13 Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse Reimagining the Home Game

White Glory

Saul’s discovery of hockey at St. Jerome’s is revelatory. From Father Leboutilier’s books about “hockey gods” like Béliveau, Mahovlich, and Richard, Saul gets the idea that “hockey had an alchemy that could transform ordinary men into great ones” (Wagamese 2012, 57). That hockey has such a power is, of course, deeply rooted in Canadian popular culture; it reflects the idea that hockey can be a “field of dreams” for young Canadian boys and men, turning zeroes into heroes, and bringing fame and fortune (see Gruneau and Whitson 1993, 131–33). In the context of Indian Horse, it is important to stress the religious nature of the “alchemy” that hockey appears to have for Saul. Saul, when he is sent to St. Jerome’s, is forcibly separated from his Anishinaabe heritage, and thus from the stories that would give value and meaning to his life. The religious aura of his discovery of hockey suggests that hockey is a compensation for this loss. The extreme quality of his emotional response also hints at an impossible desire: he craves from hockey the alchemical power to heal the traumas of his life.

The first time Saul sees a real game he is struck by the beauty of it: “I will never forget the first time I watched the older boys play. The white glory of the rink.” (Wagamese 2012, 57). The words “white glory” in this passage carry a heavy symbolic weight. “White” is associated with the outdoor ice upon which the boys at St. Jerome’s play, thus tapping into the centrality of such ice in the hockey myth. Readers familiar with King Leary will remember the ice of the Ottawa canals upon which Percival Leary learns to skate, as well as the oval rink kept by the Brothers at the Bowmanville Reformatory. In the hockey myth, outdoor ice is associated with purity, personal wholeness, and the innocence of childhood—all qualities that Saul craves. “White” also carries a hint of “whitewash,” a reminder that Saul is attracted to hockey to obscure the traumas of his life. And, in the context of a novel about an indigenous hockey player, “white” cannot help but carry racial overtones, which suggests a foreshadowing of what Saul will face when he encounters the “whiteness” of the hockey world.

The word “glory” is equally heavy with meaning. The word reinforces the religious aura of hockey for Saul, and also—whether Saul is conscious of this or not—gives a Christian overlay to this aura. Many passages in the Bible use the word “glory,” as well as many Christian hymns, and it is found in the closing lines of “The Lord’s Prayer” (“for thine is the Kingdom / the power and the glory / forever and ever / amen”). Hockey in the residential schools—like other sports and recreational activities—was framed by the larger religious environment. The underlying justification for the game at St. Jerome’s would have been the Catholic version of muscular Christianity: healthy bodies supposedly leading to healthy (Catholic) souls. This use of hockey is parodied in King Leary’s depiction of the slogan over the Bowmanville Reformatory: “To Keep a Boy Out of Hot Water, Put Him on Ice” (Quarrington 1994, 34). To Canadian readers, the setup for Saul’s career might also bring to mind Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater, with its depiction of the priest refereeing the boys’ outdoor hockey game.

The 2015 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission paints a mixed portrait of the role of hockey in the residential schools. A number of witnesses reported that the few good memories they had of the schools had to do with athletics. Noel Starblanket, for example, reported that when he was forced to go back to his school after the holidays, the only thing he looked forward to was the sports (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015b, 189). Paul Andrews reported that the gym “was a saviour for a lot of things because we were good at the physical stuff” (189). Sports sometimes offered a respite from abuse. There was also a sense of camaraderie that developed from being on a team. John Kistabish stressed this in relation to hockey. “I really liked to play hockey,” he explained. “I liked a lot because we helped each other, you weren’t alone” (190). Much depended on the coaches. Some coaches were as abusive as the priests were at other times. Pierre Papatie, another hockey player, reported that if his team lost games, the priest-coach would beat them with a ruler (190).

