross from town to town to play other teams: “In the fading light of the sun we’d follow the dim, humped white of the snowdrifts at the road’s shoulder into the northern bush.”
Of course, in an area and time rife with racism, tragedy never leaves the scene fully.
We root for Saul’s teammate Virgil when he tells a rude local, “I don’t recall asking you to join us,” after the team is told that they won’t share space with Native Americans.
The beating that follows goes beyond violence. The team agrees to never speak of the degradation that finds them. Even so, Saul tells us that “there were moments when you’d catch another boy’s eye and know that you were both thinking about it. Everything was contained in that glance. All the hurt. All the shame. All the rage.”
For Saul, this is kindling. During one particularly horrific game, Saul “turned and looked at the crowd. I raised my stick to them and stepped out onto the ice and reclaimed the game. There wasn’t one of those players who could skate with me.”
He loves the game, and the game loves him in return. Saul's performances can’t be missed by the sport at large, and a scout is quick to recruit him onto a club that feeds into a professional team.
But bigotry follows him here as well. As a Marlboro at the rookie camp, Saul is a minority. He cannot escape constant taunting, physical and verbal.
The tipping point comes when a referee, the audience, and then Saul’s own team turn their backs after an opposing player trips him on the ice.
“That was the end of any semblance of joy in the game for me.”
A spiral begins.
Saul revels in the expectations of the crowd. He gets violent, and the team suffers for the penalties he catches.
He has enough. He quits.
Wagamese takes us into Saul’s pain with an excruciating recollection of two sisters who died horribly at the residential school. One was killed by physical punishment, the other, upon learning about it, by suicide.
Saul remembers rushing forward to stop the second sister. But he couldn’t. And he doesn’t feel like he can stop his own despair and decline, either.
He takes a job as a deadfall bucker back in the town of his adopted family, Manitouwadge.
Living among his fellow laborers, he compartmentalizes the racism and violence he experiences as best he can. In adulthood, we could be reading about the same child Saul once was, hiding himself, all of himself, out of harm’s way at the school.
The easy fix for finding the camaraderie he’s missing from the vacuum left by hockey leads to alcohol, the first time it enters his life.
Calmness comes with it, and functioning alcoholism reframes his life as a thing to endure, a teetering balance of withdrawal symptoms or drunkenness in order to keep an income and repeat the same process, day after day.
“It was a dim world,” Saul says of this life. “Things glimmered, never shone.”
At the bottom, Saul feels compelled to revisit the ice rink that first brought him to hockey, the only love he’s had.
It’s here that Saul recalls, for the first time, the sexual abuse inflicted by Leboutilier.
It might or might not be wishful thinking to expect exceptions among the staff at the school. But the pattern is not surprising. A liking beyond genuine care and service was hinted at in the amount of attention Leboutilier gave to Saul. Allusions can also he found in his language, creeping and ominous, beneath the freedom Saul is given access to by him on the ice.
“I had run to the game,” Saul says. “Run to it and embraced it, done anything that would allow me to get to that avenue of escape. That’s why I played with abandon. To abandon myself.”
When he leaves the rink to return to his adoptive parents, Fred and Martha, he makes it clear that he wants to live better. He knows what he has to overcome, more fully than ever before, and needs more than what he’s given himself since leaving hockey.
Saul sees promise in the community and sport he left behind. Coaching sounds right to him, and he tells his old teammate, Virgil, after denying that he can play on himself, “you reclaim things the most when you give them away.”
Ending on this upswing is hopeful. But, of course, there is more to the story.
I started the book and wrote this review with an eye on current events, seeking a worthwhile mediation on the sadness and endurance of injustice that is part and parcel of history.
I’m not reminded that this is true, but see a direct line, uninterrupted and inadequately addressed, from colonization to the current oppression of indigenous peoples we see around the world today.
With that in mind, I found one of the most intriguing choices Wagamese makes is the experience of reading the ending.
The realization of Leboutilier’s abuse comes at page 198 of 221 in the book. It happens quickly, abrupt even, and the resolution follows soon after. Our narrator gets what he needed, and an essence of success all but glows around his return to a world of encouraging others to find strength in turn.
It’s a great ending, but I feel like Wagamese is too deliberate an artist to not be saying something with such a short verdict.
The story is done, and the cover shuts like a door slammed shut. We have the world again, one with realities that are honestly but briefly presented in the pages.
And we find ourselves steeped in them.
Like a clap given to wake someone up, I wonder if we are being asked, bluntly, what we will do in light of reading Saul’s journey on the page, and continuing our own outside the text.
Only one person can answer that, and there are many, many different answers to give.
I’ve been lucky and blessed enough to know a few people who are giving incredible replies to the ongoing reality Wagamese writes about in Indian Horse.
Coach Brandon Dugi is a friend, photographer, and elite runner in his own right. He is a leader in his community on a Navajo reservation in Page, Arizona, and in April 2021 we started an ongoing fundraiser, #DinéBikéyah, for $4,000 to purchase water tanks that the residents in his community use to bring water for everything from washing to drinking and raising animals.
If you can contribute or share this effort around, it is a great way to give practical assistance to a community that would appreciate it very much.
Verna Volker, ultra marathoner, teacher, and founder of Native Women Running and the Native Runners Podcast, uses sports like Dugi to seed action and increased visibility around these issues, all while empowering others as well.
The Red Justice Podcast takes deep dives into the troubling and ongoing cases of missing persons and murders of Native American people.
There is no shortage of people and resources to turn to if you would like to learn more about what is happening to the Native American community in the United States and Canada.
This is a sliver of a sliver of the people, communities, and resources that are available to learn more and get active for the Native American community.
If this matters to you, make it matter.