indian horse abuse essay

To install StudyMoose App tap and then “Add to Home Screen”

Exploring Identity, Trauma, and Resilience in "Indian Horse"

Save to my list

Remove from my list

Introduction

Identity and cultural displacement, trauma and healing.

Resilience and Survival

Legacy and reclamation.

Exploring Identity, Trauma, and Resilience in "Indian Horse". (2024, Feb 22). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/exploring-identity-trauma-and-resilience-in-indian-horse-essay

"Exploring Identity, Trauma, and Resilience in "Indian Horse"." StudyMoose , 22 Feb 2024, https://studymoose.com/exploring-identity-trauma-and-resilience-in-indian-horse-essay

StudyMoose. (2024). Exploring Identity, Trauma, and Resilience in "Indian Horse" . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/exploring-identity-trauma-and-resilience-in-indian-horse-essay [Accessed: 27 Sep. 2024]

"Exploring Identity, Trauma, and Resilience in "Indian Horse"." StudyMoose, Feb 22, 2024. Accessed September 27, 2024. https://studymoose.com/exploring-identity-trauma-and-resilience-in-indian-horse-essay

"Exploring Identity, Trauma, and Resilience in "Indian Horse"," StudyMoose , 22-Feb-2024. [Online]. Available: https://studymoose.com/exploring-identity-trauma-and-resilience-in-indian-horse-essay. [Accessed: 27-Sep-2024]

StudyMoose. (2024). Exploring Identity, Trauma, and Resilience in "Indian Horse" . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/exploring-identity-trauma-and-resilience-in-indian-horse-essay [Accessed: 27-Sep-2024]

• Indian Horse: How Trauma Rooted from Abuse Affects Health Pages: 5 (1233 words)
• Exploring Trauma, Resilience, and Ethical Dilemmas in "Johnny Got His Gun" Pages: 3 (702 words)
• Trauma leads to more trauma as observed at the protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Pages: 3 (850 words)
• Adolescent Trauma and Resilience in 'The Story of Tom Brennan' Pages: 2 (325 words)
• Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple Pages: 5 (1282 words)
• Adversity in "Indian Horse": Story of Difficulties and Misfortune Pages: 5 (1220 words)
• Impact of Society on Saul's Life in Indian Horse Pages: 5 (1450 words)
• Abuse in Residential Schools as Depicted in the Novel Indian Horse Pages: 3 (708 words)
• How Minor Characters Affect the Character Development of Saul in Indian Horse Pages: 4 (1027 words)
• Saul Indian Horse: The Concept of Culture Pages: 3 (885 words)

👋 Hi! I’m your smart assistant Amy!

Don’t know where to start? Type your requirements and I’ll connect you to an academic expert within 3 minutes.

Life of Indian Americans in Wagamese’s Indian Horse Novel Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Native Americans have always been discriminated against and harassed. The unemployment rate among the indigenous population is much higher than among American citizens. The well-known reservations, assimilation programs in schools and colleges, and other forms of persecution caused a serious deterioration in the indigenous people’s quality of life and morale. The novel Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese discusses the fate of one of the sufferings from the stigmatization of a young man. The novel touches on three major themes: the importance of family traditions, cultural genocide, and trauma resulting from abuse, which can lead to significant addiction problems.

Throughout the novel, the author emphasizes the importance of family traditions. One of the significant examples is when the question of funerals was raised. Naomi was unable to bury the dead person according to the ingenious traditions of the Ojibway. Such a situation shows the complete discrimination of the cultural minority, which affects people’s self-identification. Another important aspect of traditions and family kinship is shown when Naomi, without any hesitation, strives to find her nephew, being sure that he can help her and Saul. Thus, by implementing such events, the author shows that the connections between family members are unconditional for the representatives of Ojibways.

The second theme is cultural genocide, which is especially highlighted in the narration of the example of Saul. The humiliation experienced in the residential school is primarily based on the differences in the cultural perception of the surrounding world. Another example of genocide is the prohibition from being part of the hockey team due to Saul’s religious and cultural inheritance. A young man’s life was destroyed because such stigmatization occurred to him. Therefore, the cruel discrimination resulting in significant problems with self-identification is considered cultural genocide.

The horrifying attitude to Saul resulted in the occurrence of alcohol addiction. Being unable to get any joy in life, Saul tried to calm down his sorrow using alcohol. As a result of his mental issues, which he can not bear, he drinks himself into a seizure and ends up in the hospital. Only by accepting the horrors he experienced at school and feeling a connection with his family does Saul connect his life with hockey again. Only through finding the support of his family and understanding the moral issue resulting from alcoholism does the character obtain freedom by striving for a different everyday life.

Therefore, the novel addressed three major themes related to cultural stigmatization, genocide, and the addiction caused by moral struggles. Discrimination causes significant problems with self-acceptance. The culture-centered bullying causes mental issues, which in adulthood causes lower resilience to habits. Therefore, various cases of abuse can lead to the emotional breakdown of the person and addiction to substances or alcohol (as in the novel). The fight against addictions should be started by minimizing emotionally adverse living conditions, including cultural discrimination. The effects of some addiction-eliminating organizations can be in vain if no other regulations limit the stigmatization. Moreover, the government should also sponsor psychological help for people mentally suffering from abuse, discrimination, or addiction.

• Themes in Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust Novel
• Themes of the “Adams” Story by George Saunders
• Hijabi Hockey: Athletes Experience
• The Hunger Game Book by Nick Saul
• Battle of King Saul
• Tradition and Violence in "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
• The Short Tale "Hell-Heaven" by Jhumpa Lahiri
• “Bring the War Home” by Kathleen Belew
• Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” Book Analysis
• Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” Analysis
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, May 7). Life of Indian Americans in Wagamese's Indian Horse Novel. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-of-indian-americans-in-wagameses-indian-horse-novel/

"Life of Indian Americans in Wagamese's Indian Horse Novel." IvyPanda , 7 May 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/life-of-indian-americans-in-wagameses-indian-horse-novel/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Life of Indian Americans in Wagamese's Indian Horse Novel'. 7 May.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Life of Indian Americans in Wagamese's Indian Horse Novel." May 7, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-of-indian-americans-in-wagameses-indian-horse-novel/.

1. IvyPanda . "Life of Indian Americans in Wagamese's Indian Horse Novel." May 7, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-of-indian-americans-in-wagameses-indian-horse-novel/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Life of Indian Americans in Wagamese's Indian Horse Novel." May 7, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-of-indian-americans-in-wagameses-indian-horse-novel/.

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

• Basic site functions
• Ensuring secure, safe transactions
• Secure account login
• Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
• Remembering privacy and security settings
• Analyzing site traffic and usage
• Personalized search, content, and recommendations
• Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

• Remembering general and regional preferences
• Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Download Free PDF

Nighttime Invasions, Colonial Dispossession, and Indigenous Resilience in Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse

2022, American, British and Canadian Studies

This essay demonstrates how Richard Wagamese employs oral storytelling techniques to make the complex idea of Indigenous dispossession sensually and intellectually accessible to readers of his novel, Indian Horse. The Wabseemoong First Nation writer depicts the devastating effects of white entitlement when rendering character Saul Indian Horse's experiences in Canada's residential schools and the effect those schools had on his subsequent life. Using narrative analysis, it will be shown how Saul loses his ability to perceive places as being alive and resonant, and is thereby dispossessed on an individual, social, and spiritual level. Furthermore, Wagamese's descriptions of the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of Indigenous children draw attention to the harrowing histories of Canada's residential schools, thus laying bare the necropolitical potential of settler-colonial dispossession. This essay links Wagamese's narrative to recent arguments brought forward in Indigenous studies. It aims to demonstrate that Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial states is part of modernity, and its overarching political economy, that is capitalism.