The residential school witness whose story most captures the complexity of hockey at the schools is perhaps Fred Sasakamoose, who became the first Treaty Indian to play in the National Hockey League. Sasakamoose attended residential school in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, where the boys “had the opportunity to skate every day” (193). Sasakamoose became the star player on a team that won a provincial championship. But he was also severely abused. He left the school at age fifteen, the earliest he could get away. A priest, trying to be helpful, brought a hockey scout to his parents’ home to talk to him. Sasakamoose hid in his room. Eventually he was talked into playing junior hockey in Moose Jaw and went on to play for the Chicago Black Hawks, but never felt that he fit into the world of professional sport. As he explained: “I didn’t want to be an athlete, I didn’t want to be a hockey player, I didn’t want to be anything. All I wanted was my parents” (193).

Vision/Hockey Vision

When Saul gets his chance, he reveals himself to be a gifted hockey player. Though he has significant physical abilities, what really defines his gift is his “vision.” He sees possibilities in the game that others cannot. “I can’t explain how it came to me,” he explains, “but I could see not just the physical properties of the game and the action but the intent” (Wagamese 2012, 58). Saul’s vision extends from a Gretzky-like ability to read the play to an ability to imagine new moves for himself and then immediately execute them (64). In an important twist, Saul believes that his hockey vision is equivalent to the visionary abilities of the great teachers from his own community. With his hockey vision, he believes he has been blessed with the same ability as his great-grandfather Shabogeesick, who had a special gift of knowing where other animals would be because “[the] world spoke to him … [and] told him where to look” (58).

Saul’s description of his hockey vision is consistent with the mystical quality of “the zone,” that holy grail state aimed for by athletes in which excellence becomes easy. This is the state of mind/being Saul enters into when he plays. More significantly, the parallel Saul draws between his hockey vision and the vision of his ancestors creates a link back to the land. When Saul says of his great-grandfather that the “world spoke to him,” what he is pointing to is the fact that Shabogeesick’s visionary gift is rooted in his relationship to the land, and, especially, to sacred natural locations like Gods Lake in the heart of Anishinaabe country. Gods Lake is the “secret territory” of the Indian Horse family, where, as a child, Saul hears fragments of the Old Talk of his ancestors (23). Everything Saul has lost—his family, his culture, his sense of wholeness in himself—is embodied in his lost connection to this homeland. With his experience of vision in playing hockey, it seems that he has found a way to get back home.

But has he? Given the context in which Saul is introduced to hockey, as a sport played at a residential school (with all the horrors that that implies), it is hard not read Saul’s account of discovering the game as ironic. The myth of hockey links hockey to the land—especially to northern land of the kind associated with the Anishinaabe. But when Saul asserts this link, as an Indigenous child in a residential school, it seems to be a wishful projection. The “vision” he experiences seems more likely an expression of his desire for reconnection than an actual reconnection with his homeland.

Setting up the Hockey Myth

The early part of Saul’s hockey career seems drawn directly from iconic moments in popular sports/hockey literature. The episodes are so typical, in fact, that it might appear at first that Wagamese is naïvely repeating the hockey myth.

Here’s a brief summary of Saul’s career.

At first, Saul is too young and small to play on the St. Jerome’s team, so he gets the job of caring for the rink. He gets up early every day to do so. Eventually, he steals a hockey stick from the team’s supply, stashes it in a snowbank, and practices alone with horse turds while pretending to skate (Wagamese 2012, 61). Then he steals a pair of too large skates, stuffs them with newspapers, and teaches himself to skate. He practices in secret every morning before anyone else gets up. Then, one day, while he is watching the bigger boys practice, a boy on the St. Jerome’s team gets hurt. Saul offers to go in for him. Father Leboutilier is surprised: “You skate, Saul?” Saul admits to having taught himself. So Saul goes in. He is smaller than any other player. The big boys laugh at him. But he turns out to be the best player of all (68). He is added to the team. When the team goes to play against other teams, the spectators mock Saul for his tiny stature: “The Indian school brought their mascot,” they laugh (74). But Saul turns out to be the best player on the ice there as well. By this point Saul has gone through the classic stages of becoming accepted by the team: first he is treated as an outsider; then, after certain trials and rituals, he is accepted, and in this acceptance, he finds “another expression of the spirit of the game” (86). Next, his exceptional ability opens up opportunities for him to play at higher levels. During his second year, as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, he plays in a nearby town for a midget team, made up of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and is the best player. Then he plays for two years on an adult tournament team, the Manitouwadge Moose, for an Indigenous community—and is the best player. While he is playing for the Moose, a scout for the Toronto Maple Leafs sees him. As a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, he is invited to play for the Toronto Marlboros, the Junior A feeder team for the Toronto Maple Leafs. And, of course, he is the best player.

