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Indian Horse: A Novel Paperback – April 10, 2018
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Named a "Best Novel of the Decade" by Literary Hub
Saul Indian Horse is a child when his family retreats into the woods. Among the lakes and the cedars, they attempt to reconnect with half-forgotten traditions and hide from the authorities who have been kidnapping Ojibway youth. But when winter approaches, Saul loses everything: his brother, his parents, his beloved grandmother—and then his home itself.
Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul is surrounded by violence and cruelty. At the urging of a priest, he finds a tentative salvation in hockey. Rising at dawn to practice alone, Saul proves determined and undeniably gifted. His intuition and vision are unmatched. His speed is remarkable. Together they open doors for him: away from the school, into an all-Ojibway amateur circuit, and finally within grasp of a professional career. Yet as Saul’s victories mount, so do the indignities and the taunts, the racism and the hatred—the harshness of a world that will never welcome him, tied inexorably to the sport he loves.
Spare and compact yet undeniably rich, Indian Horse is at once a heartbreaking account of a dark chapter in our history and a moving coming-of-age story.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMilkweed Editions
- Publication dateApril 10, 2018
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- ISBN-101571311300
- ISBN-13978-1571311306
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Many indigenous authors have portrayed the horrific conditions endured by Native children in boarding schools in both the US and Canada throughout much of the twentieth century. But perhaps no author has written a novel with such raw, visceral emotion about the lifelong damage resulting from this institutionalization as Wagamese . . . Wagamese's heart-wrenching tale was made into an award-winning movie, and it tells a story that will long haunt all readers."―Booklist (starred review)
“This flawless novel is an epic tragedy graced with tendrils of hope. . . . We are indebted to [Wagamese] for all he wrote, and especially for this book, a powerful fictional illumination of a Native North American life that echoes so many real ones.”―Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A wonderful coming-of-age novel . . . When the story's protagonist, Saul Indian Horse, lands in a treatment center after an alcoholic overdose, he's encouraged to draft his life story―and it's an incredible tale." ―Outside Magazine
“While Wagamese’s fictionalized account is unflinching in its grim history of institutional cruelty, it also witnesses moments of human joy . . . With Indian Horse, Wagamese has sneakily written one of the great works of sport literature, filled with the kind of poetry that can redeem individual lives despite the systems that would see them destroyed.”―Literary Hub
“Haunting and masterful . . . In spare, poetic language, Wagamese wrestles with trauma and its fallout, and charts the long, lonely walk to survival.”―Publishers Weekly
"[A] chillingly beautiful book . . . Wagamese’s novel depicts the tragedies of residential schools (although they were more like child labor camps than schools) in the 1960s to ‘70s through the life of Saul Indian Horse, a young First Nations boy who escapes the horrors of the school through his passion for hockey."―Electric Literature
“From the novel’s outset, Indian Horse announces itself as the story of a generation, not merely of a single individual’s life. . . . It is the intimacy of Wagamese’s telling that transforms the story from an abstract experience to one that lives and breathes.”―Fiction Writers Review
Canadian Praise for Indian Horse:
“Indian Horse distills much of what Wagamese has been writing about for his whole career into a clearer and sharper liquor, both more bitter and more moving than he has managed in the past. He is such a master of empathy―of delineating the experience of time passing, of lessons being learned, of tragedies being endured―that what Saul discovers becomes something the reader learns, as well, shocking and alien, valuable and true.”―Jane Smiley
“An unforgettable work of art . . . Indian Horse finds the granite solidity of Wagamese’s prose polished to a lustrous sheen; brisk, brief, sharp chapters propel the reader forward. He seamlessly braids together his two traditions: English literary and aboriginal oral. So audible is Saul's voice, that I heard him stop speaking whenever I closed the book.”―National Post
“One of the rarest sorts of books: a novel which is both important and a heart-in-throat pleasure.”―Edmonton Journal
“It is as a story of reconciliation that this novel reveals Wagamese’s masterful subtlety. . . . In a single image, Wagamese complicates in blinding ways the entire narrative; in a single page, Indian Horse deepens from an enjoyable read to a gripping critique of Canada.”―The Walrus
“This book is so many things; it is a mystical tale; it is an ode to the good old hockey game and its power to lift players above their situations; it is a story of a system that fails and fails its children in horrifying ways; it is a story of healing. . . . A hopeful and beautiful book.”―Guelph Mercury
Praise for Medicine Walk:
“Less written than painstakingly etched into something more permanent than paper . . . Richard Wagamese bides his time, never rushing, calibrating each word so carefully that he never seems to waste a shot. . . . Though death saturates these pages, not a word here is lugubrious. Though revelations abound, there are no cheap surprises. . . . There’s nothing plain about this plain-spoken book.”―New York Times
“A slim, beautiful, heart-wrenching novel . . . Richard Wagamese is a marvelous writer, and this is a treasure of a book.”―Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Wagamese has penned a complex, rugged, and moving father-son novel. His muscular prose and spare tone complement this gem of a narrative.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Richard Wagamese is a keen observer, sketching places or people elegantly, economically, all while gracefully employing literary insight to deftly dissect blood ties lingering in fractured families. . . . A powerful novel of hard men in hard country, reminiscent of Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall.”―Kirkus
“A deeply felt and profoundly moving novel, written in the kind of sure, clear prose that brings to mind the work of the great North American masters like Steinbeck. But Wagamese's voice and vision are also completely his own, as is the important and powerful story he has to tell.”―Jane Urquhart
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
My name is Saul Indian Horse. I am the son of Mary Mandamin and John Indian Horse. My grandfather was called Solomon so my name is the diminutive of his. My people are from the Fish Clan of the northern Ojibway, the Anishinabeg, we call ourselves. We made our home in the territories along the Winnipeg River, where the river opens wide before crossing into Manitoba after it leaves Lake of the Woods and the rugged spine of northern Ontario. They say that our cheekbones are cut from those granite ridges that rise above our homeland. They say that the deep brown of our eyes seeped out of the fecund earth that surrounds the lakes and marshes. The Old Ones say that our long straight hair comes from the waving grasses that thatch the edges of bays. Our feet and hands are broad and flat and strong, like the paws of a bear. Our ancestors learned to travel easily through territories that the Zhaunagush, the white man, later feared and sought our help to navigate. Our talk rolls and tumbles like the rivers that served as our roads. Our legends tell of how we emerged from the womb of our Mother the Earth; Aki is the name we have for her. We sprang forth intact, with Aki’s heartbeat thrumming in our ears, prepared to become her stewards and protectors. When I was born our people still talked this way. We had not yet stepped beyond the influence of our legends. That was a border my generation crossed, and we pine for a return that has never come to be.
These people here want me to tell my story. They say I can’t understand where I’m going if I don’t understand where I’ve been. The answers are within me, according to them. By telling our stories, hardcore drunks like me can set ourselves free from the bottle and the life that took us there. I don’t give a shit about any of that. But if it means getting out of this place quicker, then telling my story is what I will do.
It was social workers at the hospital who sent me here. The New Dawn Centre. They call it a treatment facility. The counsellors here say Creator and the Grandmothers and the Grandfathers want me to live. They say a lot of things. In fact, they talk all the time, and they expect us to do the same. They sit there with their eyes all shiny and wet and hopeful, thinking we don’t see them waiting. Even with my eyes on my shoes I can feel them. They call it sharing. It’s one of our ancient tribal principles as Ojibway people, they claim. Many hearts beating together makes us stronger. That’s why they put us in the sharing circle.
There are at least thirty of us staying here. Everyone from kids in their late teens to a few in their thirties, like me, and one woman who’s so old she can’t talk much anymore. We sit in circles all day. I tire of talk. It wearies me. It makes me wish for a drink. But I endure it, and when my counsellor, Moses, ushers me into his office for one-on-one time, I endure that too. I’ve been here a month, after six weeks in the hospital, and that’s the longest I’ve been without a drink for years, so I guess there’s some use to it. My body feels stronger. My head is clear. I eat heartily. But now, they say, the time has come for the hardest work. “If we want to live at peace with ourselves, we need to tell our stories.”
I can’t tell mine in the circle. I know that. There’s too much to sort out and sift through. And I’ve noticed the younger ones getting all twitchy in their seats the few times I’ve tried to speak. Maybe they don’t believe me, or something about what I’m saying pisses them off. Either way, I can’t talk there. So Moses gave me permission to write things down. So I will. Then I’ll get on with life. Somewhere.
Our people have rituals and ceremonies meant to bring us vision. I have never participated in any of them, but I have seen things. I have been lifted up and out of this physical world into a place where time and space have a different rhythm. I always remained within the borders of this world, yet I had the eyes of one born to a different plane. Our medicine people would call me a seer. But I was in the thrall of a power I never understood. It left me years ago, and the loss of that gift has been my greatest sorrow. Sometimes it feels as though I have spent my entire life on a trek to rediscover it.