Free related PDFs Related papers

Actio Nova: Revista de Teoria de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, 2019

This paper purports to explore the narrative devices which enable the Anishinaabe Canadian author Richard Wagamese to compel the reader of his novel Indian Horse (2012) to experience the same violence as that faced by the young protagonist when the repressed memory of the terrible abuse suffered at an Indian residential school resurfaces decades after, disrupting the apparently linear course of the story. This study also seeks to show that Wagamese offers a major contribution to the rewriting of the history of residential schools in Canada by reclaiming Aboriginal narrative forms as a means to recover stolen memories, and thus to reconstruct both the fragmented (his)story and the shattered self.

American Indian Quarterly, 2003

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 14733280902798837, 2009

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining

Wicazo Sa Review, 2009

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Conference: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Native American Symposium 2019At: Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Durant, OK, 2020

As colonial powers imported written material commodities to their colonies, they also imported colonial ideals and values. One of these textual imports was the white savior trope, where forms of communication, including literature, from the imperial centre informed newspapers at the periphery, and vice-versa. This applied particularly to the treatment of non-white, non-English-speaking peoples. In Canada, primary concern was given to considerations of the ‘Indian problem,’ where depictions of Indigenous peoples were fraught with notions of helpless and savagery. Grounded in the affirmation that the colonizer’s way was the right way to live, the white savior informed the textual representations of Indigenous peoples. Through an examination of works by Rudyard Kipling, Henry Morton Stanley, and Duncan Campbell Scott, this papers examines how depictions of “Others” were imported into Canadian culture through works belonging to the imperial archive. By mobilizing concepts put forth by Harold Innis, Thomas Richards, David Spurr, and John Hartley, this paper also explores how through early Canadian residential school policy and newspaper representations spawned a fantasy of control that has been maintained through Canadian textual depictions of Indigenous peoples, which were exported to the colonial centre and acted to reinforce the white savior aspect of colonization. This paper is adapted from the literature review of my Masters in Journalism thesis, titled “Towards Reconciliation: The White Savior Trope in Canadian Newspaper coverage of Grassy Narrows First Nation between 1977 to 2019,” which is being completed at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

The Canadian journal of native studies, 2007

Transmotion, 2019

International Indigenous Policy Journal, 2020

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature Revue Canadienne De Litterature Comparee, 2011

Critical Ethnic Studies, 2016

University of Manitoba, 2016

Empire, Education and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth century missionary infant schools in three British colonies, 2014

Beyond the Border: Tensions across the Forty-Ninth Parallel in the Great Plains and Prairies, 2013

Complutense Journal of English Studies, 2017

Studies in Social Justice

Ethnologies, 2004

Related topics

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Re-Storying the Colonial Landscape Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse

• Jack Robinson

Online publication: June 1, 2013

An article of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne  

Volume 38, Number 2, 2013 , p. 88–105

All rights reserved, ©2013

Article body

The Anishinaubae creation story, as related by Anishinaubae scholar Basil Johnston, tells that KitchiManitou, the Great Mystery, made the earth from a vision, but that all was devastated by a flood. Then a pregnant Manitou, Geezigho-quae, or Sky Woman, fell to this water world, and, from the back of a turtle, got the water animals to dive for Earth. From a small clump retrieved by Muskrat, using the power of thought or dream, she created Turtle Island, or North America. She then gave birth to twins who begat the Anishinaubaeg (“Is That” 7). The story represents the task of self-creation that each member of the tribe must undertake in life; as Anishinaubae theorist Leanne Simpson puts it, “each of us must struggle down through the vast expanse of water to retrieve our handful of dirt” (69). Simpson adds that in the colonial context, each individual must undertake this quest for the purpose of reconstructing the tribal community: “We each [sic] need to bring that earth to the surface, to our community, with the intent of transformation” (69). The narratives of Anishinaubae author Richard Wagamese, whether autobiographical or fictional, are representations of his own journey, vehicles of personal and cultural reconstruction. Indian Horse is another such narrative. It is, of course, possible to read the novel as being exclusively about residential schools or hockey or both: it does represent prominently the historical trauma caused by residential schools, and it does convey the hero’s encounter with racism in the world of Canadian regional and junior hockey in the 1960s. In order to understand the depiction of Saul Indian Horse’s wounded spirit and of what Eduardo and Bonnie Duran call the “soul wound” of his people, these topics do require attention. [1] Yet close textual analysis is needed to show how the text uses oral storytelling techniques to render Saul’s journey of personal re-creation: his reclamation of a healthy form of Indigenous masculinity, of his visionary power, of a spiritual connection with the land, of relationships with his extended kinship family, and of a sense of gender complementarity and reverence for the feminine.

Some context is needed for the place of close textual analysis in the study of Indigenous literature. Metis scholar Jo-Ann Episkenew comments, “When I began teaching Indigenous fiction from Canada, many colleagues told me that it was too simplistic to study in a serious manner” (146). Indigenous oral stories are sometimes wrongly seen as simplistic, and orality-based literature is misconceived as imbued with the same simplicity. In order to emphasize the social relevance and transformative power of their narratives, some Indigenous authors have chosen to write with what Helen Hoy calls “discursive transparency” (288). Hoy asserts that this avoidance of artifice leads to the misconception that critical analysis is unwarranted, with the result that the text is misconstrued as “an anthropological site” or an unmediated “source of authentic life experience” (288). Because the field is emergent and of political importance, the theorizing of Indigenous literature has assumed primacy over textual analysis. The influence of cultural and Native studies has relegated literature to a role that is ancillary to the examination of culture. Cree/Metis scholar Emma LaRocque warns that the polemical emphasis on a “healing aesthetics” may require a “utilitarian function” from the literature while failing to appreciate its aesthetic qualities (168). This essay conducts a close textual analysis for three reasons. First, it demonstrates the aesthetic complexity that lies beneath the ostensible simplicity of this orality-based narrative. Indian Horse has a terseness that may be mistaken for “discursive transparency,” but its lyricism and structure merit analysis as an Indigenous aesthetic. Second, it responds to Kimberley Blaeser’s call for critical approaches that “arise out of the literature itself” rather than imposing upon the literature “an established critical language” or established genres, categories, or theories (“Native” 53-54). Third, it recognizes the imbrication of content and form. To disconnect the two produces an inadequate thematic analysis because themes can be well understood only as they are expressed in textual details and patterns; a solely thematic reading fails to recognize the text’s transformative power because that power inheres in its aesthetic qualities. This is why Sam McKegney, as a selfdeclared “communitist” ( Magic 56), insists that “true commitment to ‘the literature itself’ is a commitment to community, nationhood, and sovereignty” (“Committing” 30).

