Indian Horse by RIchard Wagamese

When I released myself to the mystery of the ice I became a different creature. I could slow down time, choose the tempo I needed whenever I launched myself into learning a new skill. I could hurtle down the ice at full speed and then bend time in upon itself to slow the turn, every muscle, every tendon, every sinew in my body remembering the movement, learning it, making it a part of me.

As a child, Saul Indian Horse has a vision: at his family's ancestral home at Gods Lake in northern Ontario, he sees his ancestors, living the way they once did at the water's edge. He sees his great-grandfather, the original Indian Horse who first brought horses to the local tribes from the plains Ojibwe. But Saul's vision is of little help when his parents disappear, taking his little brother's body--he has just died of tuberculosis--to a distant priest, never to be seen again. He and his grandmother travel painstakingly through the dead of winter the closest town, where Saul is taken by the whites who find him and placed into one of Canada's notorious residential schools.

If nothing else, Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse presents a damning account of the brutality of the residential schools, where students are beaten, tormented, and killed. Children, stolen from their parents, punished with long bouts of solitary confinement inside the freezing "Iron Sister," hands tied behind their back, forced to work, respond by breaking, even committing suicide. Deaths are a frequent occurrence, but never mentioned; children's bodies are dumped into an anonymous grave and the nuns move on. It would be tempting to say that Wagamese's account is overly dramatic, if you didn't know that such things really did happen with great frequency.

One priest, a Father Leboutilier, takes to the young Saul, allowing him to serve as a kind of manager for the school's hockey team. Enamored of the older boys and the NHL Leboutilier shows him on TV, Saul practices in the early morning when no one is watching, and he turns out to be preternaturally talented: the vision that showed him his ancestors can show him the space of the ice and the movement of the game. I'll say this about Indian Horse: it's a good hockey novel. The descriptions of Saul's exploits in the game are easy to follow and exciting, without being impenetrable or repetitive, as sports writing might be, but Wagamese is well served by the simplicity and lucidity of his style. Perhaps hockey, the reader thinks, can bring Saul a life to replace the one he lost.

But as another Native coach tells him, the white people of Canada think hockey is "their game." Saul is coveted for his talent and moves up the ladder of amateur hockey, but he's resented for his Indianness by his teammates and mocked by fans. He responds by becoming a fighter, a goon. If it's a savage they want, he reasons, it's a savage they'll get, and the results reverberate off the ice: Saul quits hockey and begins to drift. As the novel opens, he makes it clear that he's writing from a rehab facility.

The biggest gut-punch in Indian Horse--here's the spoiler alert, folks--is when, toward the end of the novel, Saul remembers what he has suppressed: Father Leboutilier, the man who taught him hockey, the man who told him he was "a glory," the only one at the residential school who seemed to care if he lived or died, sexually abused him for years. It's a moment that takes your breath away. How can hockey save Saul when it's inextricable from the torture he received, and the brutality of white Canadians? Indian Horse is, at its heart, about the repercussions of that cruelty, and whether what it breaks can ever be remade.