2
I wasn’t there the day the first Indian horse came to our people, but I heard the story so many times as a boy that it became real to me.
The Ojibway were not people of the horse. Our land existed as an untamed thing, lakes, rivers, bogs and marshes surrounded by citadels of bush and rock and the labyrinthine weave of country. We had no need of maps to understand it. We were people of the manitous. The beings that shared our time and place were lynx, wolf, wolverine, bear, crane, eagle, sturgeon, deer, moose. The horse was a spirit dog meant to run in open places. There was no word for it in the old talk until my great-grandfather brought one back from Manitoba.
When the sun was warm and the song of the wind could be heard in the rustle of the trees, our people said that the Maymaygwayseeuk, the water spirits, had come out to dance. That’s the kind of day it was. Sparkling. The eyes of the spirits winking off the water.
My great-grandfather had wandered off into the bite of the north wind one day near the end of winter, headed west to the land of our cousins, the Ojibway of the plains. His name was Shabogeesick. Slanting Sky. He was a shaman and a trapper, and because he spent so much time out on the land, it told him things, spoke to him of mysteries and teachings. They say he had the sending thought, the great gift of the original teachers. It was a powerful medicine, allowing vital teachings to be shared among people separated by tremendous distance. Shabogeesick was one of the last to claim its energy before history trampled it under foot. The land called to him one day and he walked off without a word to anyone. No one worried. It was something he did all the time.
But that late spring afternoon when he walked back out of the bush from the east, he was leading a strange black animal by a rope halter. Our people had never seen such a creature, and they were afraid. It was massive. Huge as a moose, but without antlers, and the sound of its hoofs on the ground was that of drums. It was like a great wind through a fissure in rock. People shrank from the sight of it.
“What manner of being is this?” they asked. “Do you eat it?” “How does it come to walk beside a man? Is it a dog? Is it a grandfather who lost his way?”
The people had many questions. None would approach the animal and when it lowered its head and began to graze on the grass, they gasped.
“It is like a deer.”
“Is it as gentle as Waywashkeezhee?”
“It is called a horse,” Shabogeesick told them. “In the land of our cousins it is used to travel long distances, to bear loads too heavy for men, to warn of Zhaunagush before he can be seen.”
“Horse,” the people said in unison. The big animal lifted its head and whinnied, and they were afraid. “Does it mock us?” they asked. “It announces itself,” Shabogeesick said. “It comes bearing great teachings.”
He’d brought the animal back on the train and walked it thirty miles from the station to our camp on the Winnipeg River. It was a Percheron. A draught horse. A working beast, and Shabogeesick showed the people how to halter it, to rig it with straps sewn from cedar roots and trading post rope so it could haul the carcasses of moose and bear many miles out of the bush. Children learned to ride on its broad back. The horse pulled elders on toboggans across the deep snows of winter and allowed men to cut trees and haul the logs to the river where they would float them to the mill for money. Horse was indeed a gift and the people called him Kitchi-Animoosh. Great Dog.
Then one day Shabogeesick called everyone together in a circle on the teaching rocks where the Old Ones drew stories on the stone. The people were only ever called to those sacred stones when something vital needed to be shared. No one knows where that place is today. Of all the things that would die in the change to come, the way to that sacred place was perhaps the most grievous loss. Shabogeesick had brought Kitchi-Animoosh, and Horse nibbled at the succulent leaves of the aspen while my great- grandfather spoke.
“When the horse first called to me, I did not understand the message,” Shabogeesick told them. “I had not heard that voice before. But our cousins on the plains spoke to me of the goodness of this Being, and I fasted and prayed in the sacred sweat lodge for many days to learn to speak with it.
“When I emerged from the sweat lodge this Horse was there. I walked with it upon the plains and the Horse offered me its teachings.
“A great change will come. It will come with the speed of lightning and it will scorch all our lives. This is what Horse said to me under that great bowl of sky. ‘The People will see many things they have never seen before, and I am but one of them.’ This is what he said to me.
“When the Zhaunagush came they brought the Horse with them. The People saw the Horse as special. They sought to learn its medicine. It became a sign of honour to ride these spirit beings, to race the wind with them. But the Zhaunagush could only see this act as thievery, as the behaviour of lesser people, so they called us horse thieves.