Saul Indian Horse’s story unfolds in five stages: first, his early childhood in the bush of northwestern Ontario with his Anishinaubae extended family; second, his boyhood years in residential school; third, his adolescent life in regional and junior hockey, which brings him to the age of eighteen; fourth, the fifteen years of his young manhood that are spent in emotional confusion and alcoholic drifting; and fifth, his return at thirty-three to his adoptive extended kinship family and his reclamation of Anishinaubae intellectual traditions. Saul has obtained permission from his counsellor at the New Dawn Centre, where he is recovering from alcoholism, to write his story rather than relating it orally (3); most of the novel is the text that he reads aloud to his counsellor and group (207). He opens his reading in the formal manner of the teller of traditional sacred stories: he states his name, his family and clan relations, his tribe, and its traditional territory (1). The text is thus both a written document and an oral story, and it is framed as a sacred story; at the outset, the text invites the reader to conflate casual oral stories, sacred stories, and the contemporary novel. The narrative bears the marks of orally influenced Indigenous literature as identified by Laguna Pueblo and Sioux scholar Paula Gunn Allen: the narrative structure is circular (63, 79); symbols and images are used consistently to conflate the commonplace and the spiritual (69); and pairings of images, symbols, and phrases are used in a repetitive manner in order to transfer to narrative the transforming effects of ritual (63). Allen argues that Indigenous peoples “perceive their world in a unified-field fashion” and that “the requirements of tribal literatures are accretive and fluid” (244). A critical approach is therefore needed that devotes attention to the nuanced relationship between background and foreground: “In the western mind, shadows highlight the foreground. In contrast, in the tribal view the mutual relationships among shadows and light in all their varying degrees of intensity create a living web of definition and depth, and significance arises from their interplay” (244).

With the circularity of oral storytelling, the novel’s end returns Saul to the tribal intellectual traditions depicted in the first thirty pages, though his homecoming is still in process. In resisting a dramatic resolution, the text employs what Thomas King calls the “flat narrative line” of Indigenous storytelling (“Godzilla” 245). The plot’s irresolution resists an absolutist or purist stance of tribal cultural resurgence; the realization of the healing aesthetic is constrained by social and psychological realism. Saul’s psychological wounds remain deep: memories of sexual abuse still haunt him, and the racism of Canadian society is ongoing in his life. His intuitive abilities as a seer or visionary, developed and enhanced by his Anishinaubae upbringing, have enabled him to become a talented hockey player who can anticipate where the play is going before it gets there. In becoming a successful junior hockey player, he has integrated somewhat into mainstream society. Saul withdraws from that enculturation in order to find an interstitial cultural space in which he can build a comfortable life. Yet the Anishinaubae milieu that he rediscovers is already a culturally mixed one: his adoptive parents have been to residential school; the racially mixed town is driven economically by logging and mining; and the possibility of a traditional life on the land, untouched by settler society, has died with his grandmother’s generation.

Saul’s hybrid cultural positioning is common for Indigenous individuals in colonial society. Cree scholar Neal MacLeod writes of “Coming Home through Stories” (61) as a matter of “the attempt to link two different narrative locations” (70). He predicts that the need to connect the colonial present with a restoration of the tribal past will continue to challenge Indigenous peoples in the future, so that “emerging forms of Aboriginal consciousness, including Cree ones, will be hybridized” (70). Allen also looks toward the past. She claims that the North American Indigenous individual has faced the following dilemma since the arrival of settler society: how does one participate in an Indigenous tradition that symbolizes “the essential unity of a human being’s psyche” while still confronting the “conflict, fragmentation, and destruction” that have damaged that psyche in colonial society? (81-82). Story is the unifying method used in Anishinaubae culture and in most Indigenous cultures to address this dilemma. Story is the traditional means of imparting and preserving Indigenous cultural wisdom; moreover, it provides the adaptability, flexibility, and fluidity needed to cope with extreme cultural transition. Blaeser emphasizes that the noun story is simultaneously a verb in her language. As Wagamese does in Indian Horse, Blaeser links sacred oral stories, informal oral storytelling, and orality-based print literature:

I claim a storied landscape. I say Indian people do not so much teach, but rather story their children. I include in my understanding the mythic, ceremonial, and casual stories, for these seldom if ever remain separate from one another. The range and reach of these vested words sustain us in vision. (“Wild Rice” 240)

Saul’s grandmother, Naomi, the matriarch of the small band, is the repository of its stories. She tells them to Saul, passing on the “secrets of the cosmos and the basis of our spiritual way” (40). She also narrates the family stories of the shaman Shabogeesik’s “good medicine” (12) and of how Gods Lake became the exclusive territory of the Indian Horse family (18). Sociologist and narratologist Arthur Frank focuses on the capacity of stories to do things in society. He explains that a changed awareness, or an altered “narrative habitus,” can be achieved in the healthiest way through the reader’s dialogical companionship with stories (198). [2] Living closely with the “vested words” of his grandmother’s stories is a lifeline that enables Saul to connect the hybridity of his contemporary cultural position with Anishinaubae intellectual tradition. Similarly, a dialogical interaction with Indian Horse and other indigenous narratives of what Anishinaubae scholar Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance” offers a means of healing and cultural resurgence for Anishinaubae and other Indigenous readers, while such interaction inspires all readers to seek justice through social change.

One convenient way to examine Indian Horse is to look at the linkage between memoir and fiction. Wagamese’s memoir One Native Life attests to the intergenerational reach of the suffering caused by residential schools, which left Wagamese’s parents and their siblings with “a terrible hurt vented on those closest to [them]” (227). As a result of this hurt, his aunt broke his left arm and shoulder when he was less than a year old. Moreover, in February 1958, his parents abandoned Richard and his two siblings in the bush (239). In the novel, Saul’s parents abandon him and his grandmother Naomi in the bush with winter approaching (41). The implication is that they have been preoccupied with drinking, as were Wagamese’s own parents. [3] Like Saul Indian Horse, Richard and his siblings got as far as the Minaki railroad platform; then the police turned them over to the Children’s Aid Society, making Wagamese part of the mass removal of Indigenous children from their homes that was dubbed “the sixties scoop” (even though it continued into the seventies and eighties). [4] He spent his childhood in White homes, dislocated from his Anishinaubae family and kinship structure and from the cultural practices that could inform personal identity. Although one generation removed from first-hand residential school experience, Wagamese is the prototype for his protagonist.

