Indian Horse

Indian Horse is a novel by Canadian writer Richard Wagamese, published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2012.^[1] Wagamese's best known work, it won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2013^[2] and was a competing title in the 2013 edition of Canada Reads.^[3]

The novel centres on Saul Indian Horse, a First Nations boy who survives the Indian residential school system and grows up to become a star ice hockey player.^[1] It follows Saul on his journey to self-awareness and self-acceptance, taking the reader along so that his painfully-grained insights also become the reader's.^[4]

According to Wagamese, in the beginning, he intended to write a novel about hockey: he had played amateur hockey himself and still loved the game, but gradually the legacy of the residential school system became a focal point of the story. He said that writing the book took about five times longer than it typically would have taken him to write a book "because of the emotional territory it covers". Although Wagamese himself did not attend a residential school, he was still affected by that system because his mother, aunts and uncles were residential school survivors.^[5][6]

A film adaptation, Indian Horse, was directed by Stephen Campanelli and premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.^[7]

References