“The change that comes our way will come in many forms. In sights that are mysterious to our eyes, in sounds that are grating on our ears, in ways of thinking that will crash like thunder in our hearts and minds. But we must learn to ride each one of these horses of change. It is what the future asks of us and our survival depends on it. That is the spirit teaching of the Horse.”
The People did not know what to make of this talk. Shabogeesick’s words scared them. But they trusted him and they had come to love Kitchi-Animoosh. So they took good care of him, fed him choice grains and hay that they traded for at the rail line. The children rode him to keep him fit. When the treaty men found us in our isolated camp and made us sign our names to the register, they were surprised to see the horse. When they asked how he had come to be there, the People pointed at Shabogeesick, and it was the Zhaunagush who called him Indian Horse. It has been our family name ever since.
3
All that I knew of Indian died in the winter of 1961, when I was eight years old.
My grandmother, Naomi, was very old then. She was the matriarch of the small band of people I was born to. We still lived a bush life at that time. We had little contact with anyone besides the Zhaunagush at the Northern Store in Minaki, where we took our furs and berries, or the odd group of wandering Indians who stumbled across our camps. If there was ever a sign of an approaching stranger, our grandmother hurried my brother Benjamin and me off into the bush. We would stay there until the stranger departed, even if that took a day or so.
There was a spectre in our camp. We could see the shadow of this dark being in the lines of our mother’s face. She would sometimes sit huddled close to the fire, clenching and unclenching her fists, her eyes dark moons in the firelight. She never spoke at times like that, never could be comforted. I’d walk to her and take her hand but she didn’t notice me. It was as if she was under the influence of a potent medicine no shaman had the power to break. The spectre lived in the other adults too, my father and my aunt and uncle. But its most chilling presence was in my mother. “The school,” she would whisper then. “The school.”
It was the school that Naomi hid us from. It was the school that had turned my mother so far inward she sometimes ceased to exist in the outside world. Naomi had seen the adults of our camp taken away as children. She’d seen them return bearing a sorrow that could not be reached, and when my grandfather died, she took her family back to the land, hoping that an Ojibway life might heal them, ease their pain.
Besides my brother, I had a sister that I never met. Her name was Rachel, and the year before I was born she disappeared. She was six.
“The Zhaunagush came from across the water,” our grandmother told Benjamin and me one time when we were hidden in the trees. “It was the end of August and we were coming back to the river from the summer camp near One Man Lake. Our canoes were full of berries. We planned to go to Minaki to sell them and buy supplies for the winter. We were tired.
“I never thought they’d come in the dawn. Me, I always thought the Zhaunagush slept late like fat old bears. But they walked into our camp and I pulled my robe up over Benjamin who was so small and hid him from their view. But they found Rachel and they took her away in their boat.
“I stood on the rocks and watched them. Them, they had a boat with a motor, and when they rounded the bend in the river I thought how fast things can vanish from our view. Her screams hung in the air like smoke from a green fire. But even they finally vanished and all that was left was the wake from that boat slapping at the rocks at my feet.
“That’s all I carry of her now―the wet slap of water on the rocks. Every time I hear it I remember the dawn the white men came and stole Rachel from us.”
So we hid from the white men. Benjamin and I developed the quick ears of bush people. When we detected the drone of an engine we knew to run. We’d grab the old lady’s hand and scuttle into the trees and find a place to secret ourselves away until we knew for certain that there was no danger.
I learned English at the same time I learned Ojibway. My father taught me to read from Zhaunagush books, taught me to form the sounds the letters built with the tip of his finger as my guide. They felt hard, those white man words; sharp and pointed on my tongue. Old Naomi fought against it, trying to throw the books in the fire.
“They come in different ways, them, the Zhaunagush,” she said. “Their talk and their stories can sneak you away as quick as their boats.”
So I grew up afraid of the white man. As it turned out, I had reason to be.
In 1957, when I was four, they got my brother, Benjamin. The old lady and I were gathering roots in a glade back of the trees that stood against the river. The men and my brother were at the foot of a rapids setting gill nets. The airplane came out of the west, and we did not hear it soon enough. Naomi and I made it to a cleft in the rocks, but the men and my brother had nowhere to go. The plane cut them off, and we crawled up out of our crevice in the rocks and watched as those men from the plane lowered a canoe and forced my family’s canoe to the opposite shore. They had guns, those Zhaunagush. I think that if they hadn’t, my father and my uncle would have fought them off and we would have run into the back country. But they took my brother at gunpoint and pushed him up into the plane.