Saul’s cultural hybridity is symbolized by contrasting embraces that exemplify the symmetry of oral storytelling. The first embrace is that of his grandmother Naomi, who perishes while holding him in her arms:

Wrapped in the cracked canvas of an old tent, I huddled in the arms of the old woman and felt the cold freeze her in place. I understood that she had left me and I lay there crying against the empty drum of her chest. (42)

The moment represents the severance of Saul’s connection to his Anishinaubae family and culture. The second embrace is that of Father Leboutilier, which crystallizes the suffering Saul endures in residential school. Connecting the second embrace explicitly with the first, Saul recalls his emotional vulnerability and his dissociation from his body at the time of the assault: “As he gathered my face in his hands and kissed me, I closed my eyes. I thought of my grandmother. The warmth of her arms holding me, I missed that so much” (198). As Ann Laura Stoler notes, colonial society invades the most intimate aspects of the lives of the colonized, including the sexual, interpersonal, and familial; Stoler calls these institutionalized invasions “structured violences.” [5] Naomi’s self-sacrifice is replaced by Father Leboutilier’s oppression. Though he claims to have Saul’s emotional and spiritual well-being in mind, the priest takes advantage of his position in order to force a sexual relationship upon his charge; this constitutes a violent betrayal of the trust that Saul has learned in his relationship with his grandmother. The impact of this betrayal is life-long: as an adult, Saul struggles to regain the ability to trust in order to re-establish close personal relationships in his life. Foucault uses the concept of “biopolitics” to assert that the site of colonial oppression is the body of the oppressed (see Stoler 13); moreover, as this episode shows, the oppression of the body has complex emotional ramifications. [6] Saul’s original acceptance of Father Leboutilier’s embrace is soon overlaid by guilt and shame: “When I found myself liking it, I felt dirty, repulsive, sick” (199). The pain of guilt and shame is imbricated with rage when, over time, he is able to recognize his own helplessness and Father Leboutilier’s abuse of his power. He attempts to escape from emotional turmoil into the self-forgetting of hockey: “That’s why I played with abandon. To abandon myself” (199). Saul insulates himself from an awareness of his pain by covering it with anger, but hockey soon proves to be an outlet for rage, and Saul must confront the source of the broken trust and shame beneath his anger before he can accept and honour his emotions. Only then will he be ready to care for himself and others within his Anishinaubae community.

As Julia Emberley notes, residential schools and other colonial policies enacted a “colonial violence” that “was instrumental in the destruction of Indigenous kinship relations” and that destroyed Indigenous homes, constituting what Emberley calls “colonial domicide” (236). In 1920, attendance was made a legal requirement for Indigenous children between seven and fifteen; in 1933, officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were made truant officers; these officers were allowed to enter Native homes and issue penalties to parents who refused to send their children to residential school (J.R. Miller 170). Abductions of Indigenous children occurred but were undocumented. The novel’s representation of this historical reality is dramatic: in the late 1950s, two of the Indian Horse children are hunted down in the bush near Gods Lake and abducted by motorboat (9) and plane (11). The damage done to Saul’s life is foreshadowed in the images of darkness versus light that unify the brief chapter depicting his first day at St. Jerome’s. It begins with an image of darkness: “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” (43). A contrasting image of light emphasizes the deprivation of a child suddenly confined who has spent his life outdoors: “I was lonely for the sky, for the feel of it on my face” (43). The chapter closes with an image of light removed: “In what seemed like an instant, the world I had known was replaced by an ominous black cloud” (47).

In the orality-based narrative, the repetition of images transfers the transformative powers of ritual to the literary text. While images of darkness versus light mark Saul’s residential school experience, images of calmness, coldness, and indifference depict racism inside and outside of St. Jerome’s. Sister Ignacia beats a boy, saying with “a terrible calm” that “we work to remove the Indian from our children” (46-47). [7] In the world of regional hockey, Saul’s all-Native team, the Manitouwadge Moose, are beaten up and urinated on for eating in a coffee shop deemed to be for Whites only (133-35). In addition to its obvious parallel to the imposition of Jim Crow laws in the United States and to the long struggle of African Americans for racial equality, the episode is notable for the coldness of the White perpetrators: as Virgil, Saul’s brother through extended kinship, reports, “They did it silently. Like it was an everyday thing. I never knew people could be that cold” (136). Saul encounters the same coldness when his junior hockey teammates treat him as invisible: “These guys weren’t mean. They weren’t vicious. They were just indifferent, and that hurt a whole lot more” (163). These incidents reveal a long-established racial hegemony that the perpetrators expect never to be challenged. Allen refers to the coldness of this outlook by using phrasing similar to that found in the text: she states that colonial historians erase Indigenous peoples from North American history, “except when we are calmly, rationally, succinctly, and systematically dehumanized” (49). Saul’s response is to internalize the impersonal hatred expressed by the colonizers. He beats up a racist co-worker on a forestry crew: “I was frigid blackness inside, like water under a berg” (175). Saul is now depicted in the images of darkness and coldness formerly associated with racism; above him is not the light of open sky but the massive whiteness of the iceberg, which symbolizes a monolithic racial dominance (175).

Equally challenging is the conflation of race and gender in colonial stereotypes of the Indigenous male. Brian Klopotek argues that colonizing culture has disseminated a number of stereotypes of Indigenous males that continue to have great ubiquity and influence: “For at least the last century, hypermasculinity has been one of the foremost attributes of the Indian world that Whites have imagined” (251). Klopotek maintains that the Indian, as imagined in colonial society, includes images of “noble or ignoble savages, wise old chiefs, and cunning warriors” that “comprise an impossibly masculine race” (251). Vizenor points out that the very word Indian is a “manifest manner” or a “simulation” that reduces all Indigenous individuals to the image of one representative Indian, who is invariably male: Vizenor calls it “the contrivance of the other in the course of dominance” ( Manifest vii). Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred states that images of the violent Indigenous warrior are foils “for the White conquest of North America” (“Reimagining” 79). The colonizing function of these images of impossible hypermasculinity is to invent a powerful opponent who must be repeatedly defeated. These images pre-empt the possibility of peaceful co-existence with multi-dimensional Indigenous males by establishing mental constructions that predetermine a continued interracial violence; as Alfred puts it, these images are “not meant to be lived with” but “meant to be killed, every single time” (“Reimagining” 79). Sports writers and cartoonists portray Saul persistently as an embodiment of the hypermasculine Indian warrior: counting coup, on a raid, carrying a war lance, etc. (163). Because he is a gifted playmaker, opposing teams harass him until he retaliates; gradually, his role on the team shifts from playmaker to intimidator or goon: “If they wanted me to be a savage, that’s what I would give them” (164). When benched, Saul walks out of his short junior hockey career and returns to his family and community in Manitouwadge. When he plays again with the Moose, his pain is once more covered by rage. Disconnected from family and community, he goes on the road, finding solace in alcohol, which offers “an antidote to exile” in that it enables him to play the clown and raconteur (181). He exists in fear of knowing himself for fifteen years until he faces his repressed memory of sexual abuse and his alcoholism. This shows how the violence of hypermasculinity arises from pain and shame; as Sam McKegney puts it, “combatting shame in oneself” and discovering “a nurturing manhood” constitute an alternative warrior ethic ( Masculindians 95). In contrast to the destructive colonial simulation of hypermasculinity, the novel presents this alternative warrior ethic as a way of bringing peace to the lives of Indigenous men.

