Better Call Saul

Canada lacks a common narrative, partly because of competing national mythologies. But there are also the stories we have refused to tell, ones that have been carefully omitted from our history, many of which belong to those who lived here first. When I was growing up, most Canadians, including recent immigrants like my parents, did not consider Indigenous literature to be an integral part of mainstream culture. It wasn’t until I started working in publishing, shortly after finishing university, that I spent time with First Nations stories. A children’s book author on our company’s list, C. J. Taylor, introduced me to the idea that the same land could be experienced in wildly divergent ways. It feels obvious to say it now, but her retellings of Mohawk folklore for kids opened me up.

Despite this revelation, my reading remained limited for years. And, in typically Canadian fashion, I unthinkingly sought out authors from south of the border: Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, among others. It was only when I watched Indian Horse, the 2017 adaptation of Richard Wagamese’s sixth novel, that I started to realize the extent of my blind spots.

All this is to say that I now think of Indian Horse as the most Canadian book I have read. It takes the wilderness survival trope, which Margaret Atwood introduced in her 1972 survey of our national literature, Survival, and upends it. Published in 2012, Wagamese’s work is a story about endurance, sure, but it is mostly about shame, both within the book and for its reader; our shame is a forceful idea that comes through on every page. The timing of its publication also feels significant. Just a few years later, in 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed the ghastly suffering of thousands of Indigenous children, their parents and families, and entire communities — a country.

The novel begins with Saul Indian Horse, a six-year-old Ojibway boy living in the wilds of Manitoba and Ontario in the 1950s. He is separated from his family and ends up, at eight years old, in a residential school where he discovers a love of hockey. As a teenager, he earns a ticket to Toronto to play at a higher level. There he confronts obstacle after obstacle — and a new world and a new level of hostility — before succumbing to alcoholism and nihilism.

Indian Horse is a study in the failure of institutions — spiritual, political, and social — as they intersect with and are instructed by the legacy of colonialism. It is also a foray into unimaginable violence, hard work, camaraderie, family, and redemption. Through one boy’s dreams, Wagamese reveals a society structured to break down its youngest and most vulnerable. At times it is gruesome, with casual mentions of the deaths of children — sometimes several kids in a single paragraph — and families torn asunder by situation and system. Above all, it is about dealing with traumas, both your own and those that have been passed down through generations.

The poetic evocations of nature and Saul Indian Horse’s discovery of hockey are written with tremendous detail. The opening chapters, which show the Ojibway people’s spiritual link to the bleak landscape along with the way the past and the present live together, bring the reader to an expansive and intimate way of seeing the world. “We made our home in the territories along the Winnipeg River,” the narrator begins, “where the river opens wide before crossing into Manitoba after it leaves Lake of the Woods and the rugged spine of northern Ontario. They say that our cheekbones are cut from those granite ridges that rise above our homeland.” The land, home, spirituality, and community: there is no distinction. Which is the point and continues to be the point. If you don’t understand, read these opening lines again. Read the part about young Saul’s vision at Gods Lake. Or the account of his return to its shore to commune with his great-grandfather and namesake. These pages are imbued with the sense that identity is indistinguishable from place.

Yet there are passages that are shockingly banal for a book of such power. When Saul finds a family of beavers in the woods, he calls it “delightful” and leaves it at that. The pacing feels uneven, too, especially in the second half. But whose pacing and sense of time am I thinking about here? Criticizing Indian Horse along these lines feels churlish, leading me to question the cultural standards I’m imposing upon the work. I’m not uncomfortable about my perspective, but I’m uncertain, especially when I remember my own shame and complicity. The weary redemption — and, yes, sense of survival — Saul feels at the end mirrors that of the reader.

That’s the hope. And that’s the gift.