<i>Indian Horse</i> and Finding Place and Belonging in Sport History

The novel Indian Horse by the late Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese has received significant public and scholarly attention since its 2012 publication. On the surface, the importance of Indian Horse to sport history might be obvious, particularly in the context of Canada's sporting past. Simply put, it is the story of a young boy who falls in love with hockey and goes on to achieve great things in Canada's avowed national winter sport. Nonetheless, the broader context and details complicate and disrupt such typical (i.e., sanitized and whitewashed) narratives of Canada's sporting history, mainly as it concerns settler Canadians’ resolved attachment to hockey. A close reading of Wagamese's acclaimed novel teaches us many things about Canada's sporting past, most importantly, the ways in which sport is intimately interwoven with the aspirations of Canadian settler colonialism. For this reason alone, Indian Horse is an exceedingly important sport history book because it offers an honest account of Canada's sporting past. It recognizes that the foundation of Canada's sport system—akin to the underpinnings of Canada's legal, political, and economic systems—is conditional upon violence carried out on Indigenous bodies and Indigenous land dispossession.Concerning the question of Indigenous bodies, Indian Horse is a telltale account of Canada's dark history. The novel centers on the experiences of Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibway kid and hockey player who was heartlessly stolen from his family at age eight and sent to St. Jerome's Indian Residential School. For the next five years, he experienced inconceivable abuse at the hands of nuns, priests, and teachers—those purportedly responsible for his education, safety, and general well-being. There, Saul became a student of hockey and, eventually, a skilled and prolific player. After his time at St. Jerome's, he competed in more competitive all-Native and mainstream leagues, achieving significant athletic success, albeit experiencing incessant racism in mainstream hockey spaces. Eventually, the trauma of his childhood overcomes him, and Saul turns away from the game he loves and that had offered him solace for so many years. In the end, we learn that even in these sporting spaces of supposed refuge, away from the day-to-day abuses carried out at St. Jerome's, Saul cannot escape the violence enacted upon him by yet another authority figure entrusted to care for him—his coach. Although fiction, Indian Horse is, in all respects, grounded in historical fact. It uses Saul to narrate a truthful account of the abuses experienced by thousands of innocent children throughout Canada and the role of sport in abetting such violence.While the question of Indigenous land dispossession is less transparent throughout the novel, it is nonetheless central to Wagamese's story. Literature scholars, in particular, have critically engaged this acclaimed novel, not only calling attention to Saul's heartbreaking residential school experiences but also emphasizing questions of Indigenous land dispossession. Importantly, within the settler imagination is the belief that the landscape from which hockey organically arose was literally and metaphorically “white” and, thus, lacking an Indigenous presence. As scholars Sam McKegney and Trevor J. Phillips contend, “Hockey is often conceived as a vehicle for manufacturing settler belonging. . . . This is why the landscape of frozen lakes and rivers that is conceptualized as the ‘True North’ and replicated in NHL advertising and beer commercials is one that tends to be portrayed as devoid of Indigenous presence.”1 On these assumed barren topographies, Canada's hockey and, by extension, broader sporting histories typically descend. As such, Indian Horse brings to the forefront Indigenous land dispossession, recognizing that Saul was not only cruelly ripped from his family and sent to residential school, but in doing so, he was, too, violently torn from his Ojibway homelands. And although he fell in love with hockey, as Wagamese subtly yet powerfully discerns, Saul could not find belonging in a game that arose on lands stolen by Canada and in a sport that worked to sustain the impaired missions of nation-building.Nevertheless, Indian Horse is not just a story about suffering and loss. It is also a story about survival, belonging, and love. Saul's journey in the physical world begins in 1961 on Aki, the Ojibway word for Mother the Earth, where he is in the protection of his family—his grandmother, mother, father, brother, and those in the Spirit World, all who belong to Manitou Gameeng (later named God's Lake by Zhaunagush [the white man] missionaries), the territory to which the Indian Horse family belongs. Although the family endured considerable day-to-day hardship in Saul's early years, including the prior abductions of his two siblings by Canada's government, the family's despairing efforts to keep Saul safe from such evil, and the sorrows of his parents who desperately tried to cope with the kidnapping of their two oldest children, Saul experienced much joy in these early years of his life, as he was surrounded by and raised within an ethos of love and belonging. Importantly, at the outset of this work, Wagamese takes the time to share stories about Saul's family and ancestors and the landscape that nourished and protected the Indian Horse family for millennia.Indian Horse is an exceedingly important sport history text, first and foremost because it offers a truthful account of Canada's sporting past, thus disrupting conventional discourse. It can reasonably be argued that a nation's sporting history cannot exist outside and beyond the history that gave rise to the creation of the nation-state. Indigenous land dispossession and violence enacted on Indigenous bodies were (and are) central to Canada's nation-building project. As such, Indian Horse squarely positions sport as an important set of cultural practices that worked to sustain, abet, and incite the aspirations of the rising nation-state and, thus, advance Canadian settler colonialism. Nonetheless, it is not for these reasons alone that I believe Indian Horse to be the most important sport history text. Rather, I consider Indian Horse to be the most important sport history text because it offers a truthful account of Canada's sporting past and speaks to relevant truths beyond those of suffering and loss. Importantly, this novel interacts with questions of survival, belonging, and love, conditions so vital to the prosperity of a people. At the end of the novel, Saul returns to hockey, but before doing so, he returns to Manitou Gameeng, where he is greeted by those now in the Spirit World, including his brother, grandmother, grandfather, great-grandfather, mother, father, and strangers (whom he understood to be ancient family members). In asking what he is to learn from this visit, Saul's great-grandfather, Shabogeesick, explains, “You've come to learn to carry this place within you” (205). In this exchange, Saul is reminded of the land he belongs to and, although not with him in the physical world, the people who love him. From a sports history perspective, the significance of Shabogeesick's words is critical. They remind us that place and belonging are core underpinnings within Indigenous epistemologies and, therefore, paramount to our understanding of sporting histories that have arisen on territories cared for by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.

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