Saul redefines masculinity as re-establishing caring relationships with others in his Anishinaubae community, especially within his extended kinship network. He rediscovers the joy he found in hockey by giving that joy to the children of his community (212). In devoting himself to being their coach, Saul embraces a non-dominative and nurturing vocation. He affirms an Indigenous manhood that serves the values of communal health and tribal continuance. A crucial part of this redefined masculinity and reconnection with community is his reunion with the Kelly family. His adoptive parents, Fred and Martha, are fellow Anishinaubaeg who had taken Saul into their family when residential school authorities quietly removed him from the embrace of Father Leboutilier: their connection with Saul is based upon their shared history as a family. In returning to his adoptive family home, Saul simultaneously reclaims the Anishinaubae model of extended kinship that residential schools had sought to erase. Alfred argues that the way to counter the definition of Indigenous manhood as the violent foil for White conquest “is to put the image of the Native male back into its proper context, which is the family.” Alfred explains that “if you put the person back into their [sic] proper context, there are responsibilities that come with that” (“Reimagining” 79). Cree-Metis scholar Kim Anderson adds that Indigenous men’s responsibilities “have been greatly obscured by the colonial process,” suggesting that “it is more difficult for men than it is for women to define their responsibilities in the contemporary setting and reclaim their dignity and sense of purpose” ( Recognition 239). Speaking of both males and females, Johnston affirms the balance between duties and rights in Anishinaubae communities: “To us, a right is debnimzewin. But each right is also a duty” (see McKegney, “Beautiful” 207). Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice also stresses “the tribal web of kinship rights and responsibilities” for both genders (207). Justice stipulates that kinship is “dynamic, ever in motion” and hence “requires attentiveness” (150). [8]

Family and kinship responsibilities form part of the Anishinaubae version of the good life, called mino-bimaadiziwin, which also comprises longevity, good health, and freedom from misfortune; furthermore, as Anishinaubae scholar Cary Miller states, mino-bimaadiziwin also involves “establishing relationships of interdependency as widely as possible.” Miller explains that these relationships involve “extended family, animals and plants, the land, and spiritual entities, the manidoog” (120-21). Connections to the land and non-human physical and spiritual beings are crucial to the good life. Both are evoked in two place names: the name of Saul’s home town, Manitouwadge, means “home of the great mystery” in Anishinaubaemowin, and his family’s ancestral home, called Manitou Gameeng and later anglicized by missionaries into Gods Lake, suggests the multitude of spiritual beings from whom the Anishinaubaeg seek assistance. In another of the pairings of the orality-based narrative, Saul has two prophetic dream visions. The first comes during his early childhood, before his Anishinaubae family and culture were lost to him. While picking rice at the lake with his family, he hears the Manitous (the mystery) of the place whispering his name (22). [9] He then has a dream of a larger band that camps at Gods Lake and is crushed when the cliff face collapses upon them (24). The apocalyptic vision foretells the impact of the colonial era on his people. More than twenty years later, after confronting the memory of his molestation by Father Leboutilier, Saul returns to Gods Lake, where he has a contrasting dream that, with the symmetry of the oral tale, also commences when the Manitous whisper his name (204). He has a vision of his great-grandfather, the shaman Shabogeesik, who bestows a benediction upon Saul’s reconnection with his tribal land: “You have come to carry this place within you. This place of beginnings and endings” (205). The first of the “beginnings” is Saul’s return to this spiritual place in order to dream, to mourn, and to pray. He allows “every ounce of sorrow, desperation, loneliness and regret to eke out of [himself]” (206). Then he prays aloud, signalling his return to the traditional Anishinaubae stance of the individual who is not alone but connected to numerous spiritual beings. The recovery of the ability to pray is a key point in Saul’s recovery of his Anishinaubae heritage. Cary Miller explains that the traditional Anishinaubaeg saw it as human to be in constant need of help from spiritual powers: “such help was perceived as so essential that no performance of any kind of task, whether in the service of subsistence, war, peace, or even love, was interpreted as due to an individual’s own abilities or efforts” (122). The related tribal beliefs that all beings have spiritual messages to impart and that animals have much to teach humans are conveyed in the family story of Shabogeesik bringing the people a Percheron horse that became much loved. Through the shaman, the horse imparts two “spirit teachings” to the community: that a terrible change would come (7) and that the people “must learn to ride each one of these horses of change” (9).

Some Anishinaubae scholars relate this tribal power of endurance and re-emergence to the people’s social history of migration. Edward Benton-Banai, a Wisconsin Ojibway of the Fish Clan, states that the Great Migration from the east coast to the area of the Great Lakes took place over five hundred years, starting in 900 A.D. (102). Scott Lyons, a Nishnaabe/Dakota scholar from Minnesota, argues that this history created a culture of constant adaptation and diversity:

What does migration produce? As we can see in the story of the Great Migration, it produces difference; new communities, new peoples, new ways of living; new sacred foods, new stories, and new ceremonies. The old never dies; it gets supplemented by the new, and the result is diversity. (4)

Vizenor calls this constant sense of cultural movement “transmotion,” stating that the word names a key factor in “ survivance, ” his own neologism combining the words survival and resistance ( Fugitive 15). Anishinaubae scholars have described their culture as one of mobility and flexibility that has always been attuned to the variability of truth. Johnston explains that the word for truth and the tribe’s name both “convey the philosophic notion that there is no such thing as absolute truth” ( Anishinaubae x). Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair concurs that the Anishinaubae define truth as “subjective, relative, and mobile” (88) and “negotiable, multiple, and fallible” (89). Simpson adds that truth is always a personal matter of what she calls “heart knowledge” (58, 94). She emphasizes that working together to manage personal truths in a way that promotes peace is essential to the Anishinaubae way of life (95). Saul thus migrates home to an Anishinaubae intellectual tradition rooted in the peaceful negotiation of difference.

Father Leboutilier and St. Jerome’s have impaired Saul’s ability to form close relationships, sending him into exile from others and himself. Professional hockey in racist White society has replaced Saul’s vision with rage, and alcohol has deepened his isolation. Saul finds his way to a peaceful and caring masculinity through the writing and reading of his story to his counsellor and group. Through story, he begins the long migration home to a reconnection with others, the land, and the spiritual world. Saul also migrates home to an Indigenous conception of the feminine that comprises gender complementarity and reverence. McKegney asserts that “the manipulation of gender systems constituted a key element of dispossessive colonial policy,” so that definitions of both genders were altered by colonial influence ( Masculindians 3); for example, the colonial definition of marriage supplanted Indigenous ones: Indigenous women were required to become supportive if not submissive wives in patriarchal nuclear families rather than participants in extended kinship networks. Episkenew notes that “Gender complementarity was more often the norm in Indigenous cultures than was the gender hierarchy that prevailed in colonial society” (48). In this gender complementarity, Indigenous women had a political influence that was lost when patriarchy was imposed upon Indigenous polities. Anderson insists that “women haven’t had a place in the official politics or governance of our people for a hundred and fifty years or so.” She tells of her experience of working in First Nations politics, where she saw “leadership that was almost exclusively male” whereas the people working at the grassroots, community level were female (“Remembering” 89 ). In the novel, Saul honours the ability of women to participate in governance when he wishes that their small band would accept the wisdom of “my grandmother’s guiding voice” (33). This dimension of the novel uses a decolonizing methodology that Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls “gendering” (151), which means revealing the different gender roles and/or relations that existed in Indigenous cultures before conquest. As in many Indigenous cultures, Anishinaubae intellectual tradition focuses on a reverence for the feminine. Saul begins his narrative by paying tribute to the tribe’s legends, which “tell of how we emerged from the womb of our Mother the Earth” (1). Wagamese expresses the same reverence in his other writings. In For Joshua: An Ojibway Father Teaches His Son (2003), he imparts the cultural teachings that he has been unable to deliver in person to his estranged son (18). In retelling the traditional story of the gift of the drum, which was sent to remind a quarrelling tribe of their responsibility to each other and to all things, Wagamese states the message imparted by the giver. Spirit Woman emphasizes the similarity of the drum to Mother Earth: “It is round like her womb. It is life-giving like her spirit. It is healing like her love, forgiveness, and nurturing” (118). As for his experience of the sweat lodge ceremony, Wagamese says, “I was in the womb of my birth mother and I was in the womb of the Great Mother, Mother Earth” (148).