So many elements in this career echo episodes from hockey literature. Saul’s small stature is reminiscent of Percival Leary from King Leary, another prodigy who overcomes smallness by a combination of will and natural talent. How Saul practices, alone and in the early hours, echoes Bill Spunska in Scrubs on Skates, as does his surprise insertion into the line-up (although Bill goes in for a player who is suspended), as well as his being “discovered” by a Toronto Maple Leafs scout. The initiation of a new player onto a team is almost an obligatory scene in sports fiction. Finally, Saul’s progress through the ranks takes him on a geographical journey away from his northern, small town “home” towards the bigger southern cities where professional hockey is played. This is the journey that Percival Leary, Bill Spunska, Bob Bonaduce, and Felix Batterinski all perform.

Chapter 34, in which Jack Lanahan, the Maple Leaf scout, tries to persuade Saul to join the Marlboros, is worth special attention. Saul, at first, is reluctant to entertain the idea of leaving the Moose. He is all too familiar by this point with the racism in the hockey world, including a horrific episode in which members of the Moose are assaulted after they win a tournament against white teams (134). Lanahan tries to reassure him by saying that “The Marlies aren’t Espanola” (149)—in other words, Toronto is more welcoming than the racist small towns of the north. Saul pushes back. “White ice, white players,” he says. “You gonna tell me that isn’t the case everywhere?” (149). Lanahan, then, changes tack. He admits that racism exists throughout the country but that the game is better than the country. “It’s not a perfect country,” he acknowledges. “But it is a perfect game” (150). He then goes on to extoll the virtues of hockey in highly romantic—even transcendent—terms:

[Every] winter … I go to hundreds of games in hundreds of dead-end little towns. The towns and the players are all different. But the game is always the same, its speed and power. Hockey’s grace and poetry make men beautiful. The thrill of it lifts people out of their seats. Dreams unfold right before your eyes. (150)

Lanahan’s portrait of hockey as a social unifier is straight out of the hockey myth. The way he ascribes nearly magical powers to the game echoes Saul’s initial belief in an “alchemy” that could “transform ordinary men into great ones” (57). Lanahan’s final argument, that Saul has the potential to be one of the great ones, reinforces magical associations. The great ones, he says, harness the “lightning” in hockey, and are “conjurers” who “become one” with the game and so are lifted “out of their lives” (150).

Saul’s mind isn’t entirely made up until after chapter 35, which contains another near obligatory scene in sports fiction, in which the best friend (in this case, Virgil Kelly) prods the reluctant small town star to take a shot at the big time for all his friends back home. Still, it is Lanahan’s pitch that sets up the hockey myth for a critical response in Indian Horse. With the pitch, the novel tempts its readers with the possibility that Saul’s career will yet be part of a sports redemption story. Protagonists in such stories always encounter villains and bullies. Remember Jimmy Ben, the “cowardly blackguard” who slashes Hughie Murray in Glengarry School Days; Benny Moore and his goon-like behaviour towards Bill Spunska in Boy at the Leafs’ Camp; and Sprague Cleghorn, blood-thirsty arch-rival of Percival Leary in King Leary. Sometimes the villains are racists. Remember how Gord Jamieson gets suspended in Scrubs on Skates (giving Bill his big break) because he fights an opposing player who calls Benny Wong “a yellow Chink” (Young 1952, 185). The unfair play of antagonists in sports fiction tests the characters of the protagonists, who typically resolve to compete hard but honourably, in the manner of Bill Spunska, who decides after Benny Moore to play “hard, strong, and forceful, but never dirty” (Young 1963, 246).

