Indian Horse
Indian Horse is a novel by Canadian writer Richard Wagamese, published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2012. Wagamese's best known work, it won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2013 and was a competing title in the 2013 edition of Canada Reads.
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. 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.
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.
A film adaptation, Indian Horse, was directed by Stephen Campanelli and premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
In 2020, the novel's French translation Cheval Indien, was selected for Le Combat des Livres, the French-language edition of Canada Reads, where it was defended by Romeo Saganash.
