Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese

Cover photo from cbcshop.ca

This hockey story with a difference is a contender for Canada Reads 2013. Like Wagamese's essays, and his earlier novel, Keeper'n Me, this novel pulls the reader in immediately. Saul's family retreats to the bush to keep him away from the grasp of missionaries who spirit children away to residential schools. Far from town, his little brother gets sick and dies. Funeral rites for the child generate family disagreement. Even though his Granny wants the burial done the old way, Saul's parents, who have been Christianized, decide to transport the body to town by canoe for a Catholic burial.

As early autumn turns to late fall, Saul and his grandmother await their return. Meanwhile, the old woman teaches her grandson what she knows. She tells him of the basic human need for mystery, which fills us with humility. This is "the foundation of all learning."

Saul will think of his grandmother's words again many years later, when he learns to skate, becomes a soaring bird on the ice and is given a mysterious knowledge of where the play will go next. It is this strange ability to tap into the future direction of the puck and the game that makes him a star. He has inherited the ability to presage the future from his family lineage. "Our medicine people would call me a seer."

This is a hockey story, but of a unique type. A work of fiction, it is also an expose of the hardship and cruelty native children were subjected to in residential "schools" that were more like jails. At his school, the only bright star on Saul's horizon is his uncanny talent and love for hockey. With paltry equipment and ill-fitting skates, he becomes brilliant at the game.

For a time, hockey redeems him. Yet in the end, the solitary and untrusting adult Saul has become must turn inward and face the dark shadow of one more betrayal he has tried hard to forget.

Richard Wagamese is brilliant at expressing life's mystery and wonder. When Saul's grandfather sees a horse for the first time, it speaks to him in a mystical prophecy of the future: "The people will see many things, and I am but one of them." And thus the family acquires its name, Indian Horse.

Looking from the perspectives of wild animals, the narrator perceives "time's relentless prowl forward." From the point of view of the child Saul, he tells of the cold pale blue eyes of the Sister at the school, "like the eyes of a husky."

In the opening scene, the solitary broken down alcoholic that Saul has become passes on a simple message: "If we want to live at peace with ourselves, we must tell our stories." These simple words were strong medicine for me: they caused tears of recognition to spring to my eyes.

Best of all, in spite of the challenge of its subject matter, in spite of the reader's awareness that the author too was a victim of the residential school system, this beautiful book is luminous with hope.