The chapters leading up to Lanahan’s speech contain various warning signs that Saul puts too much emphasis on hockey as a way to heal his life. Yet it is hard not to be moved by Lanahan’s promise that Saul, as one of the hockey greats, could be “lifted out of his life” by the game. In this way, chapter 34 offers proof of how seductive the promises contained in the hockey myth can be. Can mastery of hockey truly be a pathway to belonging in Canada? Can the game overcome the racism that Saul has experienced? Chapter 34 tempts its readers with the hope that the answer to these questions could still be yes. What follows in Indian Horse is a stark demonstration of how naïve this hope is.

A Hockey Mimic Man

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha argues that a key feature of colonialism is the demand for “mimicry” in the colonized subjects. Basically, imperial powers rationalize their colonial projects by asserting that the natives-in-question need to be civilized by the superior values of the colonizer; to be civilized is to become like the colonizer (for example, to learn English, to be educated in an English-style school, to develop similar moral and religious values). However, since the original rationalization for the project depends upon the inferiority of the native subjects-to-be-colonized, for someone to become too good at performing the identity of the colonizer is threatening. What is required, instead, is a mimicry of this identity that is not completely successful. Here’s how Bhabha puts it: “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (2004, 122). From the point of view of the colonizer, the “not quite” in Bhabha’s definition is crucial, since the failure of colonized subjects to becoming fully “civilized” justifies the continuation of the colonial project.

The demand for mimicry from Indigenous people is at the heart of the residential schools project. The idea was to assimilate Indigenous children into white culture, but only in a limited way. Indian Horse makes this clear in Saul’s description of the educational program at St. Jerome’s. “We spent an hour in the classroom each day to learn the rudimentary arithmetic and English that would allow us to secure manual labour when we ‘graduated’ from the school” (Wagamese 2012, 79). There would be no doctors or lawyers coming out of St. Jerome’s. This is consistent with the description of the educational programs of the residential schools in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. “The educational goals of the schools were limited,” the report states, “and usually reflected a low regard for the intellectual capabilities of Aboriginal people. For the students, education and technical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 3–4).

Bhabha’s concept is strongly applicable to Saul’s hockey career. What intensifies the racism directed at Saul is that he is so good. Instead of being a hockey player in a limited, Mimic Man kind of way, and cultivating the subservient identity that would go along with this, Saul plays the game as if he was born to it. This triggers a blowback from whites who believe that hockey belongs to them. It is telling that the horrific assault on the Moose players in chapter 31 comes after they win a tournament against white teams. As McKegney and Phillips suggest, “Because the men’s belief in white superiority has been challenged by the Moose team’s tournament victory, the men prove sadistically eager to reinscribe the colonial hierarchy of white entitlement and Indigenous inferiority onto the bodies of the Moose players” (2018, 175). Saul’s individual success poses the same threat to white supremacy as the collective success of the Moose.

Breaking the Code

Lanahan’s promises turn out to be not entirely false, but not true enough for Saul. Although Saul enjoys playing with elite teammates on the Marlboros, players whom he can trust to “go to the right place, make the right moves” (Wagamese 2012, 162), he is never fully accepted by them. His teammates are not overtly racist, but they are not welcoming, and their “indifference” towards Saul is as hurtful as more explicit racism would be (163). The Marlboros, then, represent a disguised version of the racism that Saul has experienced from the non-Indigenous hockey world already. The team is part of an environment that will not allow Saul to just be a hockey player. At every turn he is reminded of his otherness, of the fact that he is “the Indian” (164).

Eventually, Saul’s hockey career is derailed. The derailing has to do with the demand that he fight. The demand reflects the stereotype of the savage, war-like “Indian” that is constantly projected at him. As part of this, and also partly in recognition of his dominating play, he is subjected to goon-like attacks from opponents. Because he won’t fight, he is shunned by his own teammates. Finally, he gives in and fights. Then it is as if the violence that he has suffered becomes what defines him; he becomes the “savage” everybody tells him he is. His “vision” disappears. He becomes a puck hog, a taunting, showboating agitator, and his coach, finally, sends him home (165).