For the Anishinaubaeg, the land is always alive and in motion, always spiritual and involved in a spiritual relationship with human beings; thus, early in his narrative, Saul mentions the Manitous, or the mystery of the land, and the Maymaygwayseeuk, the mystery of the water (4). As they head toward Gods Lake to harvest rice, Saul and his brother Benjamin revel in their shared spiritual awareness that “the land itself was in motion” (18). Toward the end of their five-hundred-year migration, near what is now called Spirit Island or Manitoulin Island at the west end of Lake Superior, the Anishinaubaeg found the lakes of wild rice beds that had been prophesied as their predestined home (Benton-Banai 101). In accordance with this tribal history, the novel depicts the “dancing of the rice” and the making of rice ties as sacred activities that bring the Indian Horse family and its small band closer together (26, 28).

His spiritual oneness with the land and his Anishinaubae cultural identity (and thus his personal identity) have been taken from Saul Indian Horse by the “structured violence” of residential schools, just as Wagamese’s self-worth was stolen by their aftermath. Many have suffered this trauma, and many have testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which concluded its hearings in Edmonton in March 2014. The TRC, the government apology of 2008, and the apologies of most of the churches that administered the schools (no apology has been made by the Catholic Church as a whole, though it ran more than 75% of the schools in Canada [10] ), are means of consigning residential schools to the past. Keavy Martin notes that the state seeks a premature resolution and asks, “When will the Canadian public and its government agree to remain on this reconciliatory journey in perpetuity?” (55). The TRC hearings were managed by the same government that has yet to adopt what Smith calls the decolonizing methodology of reframing, which means contextualizing Indigenous social problems such as suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and high rates of school recidivism and incarceration as the legacies of colonization (153). Margery Fee comments that “bureaucratic idling” continues to be a “very effective tool of colonization” (6). Effective efforts have barely begun to move beyond the treatment of Indigenous people as bureaucratic clients of the state and to turn those bureaucracies over to Indigenous sovereignty. Richard Epp wonders whether a liberal individualist society, which “posits memoryless, dehistoricized — but equal — persons,” will be able to act on the principle of birthright, honouring treaty obligations undertaken in the name of all Canadians as part of a common past (134). In this cultural context, the study of narratives of survivance like Indian Horse may offer a starting point for genuine reconciliation. If these narratives come to be studied throughout the public school system in classrooms of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, and if public schools also provide special cultural supports for Indigenous students, such a restructuring may help to transform the present historical moment into what Gods Lake is called in the novel — a “place of endings and beginnings” — not a place of extinguishing Anishinaubae and other Indigenous cultures, as residential schools were intended to do, but a place of ending racist colonialism and restoring Indigenous communities.

Duran and Duran use this term to define the psychic wound inflicted collectively on each Indigenous people, beginning with the occupation of their lands by settler society. Since that initial wounding, the emerging mythology, dreams, and culture of the people express the wound, which is also manifested in the social and health problems of the people over generations of colonization (45).

Westcott and Garroutte point out a fundamental difference between the representational “narrative,” or set of cultural assumptions with which story is approached, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, and the “narrative” of Indigenous sacred stories. The representational story reaches out only to other humans; all representations are mediated; and stories exercise no powers over material reality. Yet Garroutte and Westcott point out that Indigenous sacred stories establish links with non-human beings, conduct humans to an unmediated reality, and literally heal the human body (in addition to the mind and soul) (73-74).

Richard Thatcher uses statistical evidence to prove that fewer Indigenous people drink regularly than those of other populations (23) and that more Indigenous people than others are abstinent (24), but that Indigenous people drink more when they drink (22). Thatcher argues that the excesses of a relatively small group have been generalized to the entire population.

Cindy Blackstock notes that the state’s depredations on Indigenous families continue: the number of Indigenous children now in some form of state care is three times the number it was at the height of residential schools (165); one in ten First Nations children is now in alternative care compared to one in two hundred for non-First Nations; and reserves receive 22% less funding for child care than other Canadian jurisdictions (168).

Ann Laura Stoler argues that the definition of “empire” should not be “based on a British imperial steady-state” model but on “a notion of empire that puts movement and oscillation at the center” (9). She argues that “domestic colonialism” or “internal colonialism” are terms that usefully define different manifestations of empire (12).

Residential schools were rife with evidence of biopolitics: in addition to the sexual abuse, the forcible removal from the home; the prevention of parental visits; the corporal punishment, solitary confinement, and regimentation; the haircuts that made boys look like porcupines and girls like china dolls (Alexie); the replacement of Indigenous names with numbers or anglicized, and usually Christianized, names; the uniform Caucasian clothing, sometimes made by the students from recycled army uniforms; the inadequate diet for students and the sumptuous one for staff; the excessive labour to compensate for inadequate funding; the mortality rate that was reputed to be as high as 50% ( Inconvenient 120); and the inadequate medical care.

The text here paraphrases the words of the architect of the American residential school system: Ward Churchill records that Captain Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of the prototype Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, publicly declaimed in 1895 that the goal of the system was to “kill the Indian, save the man” in every pupil (14). Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy superintendent general of the Indian Department in Canada, stated before a parliamentary committee in 1920 that the Canadian system had the same objective, saying, “I want to get rid of the Indian problem.” He declared that he hoped to do so by closing the Indian Department and absorbing all Indians into the body politic (Milloy 46).

It is important to affirm a general model of Indigenous maleness that contrasts with colonial hypermasculinity but also important to keep the discussion indeterminate, fluid, inclusive, and open. Thus, as part of a general model, I propose only the fundamental Indigenous value of responsibility to family and kinship networks.

In The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (2001), Basil Johnston notes that the word manitous means not only “mystery” but also “spiritual, mystical, supernatural, godlike or spiritlike, quiddity, essence” (xxi). In Ojibway Ceremonies, he again notes the evocative power of this word (30).

In 1991, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate made their apology, and in February 2014, shortly before the final hearings of the TRC, the Bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories offered theirs. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI expressed “sorrow” for the “deplorable” treatment of students at Catholic-run residential schools, but this was not an apology or a statement of responsibility, and there has been no centralized apology issued by the Catholic Church.