My mother collapsed on the long, flat rock that reached out into the river at our camp. No one could move her. She lay there for days, and it was only the chill of the first autumn rains that got her up on her feet and back to the fire. She was lost to me then. I could see that. She was gaunt and drained from days of weeping, a tent of skin over her bones. When Benjamin disappeared he carried a part of her away with him, and there was nothing anyone could do to fill it. My father tried. He never left her side for weeks. But now that she had lost two children, she would not speak anything except “the school,” the words like a bruise in the air. So he left her―and he and my uncle paddled off downriver to sell the berries. When they returned they brought the white man with them in brown bottles. Spirits, Naomi called them. Bad spirits. Those spirits made the grown-ups move in strange, jerky ways and their talk was twisted. I fell asleep to evil laughter. Sometimes my mother lurched to her feet and danced around the fire, and the shadow she threw against the skin of the tent was like the outline of a skeleton. I clutched my robe tight to my throat, lay across the space my brother once filled and waited for sleep to claim me.
On clear nights the old woman and I would sit on the rocks by the edge of the river. The stars pinwheeled above us and we would hear wolves calling to each other. Naomi told me stories of the old days. Told me about my grandfather and the medicine ways he carried. Good medicine. Powerful, Ojibway medicine. The river wound serpentine, radiant in the light of the northern moon. In its curling wash I sometimes thought I could hear songs sung in Ojibway. Honour songs, raising me above the hurt of my brother’s absence. That voice sustained me, as did the firm, warm hand of Naomi on the thin blade of my shoulder.
Product details
- Publisher : Milkweed Editions; First Paperback Edition (April 10, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1571311300
- ISBN-13 : 978-1571311306
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #84,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #255 in Native American Literature (Books)
- #1,443 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #6,530 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They describe the story as heartbreaking, emotional, and powerful. Readers appreciate the author's insight and understanding of culturally outcast people. The book is described as encouraging and inspiring.
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Customers find the story heartbreaking and emotional. They describe it as a powerful story of working through trauma and learning to live again. The characters are complex yet believable, sympathetic yet flawed. Overall, readers find the book inspiring and honoring those who survived.
"...It was no disappointment. The writing soars and the story is one that evolves over time and speaks to generations of Native American and Native..." Read more
"...This book was soooo emotive, you viscerally feel shadows of the fury and the pain and the helplessness and the bitterness of the main charafater...." Read more
"Saul’s life story was amazing, but horrifying; the amount of trauma he endured, while still managing to survive was beyond comprehension...." Read more
"The book was short and a fast read but an excellent story...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the detailed descriptions of hockey skills and the story of Native Americans coming home. Readers describe it as a must-read novel that starts beautifully before turning to focus on trauma.
"...I highly recommend this amazing book that is the story of one man but is also representative of a whole generation of Native American children...." Read more
"...events, the storytelling is so impeccably simple that this is brilliant and unpretentious and so eminently readable...." Read more
"...Great book." Read more
"...A fantastic novel well worth the read." Read more
Customers enjoy the writing quality of the book. They find it well-written and engaging, with beautiful prose and detailed descriptions of hockey games. The book is described as an easy read that keeps you wanting to get to the next page. Readers praise the author as a good storyteller and say it's worth the time to read.
"...It was no disappointment. The writing soars and the story is one that evolves over time and speaks to generations of Native American and Native..." Read more
"...this book to everyone, the story is so rich and simple and well-told and important and even as the world moves on, it is important that the victims..." Read more
"...He finds that to progress he must make peace with his past. Beautifully written from the POV of a young Indian...." Read more
"...for much that is happening in young Saul's life, and an opportunity for beautiful prose...." Read more
Customers find the book insightful and impactful. They say it opens their eyes to a life and people. The book highlights native beliefs and spirituality, making it informative and well-written.
"...story is one that evolves over time and speaks to generations of Native American and Native Alaskan children who have spent their childhoods in..." Read more
"...Beautifully written from the POV of a young Indian. Highlights native beliefs and inclusive spiritual nature." Read more
"...This was an eye opening and remarkable story that everyone should read" Read more
"...A profoundly impactful book in my experience." Read more
Customers find the book inspiring and encouraging. They appreciate the human spirit's resilience and honoring those who survived. The inclusive spiritual nature and compassion are also praised.