The end of Saul’s career strikes directly at one of the sacred cows of hockey culture: “the code.” The set of unwritten rules that is supposed to govern fighting in hockey is, as Jason Blake points out, as “subterranean and tangled” as any other social code. Still, the specific rules of the code can be understood as expressions of two underlying principles. The first is the idea that there are honourable and dishonourable ways of fighting, despite the fact that all fighting is, technically, “against the rules.” What defines honourable fights varies from context to context, but it always involves a measure of restraint. Blake puts it this way:

Fighting in hockey looks like a descent into warfare, into a battle for survival, but that is only part of the ritual.… Rules such as “no headbutting” or “sucker punches” are in place to protect the fighters in hockey, to control the violence, if only to let them fight again in the near future. (2010, 104–5)

The second principle has to do with how fighting in hockey has been justified. Though there have been various rationalizations over the years, the primary one has to do with the “catharsis” hypothesis, the idea that fighting offers an outlet for aggression that would otherwise manifest itself in worse behaviour on the ice. Related to this is the idea that fighting is a form of self-policing by players. Someone who acts dishonourably on the ice, so the theory goes, will pay a price in a fight that goes beyond mere penalty minutes, and so will be deterred from further bad behaviour.

The question of what is an appropriate level of violence in hockey has preoccupied writers since Ralph Connor’s (1902) Glengarry School Days, in which John Craven, after disavowing fighting, knocks out Jimmie Ben with one punch for his abuse of Hughie Murray. Knowing how and when to employ violence has historically been a key characteristic of the hockey player in Canada. The tough but restrained masculinity associated with the correct use of violence has also served as a model for the ideal Canadian man, as embodied in characters like Bill Spunska in Scrubs on Skates and Paul Tallard in Two Solitudes (among others). The line from “the code” to the promise of Canadian identity in the hockey myth, then, is a direct one. In 1969, the year Saul plays Junior A (he was born in 1953, according to chapter 3), the code and the hockey myth in Canada were still largely unchallenged.

Hockey traditionalists in 1969 would consider Saul’s refusal to fight a dishonourable act. There is precedent for highly skilled players who refuse to fight to be protected by their teammates, as Saul was protected when he was on the Moose, but on the Marlboros he does not have the standing for this to happen. Instead, his refusal leads to further alienation: “When I refused to retaliate, my teammates starting leaving a space around me on the bench” (Wagamese 2012, 164). Here’s how Robert Faulkner, in his fascinating 1976 sociological study of violence in professional hockey, summarizes the situation Saul finds himself in:

A player is expected (indeed, morally required) to fight if he wants respect.… [A] man cannot give way to another without loss of manhood and dignity. And fighting or challenging the person who has wronged him suggests to teammates that the individual can be depended upon to behave in a manner which will not bring disgrace to the team, that he can be relied upon. (1976, 101)

According to the code, the obvious way for Saul to bond with his teammates is to stand up and fight for himself.

When Saul fights, however, his act does not have the effect that the code predicts it will. As Faulkner reports, one of the strongest moral imperatives in the code has to do with teammates supporting one another: “a [teammate] under attack becomes something of a ceremonious occasion for unhesitating support, for discharging one’s duties by keeping adversaries out of the action, and by coercive intervention if a teammate is being defeated” (1976, 103). But Saul’s teammates do not join in to protect him as the code requires. Their abandonment of him is anticipated by the incident that triggers his first fight, a cheap shot he receives after which there is “no whistle” and in response to which his teammates “laugh” (Wagamese 2012, 165). The implication is that Saul’s fighting only confirms his “savage” identity in the eyes of his teammates—an identity that had contributed to his alienation from the group in the first place.

The damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t situation Saul finds himself in with respect to fighting illustrates a key feature of oppression. The feminist theorist Marilyn Frye has argued that “[one] of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double-bind—situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation” (1983, 2). Frye offers as an example the double bind women have historically faced in Western cultures about sexual activity, in which a sexually active woman is “open to censure and punishment for being loose, unprincipled or a whore” but a woman who refrains from sexual activity “is threatened with labels like ‘frigid,’ ‘uptight,’ ‘manhater’ … and ‘cocktease’ ” (3). Saul experiences such a double bind about fighting and the label “savage.” The fact that he doesn’t fight at first confirms his “savagery” in the eyes of his teammates (since it signals that he doesn’t subscribe to the code that defines the true—that is, “civilized”—hockey player) but when he does fight it also confirms his “savagery” (since it offers proof of his inherently violent nature as an “Indian”). What Saul experiences with respect to fighting is a synecdoche for the double binds to which Indigenous people have been subjected in larger Canadian society. That fighting does not have the effect predicted in the code reinforces that the promises of the hockey myth (of which the code is a part) are not available to an Indigenous player.

Saul’s fighting exposes the false premises and promises of the code in another way as well. Rather than working as a cathartic release—as the code predicts it will—fighting turns out to be an emotional catalyst for Saul, supercharging the anger that he has, until this point, managed to suppress. The first blow he strikes is a sucker punch. Afterwards, he fights without restraint, any “questionable hit … [an] excuse for a tilt,” and his checks become not hard and clean like those of Bill Spunska, but “hard, vicious, and vindictive” (165). Saul’s anger is not only a response to the poor treatment he has received from the hockey world, but an expression of all the unaddressed traumas of his life, including his sexual abuse by Father Leboutilier (of which he is still not conscious). Fighting, in a sense, pulls off the bandage that hockey has been for Saul, and puts him in a state similar to what Wagamese saw in his own family: “My family members were filled with bitterness from their residential school experiences, and that unhealed energy erupted often in drunkenness and violence” (Wagamese 2008, 241). The key words in this passage are “unhealed energy.” Fighting exposes Saul to his own “unhealed energy.”

After his career is lost, Saul becomes dominated by this “unhealed energy.” He drinks and fights until one day, as depicted in chapter 47, he ends up in the hospital and the New Dawn Centre. An important point to remember is that Saul’s addictive behaviour after hockey is not new behaviour for him. By the time his career ends, hockey itself has become an addiction; the end of his career only leads him to substitute one addiction for another. Gabor Maté, in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, makes an important distinction between passion and addiction. “Addiction,” Maté writes, “is passion’s dark simulacrum and, to the naïve observer, its perfect mimic. It resembles passion in its urgency and in the promise of fulfillment, but its gifts are illusory” (2009, 110). Saul, from the beginning, clings to a fusion experience with hockey that seems to lift him up and out of his life. The effect, though, is temporary, and only masks the underlying traumas that haunt him. Maté suggests that there are two questions you can ask to distinguish a passion from an addiction: “Are you closer to the people you love after your passion has been fulfilled or more isolated? Have you come more truly into who you really are or are you left feeling hollow?” (109). Hockey, at times, gives Saul a sense of connection with others, particularly the Kelly family and the Moose, but it brings him no closer to who he truly is. Saul’s denial of his own trauma through hockey makes any relationships he forms extremely fragile. To free himself from his “unhealed energy” he has to make a journey of self-discovery. This journey is the focus of the last chapters of Indian Horse.

Indian Hockey

As I mentioned in Chapter 8, Judith Herman identifies three stages of recovery for survivors of trauma: “establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community” (1997, 3). Indian Horse follows Saul through these stages. The New Dawn Centre is a safe place for him to begin his healing journey. While he is at the centre, he is encouraged to tell his story. He resists at first, but then agrees to produce a written account, presumably the text of Indian Horse to chapter 47. Chapter 48 begins with Saul’s dissatisfaction with his initial account: “I thought I’d discover something new, something that would heal me” (Wagamese 2012, 191). He realizes he needs to make a physical journey to key places in his life. At White River, the location of the now closed St. Jerome’s Residential School, he stands beside the hockey rink and remembers being abused by Father Leboutilier (198–99). Then he returns to Gods Lake, where he has a vision of his ancestors in which Shabogeesick tells him “You’ve come to learn to carry this place within you” (205). Finally, he returns to the New Dawn Centre, where he spends the winter telling his trauma story to his counsellor, Moses.