Works Cited

• Alexie, Robert Arthur. Porcupines and China Dolls. Penticton: Theytus, 2009. Print. Google Scholar
• Alfred, Taiaiake. “Reimagining Warriorhood.” Conversation with Sam McKegney. McKegney, Masculindians 76-86. Print. Google Scholar
• Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Indian in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Print. Google Scholar
• Anderson, Kim. A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood. Toronto: Second Story, 2000. Print. Google Scholar
• —. “Remembering the Sacredness of Men.” Conversation with Sam McKegney. McKegney, Masculindians 87-97. Print. Google Scholar
• Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print. Google Scholar
• Blackstock, Cindy. “Reconciliation Not Saying Sorry Twice: Lessons from Child Welfare in Canada.” From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools. Ed. Marlene Brant Castellano, Linda Archibald, and Mike DeGagne. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008. Print. Google Scholar
• Blaeser, Kimberley. “Native Literature: Seeking a Critical Center.” Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Ed. Jeannette Armstrong. Penticton: Theytus, 1993. 51-62. Print. Google Scholar
• —. “Wild Rice Rights: Gerald Vizenor and an Affiliation of Story.” Doerfler et al. 237-57. Print. Google Scholar
• Churchill, Ward. Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco: City Lights, 2004. Print. Google Scholar
• Doerfler, Jill, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, eds. Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2013. Google Scholar
• Duran, Eduardo, and Bonnie Duran. Native American Postcolonial Psychology. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. Print. Google Scholar
• Emberley, Julia. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Google Scholar
• Episkenew, Jo-Ann. Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2010. Print. Google Scholar
• Epp, Richard. We Are All Treaty People. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2008. Print. Google Scholar
• Fee, Margery. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” Editorial. Canadian Literature 215 (2012): 6-10. Print. Google Scholar
• Frank, Arthur W. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print. Google Scholar
• Garroutte, Eva Marie, and Kathleen Delores Westcott. “The Story Is a Living Being: Companionship with Stories in Anishinaabeg Studies.” Doerfler et al. 61-80. Print. Google Scholar
• Hoy, Helen. How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print. Google Scholar
• Johnston, Basil. Anishinaubae Thesaurus. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2007. Print. Google Scholar
• —. “Is That All There Is? Tribal Literature.” Ed. Doerfler et al. 3-12. Print. Google Scholar
• —. The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2001. Print. Google Scholar
• —. Ojibway Ceremonies. Toronto: McClelland, 2008. Print. Google Scholar
• Justice, Daniel Heath. “‘Go Away, Water!’ Kinship Criticism and the Decolonizing Imperative.” Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2007. 147-68. Print. Google Scholar
• King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” 1990. New Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Ed. Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and J.R. (Tim) Struthers. Toronto: Broadview, 1997. 241-48. Print. Google Scholar
• —. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Doubleday, 2012. Print. Google Scholar
• Klopotek, Brian. “‘I Guess Your Warrior Look Doesn’t Work Every Time’: Challenging Indian Masculinity in the Cinema.” Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West. Ed. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau. New York: Routledge, 2001. 251-73. Print. Google Scholar
• LaRocque, Emma. When the Other is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2011. Print. Google Scholar
• Lyons, Scott. X Marks: Native Signatures of Assent. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print. Google Scholar
• MacLeod, Neal. Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. Saskatoon: Purich, 2007. Print. Google Scholar
• Martin, Keavy. “Truth, Reconciliation, and Amnesia: Porcupines and China Dolls and the Canadian Conscience.” English Studies in Canada 35.1 (2009): 47-65. Print. Google Scholar
• McKegney, Sam. “‘Beautiful Hunters with Strong Medicine’: Indigenous Masculinity and Kinship in Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1-2 (2009): 203-27. Print. Google Scholar
• —. “Committing to Indigenous Communities while Keeping the ‘Literary’ in Literary Nationalism.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1-2 (2009): 28-31. Print. Google Scholar
• —. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2007. Print. Google Scholar
• —. Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2014. Print. Google Scholar
• Miller, Cary. “Every Dream Is a Prophecy: Rethinking Revitalization: Dreams, Prophets, and Routinized Cultural Evolution.” Doerfler et al. 119-32. Print. Google Scholar
• Miller, J.R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools . Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Print. Google Scholar
• Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2006. Print. Google Scholar
• Simpson, Leanne. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter, 2011. Print. Google Scholar
• Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam James. “K’zaugin: Storying Ourselves into Life.” Doerfler et al. 81-102. Print. Google Scholar
• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed, 1999. Print. Google Scholar
• Stoler, Ann Laura. “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen.” Introduction. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. London: Duke UP, 2006. 1-22. Print. Google Scholar
• Thatcher, Richard W. Fighting Firewater Fictions: Moving Beyond the Disease Model of Alcoholism in First Nations. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Print. Google Scholar
• Vizenor, Gerald R. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. Google Scholar
• —. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print. Google Scholar
• Wagamese, Richard. For Joshua: An Ojibway Father Teaches His Son. Toronto: Random, 2003. Print. Google Scholar
• —. Indian Horse. Vancouver: Douglas, 2012. Print. Google Scholar
• —. One Native Life. Vancouver: Douglas, 2008. Print. Google Scholar

Citation Tools

Cite this article, export the record for this article.

RIS EndNote, Papers, Reference Manager, RefWorks, Zotero

ENW EndNote (version X9.1 and above), Zotero

BIB BibTeX, JabRef, Mendeley, Zotero

Indian Horse

By richard wagamese, indian horse themes, assimilation.

Assimilation, or the loss of group identity in favor of the dominant culture, is central to Saul’s story. While assimilation can happen gradually due to primarily economic and social factors, Wagamese emphasizes that the assimilation of Canadian Indigenous people into White settler culture was forced and violent. This is accurate to Canadian history—residential schools were built with the explicit purpose of “killing the Indian” in Indigenous people. The violence Wagamese details at St. Jerome’s illustrate how literal that “killing” could be; policies that prohibited Indigenous language, religion, and dress could be enforced only through brutality. Yet even without the physical abuse that surrounded these policies, Indian Horse also emphasizes the tragedy of the loss itself. Wagamese uses poetic language and evocative emotional phrases when he describes Saul and his peers’ fishing trip, and the tension between their longing for their old way of life and the nuns’ assumption that they are happily embracing Christianity.

In the western canon, coming-of-age and hero’s-journey stories often center around a white male main character who finds his strength by becoming independent and triumphing over his problems alone. While Wagamese is writing in conversation with these genres, he importantly deviates from the trope of the liberated individual by constantly emphasizing the necessity of community and interdependence. From St. Jerome's to life as a migratory worker, Saul responds to his trauma by choosing to be alone. Rather than finding himself in these moments, they are the darkest in Saul’s life. When he decides to follow the road alone, he quickly realizes that he misses his family and the camaraderie of his team. Each positive turning point in Indian Horse happens when Saul lets someone else help him: Erv Sift, Moses at the New Dawn Centre, the Kellys, his great-grandfather. Indian Horse suggests that strength isn’t being able to survive on one’s own: it's being brave enough to admit that you need other people, and that they need you. It is telling that the novel doesn’t end with Saul alone on the ice, facing his fears, but with the arrival of his neighbors and friends, coming to share the game with him. Through Saul, Wagamese models an Indigenous masculinity that embraces land, ancestry, and community rather than rugged individualism.

