Indian Horse
by Richard Wagamese
An Ojibwe boy. A residential school. Hockey as the only way out.
For you if
you want to understand what Canada's residential school system actually did to the children inside it
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Saul Indian Horse is Ojibwe, taken from his family and placed in a residential school, where he discovers he has an extraordinary gift for hockey. The ice becomes his escape — from the school, from the abuse, from the dismantling of his identity that the school is designed to accomplish. Then the hockey world shows him that escape is not the same as freedom. Wagamese — who himself survived the residential school system — writes about hockey and about genocide with equal precision. The most devastating Canadian novel about residential schools and the most beautiful about what a person can make of the fragments left behind.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Canada • North America
- Voice
- Written by a Canadian author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Indian Horse(2017)
dir. Stephen S. Campanelli
Hockey couldn't save him from what came before.
Torn from his Ojibway family and committed to a Catholic residential school in 1950s Ontario, Saul Indian Horse survives institutional abuse and finds an unlikely refuge in hockey — though the game can't undo what the school did. Adapted from Richard Wagamese's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to let athletic triumph erase institutional abuse — Saul's hockey talent doesn't heal the residential school system that tried to break him. Pedagogical in showing how trauma and skill can coexist in the same body without cancelling each other out.
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Why it’s here: Corporations gained the legal rights of a person a century and a half ago and never picked up the responsibilities that come with personhood. Chomsky, Klein, and even sympathetic CEOs get equal time here, and the argument holds up without needing to shout.
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