After his second stay at the New Dawn Centre, Saul begins the third stage of his recovery. He returns to Manitouwadge, and the Kelly family, and begins to reconnect with a community. As part of this reconnection, he returns to hockey. Fred Kelly points out that Saul is still only thirty-three years old, that the hockey world has become more Indigenous-friendly, and that the Moose would be excited to have him back (211). Saul declines to return to playing. What he wants to do, he explains, is to coach Indigenous children, so that he can share with them “the joy” he found in hockey when he himself was a child (212).

Indian Horse is silent about Saul’s thought process before he announces that he wants to coach. His return to hockey, however, is wonderfully anticipated by two moon images. In chapter 48, during his first stay at the New Dawn Centre, Saul begins to take long walks into the surrounding forest. One night he goes too far to make it back to the centre, and so spends the night on the shore of a beaver pond. Here he has a vision of Shabogeesick and his other ancestors. This vision convinces Saul that he needs to make his journey to White River and Gods Lake. Afterwards, in the clear sky above him, Saul sees “the slender silver arc of the moon” (193). The significance of this image becomes clear only after Saul’s return to Gods Lake, where he has another vision of his ancestors, then looks up to see that the moon is now full. Here is Saul’s description: “The moon hung in the air like the face of a drum. As I watched, it became the shining face of a rink, where Indian boys in cast-off skates laughed in the thrill of the game, the smallest among them zooming in and out on outsized skates” (206). After this, Saul offers tobacco in thanks to “the lake where everything started and everything ended” and moves on to the next stage of his recovery (206).

If the new moon in chapter 48 implies that Saul must make a journey towards wholeness, the full moon in chapter 51 implies where wholeness might be found. What is particularly striking about the second image, I think, is the way the moon ends up symbolizing both Indigenous sacred ritual, in the form of a drum, and hockey, in the form of a rink. The image not only implies an affinity between these two things but a connection to the centre of life, the sacred place where everything begins and ends. The vision of children playing links directly to Saul’s desire to nurture a love of the game in Indigenous children. The image of “the smallest among them” adds a further element to Saul’s desire: by sharing the joy of hockey with other children he also cares for the “smallest” child—the boy—within himself.

The last chapters of Indian Horse stress that Saul’s healing journey will not be easy. Saul’s experience with the New Dawn Centre, in which he makes some progress, then has to leave, then returns for further treatment, implies how recovery is an ongoing process in which survivors often have to circle back to previous stages (see Herman 1997, 211). A key moment after Saul’s return to Manitouwadge is when Fred and Martha Kelly admit to their own horrific experiences at residential school and the challenges they have faced in rebuilding their lives. Fred then uses a hockey analogy to suggest a path forward. He tells Saul that he is not responsible for what happened to him, but he is responsible for his own healing. Knowing that about himself, Fred goes on, is “what saved me. Knowing it was my game.” Saul then jokes that it could be a “long game” and Fred replies, “So what if it is? … Just keep your stick on the ice and your feet moving. Time will take care of itself” (Wagamese 2012, 210).

The last scene of the novel has Saul going with Virgil to a pick-up hockey game. When he gets there, Saul sees again the “white glory” of a rink (220). The repetition of this image from Saul’s first discovery of hockey implies that he has come full circle. The image also implies that the spiritual promise of hockey remains, despite the terrible history that is also a part of the game. Saul warms up alone. First he skates in ritual-like fashion around the ice. Then he finds a ball of tape on the ice, which reminds him of the horse turds he used as a child, and snaps it “into the top corner of the net” (220). Eventually, others appear. Instead of the usual limited number of players, however, the old Moose players have come with “kids of assorted ages … [and] young girls and older women” (220–21). Everybody stays on the ice and Saul asks Virgil how they can play a game with so many players. “Together,” Virgil replies, “Like we shoulda all along” (221).

