Indian Horse
SynopsisPlot
Saul Indian Horse has hit bottom. His last binge almost killed him, and now he’s a reluctant resident in a treatment center for alcoholics, surrounded by people he’s sure will never understand him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that he’ll find it only through telling his story
Story
About this book
Saul Indian Horse is a northern Ojibway man who has reached a crisis point. After a drinking binge that nearly kills him, he enters a treatment center for alcoholics. He does not expect much from the people around him, but he slowly accepts that recovery will require him to look back through his own life and speak it aloud. The novel follows his memories as they unfold, moving between very different worlds.
Much of the story centers on two formative experiences. The first is Saul's time in a residential school, one of the institutions where Indigenous children in Canada were separated from their families and pressured to abandon their languages and customs. The second is hockey, where Saul discovers an unusual ability on the ice, and the game becomes a route out of the school and into wider Canadian society.
Richard Wagamese, who was Ojibway from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in northwestern Ontario, sets the novel largely in the north of that province. He traces how talent and effort meet racism, and how the harm done in one part of a life can return in another, long after the events themselves have passed.