"...Highlights native beliefs and inclusive spiritual nature." Read more
"...Wagamese is a magnificent story-teller. Powerful and compassionate...." Read more
"...Great story of survival. Honors those kids who survived." Read more
"...Read this story let it wash over you and cleanse your soul, be kind to people, everyone is fighting a unseen battle...." Read more
Customers enjoy the author's storytelling style. They find the book a testament to the author's memory, as he weaves true-life situations into a wonderful story about Saul Indian. The author paints a heart-wrenching story about the residential school system without making it overly emotional. Readers appreciate the author's connection to his Ojibway heritage and how the story is beautifully told.
"...school, the places he lived as a youth, and his renewed connection to his Ojibway heritage. To say any more would be to provide spoilers...." Read more
"...The author paints a heart-wrenching story about the residential school system, without making it overly sentimental...." Read more
"...but is was not his story, just the story he told so beautifully and memorably. I cannot recommend this book enough!" Read more
"...It is a testament to the memory of the author." Read more
Customers enjoy the well-developed characters. They appreciate the protagonist's passion and excitement. The story also explores empathy, family, natural ability, and talent that gets wasted by systems.
"...I will read another novel soon of his work and insightful characters." Read more
"...It's about empathy, family, natural ability and talent that gets wasted by "systems" put in place to make you like everyone else...." Read more
"...are excellent. The characters are complex, yet believable, sympathetic yet flawed. An excellent book." Read more
"This story was amazing. I enjoyed it very much. The characters were fictitious, but the story was true I'm sure...." Read more
Customers enjoy the hockey aspect of the book. They find it an ode to the game and its skills. It's suitable for readers interested in history, sports, or just a great story about physical activity and its importance in young people's development.
"...Painful, but beautiful. An ode to hockey and a reveal of the pain we inflicted on Native Americans who were, after all, here first!" Read more
"...'s background is in journalism, but the descriptions, especially of hockey! are excellent...." Read more
"...Stunning in its description of the game and skills of hockey, but soon that gave way to the residential school hell for so many children...." Read more
"...Some unsettling events Interesting hockey aspect" Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2016I recently read 'Medicine Walk' by Wagamese and it was so good that I rushed to read 'Indian Horse', another book of his. It was no disappointment. The writing soars and the story is one that evolves over time and speaks to generations of Native American and Native Alaskan children who have spent their childhoods in boarding schools.
As the novel opens, Saul Indian Horse is in a rehabilitation center for treatment of his alcoholism. He has hit bottom and his sponsor has asked him to tell his story. Saul is reluctant to share but, with time, and with a visit to his roots, the reader gradually learns his history.
Saul's great passion was ice hockey and he was so good at it that he made the NHL. He loved the game, the way it let him escape the poison in his mind, and he loved the camaraderie of the team. Soon, after joining the major league, he finds that he is feeling more rage and anger than enjoyment. He decides to leave the team just as his teammates and coach have decided to kick him out. Saul wanders from bar to bar, drink to drink, until he is so down and out that his life is without meaning. What happened to this man with the passion for the game, the lust to play hockey and soar with the sport?
The answer to Saul's descent lies in the narrative he tells to his sponsor once he returns to rehab after visiting his now crumbled boarding school, the places he lived as a youth, and his renewed connection to his Ojibway heritage. To say any more would be to provide spoilers. I highly recommend this amazing book that is the story of one man but is also representative of a whole generation of Native American children. It is an amazing book with insight and understanding of those who are culturally outcast by mainstream society. Saul's story is one that will lift your heart and wet your eyes. It is a book to cherish and remember long after the last page is read.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2019This is such a good book!!! It’s unrelentingly sad to pretty much grief porn levels but even though it’s such a sad and heavy story based on historical events, the storytelling is so impeccably simple that this is brilliant and unpretentious and so eminently readable. In addition to that, it’s such an important story.
The premise is that Saul Indian Horse is born into an Ojibwe family that has already been ravaged by the devastatingly evil policy of forced assimilation of the indigenous people of Canada. His family tries their hardest to protect him from a similar fate of being forcibly separated and sent to a residential “school” where he could face a myriad of abuses and violations. In the face of fear, trauma and abuse, will his talent for hockey emerge as his salvation?
This is my first book by this author and he’s a fantastic storyteller. This book was soooo emotive, you viscerally feel shadows of the fury and the pain and the helplessness and the bitterness of the main charafater. This book exemplifies everything I love about reading- to learn and to be able to walk in other histories however briefly so you can begin to understand the emotions of others.