In Indian Horse , land isn’t just a setting; it's a character. This dynamic is introduced when Naomi teaches Saul about the family’s history with Gods Lake, which illustrates that land can have a specific character, and that it can choose to accept some people and not others. While St. Jerome’s, and settler colonialism as a system, asserts ownership of land through private possession and transformation, Saul and his Indigenous ancestors have a connection to Gods Lake rooted in a reciprocal relationship with it as a place. When Saul is suffering from alcoholism, land serves as an emotional haven, the place where he feels grounded and at peace. Saul’s ability to see into the spiritual world is also closely related to the land. When he leaves Gods Lake with Naomi, he is able to see the path his great-grandfather left when he focuses closely on the sound of the river, the taste of the air, and the feeling of the snow on his face. Towards the end of the novel, Shabogeesick appears again only after Saul spends a night in the bush, indicating that Saul needs to see and connect with the land in order for his vision to show him his great-grandfather.

By focusing on Saul, and employing an internal narration that tells the reader about his mental state as well as his circumstances, Wagamese highlights not just the mechanisms but the impacts of racism. The anti-Indigenous bigotry that white settlers inflict on Saul wears several guises: institutionalized dehumanization and abuse at St. Jerome’s, the stereotyping that haunts his athletic career, and the coldness white teammates and coworkers show towards him. The cumulative effect of these interlocking forms of bigotry is to cause Saul to shut off from the world. The abuse of St. Jerome’s is the catalyst for this pattern, but Wagamese emphasizes that the verbal and social marginalization Saul experiences as an adult has a similar effect. Fred and Martha Kelly recognize that Saul’s decision to leave hockey and go off alone was rooted in his childhood trauma, but Wagamese makes clear that the immediate decision stemmed from the racism of his teammates and commentators, which barred him from finding freedom on the ice. The stereotypical commentary that followed him as a hockey player also emphasizes the violent power of language; in fact, Saul is able to out-skate physical violence on the court, but cannot so easily evade the way racist language hems him in as a player and a person.

Reckoning with the Past

The central conflict of Indian Horse is Saul’s struggle to reconcile with his past by allowing his traumatic memories to resurface and finding ways to work past them. The beginning of the novel sets up this conflict through Saul’s mother and father, who are terrified by “the school” and unwilling, or unable, to speak of it. This silent preoccupation leads to alcoholism, neglect, and eventually their abandonment of Saul. At the same time, their presence in the novel highlights the past in a different way, as Saul inherits the trauma of the residential school even before he attends it. When Saul reaches adulthood like his parents did, he struggles with many of the same behaviors—he, too, isolates himself, abandons his found family, and slips into alcoholism. However, while Saul’s parents ignored Naomi, embraced Christianity, and shut themselves off from the past, Saul is able to reconnect with his ancestors and his traditions. By reaching back into the deep past, he is able to find the truth about his own immediate past, and to carry what he experienced with honesty. Unlike his parents, after his revelation, Saul speaks about his trauma, both to the younger patients at the New Dawn Centre and to Fred, Martha, and Virgil. Through open conversation, and relying on his community, Saul is able to begin moving on.

Sexual Abuse

In Chapter 21, Saul describes the role sexual abuse plays in the hell of St. Jerome’s. When Saul describes overhearing the other boys being raped, he uses the first person plural, depicting confusion and terror as communal. By speaking more generally, Saul illustrates the impact the assaults had on everyone. He also recounts the silence surrounding the assaults, the way none of the children would say anything to protect their friends from shame. When Saul has his revelation about Father Leboutilier at the end of the novel, this scene is put in a new light. Saul’s avoidance of the singular first person and the lack of references to himself foreshadowed the way he coped with assault—denial. Furthermore, it becomes clear that part of the traumatizing impact of rape was precisely the way it made open discussion so difficult. Overcoming that silence and speaking openly with Fred and Martha is thus central to Saul’s own healing process.

Wagamese also emphasizes the relationship between assault and the ideology and operation of St. Jerome’s. Father Leboutilier takes advantage of Saul’s desire for familial affection when he abuses him, and it was St. Jerome’s that stole Saul away from his family in the first place. Fred and Martha Kelly also draw a simile between the sexual assault and forced assimilation: both are rape because they are both ways of violating someone’s bodily and spiritual autonomy.

St. Jerome’s isn’t really a school, but a way to prepare Indigenous children for manual labor while trying to separate them from culture and family. Saul’s teacher is his grandmother Naomi, who instructs through storytelling, often about Saul’s own ancestors, and through hands-on examples, as when she teaches the family how to make traditional rice ties. Her teaching is thus situated within both land and community. When Saul recovers, he picks up the mantle of teaching. He returns to the New Dawn Centre finally willing to speak, which becomes a way to both learn about himself and teach the younger inhabitants of the center. Then he makes his way back to Manitouwadge and decides to become a coach. Saul sees coaching as a way of giving back, of sharing the joy he found in the game. His goals in coaching parallel the way Naomi taught him; they’re relational and rooted in a desire to share, to pass down.

Indian Horse Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Indian Horse is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

On page 111 Saul describes his people and a part of their identity. Find this piece, and quote it in your answer.

“We came from nations of warriors, and the sudden flinging down of sticks and gloves, the wild punches and wrestling were extensions of that identity” (111).

Chapter 1 Question

Chapter One introduces the main character and narrator. Saul Indian Horse is an indigenous Canadian of the Ojibway tribe. He is in his thirties, and he is a recovering alcoholic, who has been admitted into a recovery center called the New Dawn...

what does saul mean when he tells virgil they think its their game?

Saul and Virgil have just been through hell. The boys were forced into an alley and humiliated in the worst way by white bar patrons. Saul explains that white people don't want Indians being good at hockey: they feel hockey belongs to them.

Study Guide for Indian Horse

Indian Horse study guide contains a biography of Richard Wagamese, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Indian Horse
• Indian Horse Summary
• Character List

Essays for Indian Horse

Indian Horse essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese.

• Saul's Form of Strength: Persevering in Indian Horse
• Erasing the Indian in 'Indian Horse'
• The presentation of trauma in Indian Horse
• 'Indian Horse' in the Context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Injustice and the Road to Healing
• Self-Discovery and Cultural Rediscovery: Growth in Indian Horse

Lesson Plan for Indian Horse

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Indian Horse
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Indian Horse Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Indian Horse

• Introduction

Home / Essay Samples / Entertainment / Indian Horse / Representation of Residential School Trauma in “Indian Horse”

Representation of Residential School Trauma in "Indian Horse"

• Category: Crime , Entertainment
• Topic: Child Abuse , Indian Horse

Pages: 2 (999 words)

Views: 3306

• Downloads: -->

--> ⚠️ Remember: This essay was written and uploaded by an--> click here.

Found a great essay sample but want a unique one?

are ready to help you with your essay

You won’t be charged yet!

Ready Player One Essays

Hotel Rwanda Essays

Forrest Gump Essays

A Beautiful Mind Essays

Good Will Hunting Essays

Related Essays

We are glad that you like it, but you cannot copy from our website. Just insert your email and this sample will be sent to you.

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service  and  Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Your essay sample has been sent.

In fact, there is a way to get an original essay! Turn to our writers and order a plagiarism-free paper.

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->