The Two-Eyed Game

In 2012, the same year in which Indian Horse was published, Cheryl Bartlett, in partnership with the ’Mi’kmaq elders Murdena and Albert Marshall, suggested that reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous people in Canada could be aided by the concept of “two-eyed seeing.” They defined two-eyed seeing as “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing, and to using both these eyes together, for the benefit of all” (Bartlett, Marshall, and Marshall 2012, 335).

Richard Wagamese was probably not aware of this concept when he wrote Indian Horse. “Two-eyed seeing,” however, captures very well the features of Saul’s healing journey in the novel—including his return to hockey. As I mentioned above, Saul’s journey takes him through the three stages of recovery described by Judith Herman, but each stage is redefined by Indigenous wisdom. The significance of this is particularly evident during Saul’s returns to Gods Lake and Manitouwadge. At Gods Lake he experiences the healing potential of his homeland and the feelings of wholeness and connection with his ancestors that this land can inspire. At Manitouwadge he rebuilds his relationship to community in a way that has particular resonance for Indigenous people. As McKegney and Phillips stress, Saul’s healing requires him to “broaden his individualist focus” on the possibility of hockey transforming “ordinary men” into “great men,” in order “to encompass the realities of living Indigenous communities” (2018, 182).

The complexities of two-eyed seeing are also captured in the Indian Horse family name. The origin of the name is described in chapter 2, a stand-alone chapter between the opening account of Saul at the New Dawn Centre and the chapters detailing Saul’s early life. Chapter 2 tells of how Shabogeesick, Saul’s great-grandfather, brought a horse into the remote Ojibway community. Shabogeesick, from whom Saul inherits his gift of vision, tells a story about the significance of the horse. He explains that horses were brought into the land by the Zhaunagush (the White settlers) but that The People recognized a kinship with “these spirit beings” and adopted them for their own (Wagamese 2012, 7). The story of the horse is, for Shabogeesick, a parable for how Indigenous people must adapt to change. “A great change will come,” he says. “It will come with the speed of lightning and it will scorch all our lives.… 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” (7). The family name is conferred by the men who come to force the Ojibway to sign the treaty register. These Zhaunagush are surprised to see a horse in such an isolated community. They ask where the horse came from, and community members point to Shabogeesick. The Zhaunagush, then, call Shabogeesick “Indian Horse” and it becomes the name of Saul’s family from then on (7).

A fascinating aspect of the name story is that it is unclear whether the Zhaunagush meant “Indian Horse” as a racist epithet, a tribute, or a neutral descriptor. It is unlikely, given the historical times, that the name was a tribute. It might have been intended as a neutral descriptor, a playfully chosen “family” name for the agents to use on the registry; but the act of a white official naming an Indigenous person in this manner is colonial by definition and brings to mind the forced conferring of “Christian” names on Indigenous children at residential schools (in Indian Horse, Lonnie Rabbit is forcibly renamed “Aaron” on page 45). Most likely, the name was intended as an insult, in the manner of derogatory terms in settler culture created by putting “Indian” in front of something.

Despite the fraught history behind the Indian Horse family name, the name is (also) a reminder of Shagobeesick’s teachings about the horse. These teachings, in turn, offer a way for Indigenous people to address historical change. The hockey game at the end of Indian Horse embodies Shagobeesick’s wisdom. Like the horse, hockey was introduced into the lives of Indigenous people by the Zhaunagush as part of a violent colonial process (if, by “hockey,” we refer to the organized game set in motion by the Montreal Rules of James Creighton in 1875), yet Saul and other Indigenous players recognize in the game a “spirit” with which they feel an affinity. This spirit, like the spirit of the horse, is related to the “speed of lightning.” The transformative possibilities Saul senses in hockey require a recognition of colonial history (in the same way that Saul recognizes what happened to him in the residential schools) and then a disentangling from that history. They require the bringing together of the strengths of Indigenous culture with the strengths of Western culture. From this two-eyed seeing comes a reshaped version of the game that illustrates not only how hockey can be part of a vital Indigenous culture, but how hockey can suggest a model for reimagining the Canadian nation.

Works Cited