I’m by no means a fan of ice hockey nor do I know much about it but the author was able to make the reader understand exactly what Saul loved about it. It feels like freedom and you can feel the ice and the cold and the speed and the rush in the author’s writing. This book is primarily historical (recent) fiction but it still felt very contemporary. I loved Saul’s commentary about racist media narratives around athletes of colour. Even when it’s praise, it’s always using stereotypes that are animalistic or “savage” in a way that wouldn’t be used for a white athlete and as a sports fan, I totally see that all the time with the way commentators and journalists talk about certain non-white players.
I recommend this book to everyone, the story is so rich and simple and well-told and important and even as the world moves on, it is important that the victims of devastating cultural and actual genocide policies are never forgotten so that we never allow such things in the world again. I will say you should be in a good place emotionally before you embark on this. Secondly, please note trigger warnings for alcoholism (although there are several visceral descriptions from the perspective of an alcoholic that are unique and beautiful and apt for anyone who’s ever wondered “why can’t this person just stop drinking.” Also trigger warnings for severe child abuse, rape, traumatic parent-child separations, and depression. If you can gird your loins for the emotional punch that this amazing book packs, I highly recommend it!
- Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2024Saul’s life story was amazing, but horrifying; the amount of trauma he endured, while still managing to survive was beyond comprehension. A story of a young Indian boy in Canada’s loss of family, loss of self while at school, his loss of purpose while playing hockey, and his loss of respect with the fighting and drinking and then how he begins to heal. Wagamese is descriptive without making Saul’s life a spectacle, while keeping the reader glued to Saul’s outcome. Great book.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2024You learn with the MC what they went through and by the time the reveal hits your left stunned because you thought they were one of the lucky ones.
A fantastic novel well worth the read.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2024This book took me into another world. I like learning about the lives of others from different cultures.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2024The book was short and a fast read but an excellent story. Takes place during an earlier time when Indian children were forcibly removed from their homes to be raised in a Catholic school where essentially everything Indian is stripped away. The conditions they lived in were absolutely horrendous and many children did not survive. Saul is a young boy encouraged to play hockey by one of the priests in the home. He has some unusual mental abilities inherited from his shaman grandfather which allow him to become a truly gifted hockey player. He is eventually recruited for a professional team but is held back by his anger at his life while he lived in the Catholic school. He finds that to progress he must make peace with his past. Beautifully written from the POV of a young Indian. Highlights native beliefs and inclusive spiritual nature.
Top reviews from other countries
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Maite H.Reviewed in Germany on June 16, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr lesenswert!
Super ergreifende, spannende Geschichte!
- B. GerrardReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 7, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars A1
Brilliant writer
- Mys MReviewed in Canada on August 14, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars How the Chaos of Hockey Gave the Calm to Survive
Richard Wagamese tells an authentic story through the narrative voice of Saul Indian Horse who is in a rehab centre called The New Dawn Centre, north of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Part of the program requires that the participants tell their stories, share, so that "hard core drunks like [Saul] can set [themselves] free from the bottle and the life that took [them] there. . . they put [them] in the sharing circle." Saul can't tell his story so they say it's all right if he writes it down. This book is his story.
Saul wrote about his childhood and all about the native traditions he learned from his grandmother — about the rituals, the ceremonies, the stories of family history, how he came by the name Indian Horse, and the inevitability of change coming — that is "the spirit teaching of the Horse". For Saul, the change came the winter he turned eight. He grew up with a fear of "the school". Whenever a strange boat or plane are spotted, the children go and hide in the dense wood. One day, when Saul was four, his older brother Benjamin didn't make it to the woods and was taken from them. His mother was inconsolable; his parents left the bush to follow the white man's whiskey through sawmill camps. Eventually, Benjamin returned to them, having run from the school in Kenora, sick with TB. Grandmother Naomi led the family to God's Lake, a place she remembered from long ago. It is here that Saul learns he has the gift of vision. It is here that Benjamin dies and the family abandons Saul and Naomi.
Winter came, and Naomi tried to take Saul to find the family but despite her amazing skills and "gumption", just short of their goal, Naomi dies with her arms wrapped around Saul keeping him warm on the train platform outside of town. He was discovered and taken to St. Jerome's Residential School. He was eight years old.
Saul could read and write English and so he withdrew into his own world and stayed out of trouble:
"I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hears at St. Jerome's . . . saw young boys and girls die standing on their own two feet. I saw runaways carried back, frozen solid as boards. I saw bodies hung from rafters on thin ropes. I saw wrists slashed and the cascade of blood on the bathroom floor and, one time, a young boy impaled on the tines of a pitchfork that he'd shoved through himself. . . So I retreated. That's how I survived. Alone. . . What I let them see was a quiet withdrawn boy, void of feeling."
The same year Saul arrived, a young priest named Father Gaston Leboutilier arrived. He had "a kindness and sense of adventure that drew the boys to him. He led hikes . . . took [them] camping . . . and when winter came he brought [them] hockey". Saul was hooked! He read all the books. Too young to play yet, he watched the older boys playing and found he could visualize the game, the moves, the "rhythm under all [the] mayhem". He began watching Hockey Night in Canada with a few other boys in Father Leboutilier's quarters. He became the ice sweeper, going out early in the morning to ready the ice, then practice with a hockey stick he has hidden in the snow and a "handful of the frozen horse turds" from the barn. He was a natural.
At nine, he stashed skates that were too big for him along with the stick. He used newspaper to make them fit. He set his own practice drills and worked hard. He loved everything about the game.
"The labour made me wiry and tough. It gave my lungs a workout and cleared my mind of everything but the ice. . . I floated out onto a snow-white stage in a soliloquy of grace and motion. I loved it. Every time I skated I felt as though I had created the act. It was pure and new and startling."
Finally, when Father Gaston's team was preparing for their first game against a town team from White River, Saul got his chance. A player, Wapoose, fell and broke his ankle. Saul volunteered to take his place. After that, it was town games. Then an offer to go play for a town team; but he was too good and the other parents wanted to see their own kids playing the game. The white man thought hockey was his game. Then came the chance to leave the school and play for The Moose in Manitouwadge. Fred Kelly and his wife would take him in. He'd go to school and play hockey against other reserve teams across the territory, and Saul had his freedom.
With the Moose, Saul's spirit soared. For awhile. They had huge success, were challenged to play the Senior A league champions from Kapuskasing. That led to other games against white teams. It led to a new height of racism. Saul was scouted and went to Toronto to play for the Marlboros, a Major Junior A team. That led to even greater racism — he was always the Indian, on the rampage, taking scalps — even in the papers. He was finally forced to fight and it ruined the game for him. He gave up hockey and everything was downhill after that, until he landed in the New Dawn Centre.
This was an incredible story. The descriptions of the game were beautiful — fast-paced, vivid, so real that you don't have to be a hockey fan to follow the play and get what an amazing player Saul was. From his first time in a game:
"I stayed at the edge of the scrimmage, the play rolling its pattern out in front of me. Then, suddenly, I saw it clearly. I saw the direction of the ame before it happened and I moved to that spot. Now I bent to my skating, spreading my feet a little wider and keeping the full length of my stick blade on the ice. . .
I pushed hard, evenly, and I was at full speed in three strides. I scooped the puck onto my stick and cradled it as I pumped with my other arm. The goalie yelped and backed slowly toward the mouth of the net. I whisked across the blue line and there was only me, the puck and the net. I was flying, skating as fast as I could go, and then time slowed to a crawl. I could hear my breath, the yells of the other boys behind me, feel the pump of blood in my chest, see the eyes of the goalie squinting in concentration."
When the story came full circle, it took me totally by surprise. Maybe it shouldn't have. When I thought back, the clues were all there, but I think, maybe, I just didn't want to believe it. The parts of the story from St. Jerome's were horrific. Some of the racist acts, equally so. The spirit in Saul that enabled him to play the game so well, let you float with him in its freedom. And, despite the downside of the story, the brutal truths about the residential schools and the running of them (in this story a Catholic school but it could equally have been any denomination of protestant school as well, and certainly, the Canadian government has recognized its own culpability in this policy), and racism that still is a problem today, there is redemption for Saul and a new life when the story ends. I couldn't put the book down!
- TonyReviewed in Canada on April 9, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking book. Very sad.
It explores themes of nature vs artificial, cultural genocide, and family. Author writes in a imaginative style. Full of imagery and symbolism. Great book.
Tony
Reviewed in Canada on April 9, 2024
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Bregnard MichelReviewed in France on April 14, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars RAS
Cadeau à un lecteur anglophone