Name: Onyeka Dike

Course Code: ENGL 680

Course Title: Canadian Literature

Course Instructor: Professor Robert Lecker

Deconstructing Difference in Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse

Richard Wagamese’s emotionally tense bildungsroman novel, Indian Horse, tells a psychologically

devastating story about a boy’s journey from childhood to adulthood. The story starts with the narrator,

Saul Indian Horse, growing up with his grandmother after the death of his elder brother, a victim of the

Indian residential school system. His grandmother dies shortly after, and he is kidnapped and enrolled at

St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School, an institution that sought to westernise and Christianise

indigenous children. Instead of getting educated and civilised, Saul grows up being psychologically

damaged, as he is sexually molested by Father Gaston Leboutilier, one of the priests in the school. In

search of healing, Saul embraces hockey and becomes the best at it, yet he gives up the game because

the Zhaunagush (white men) believe it is their game and an Indian has no place in it. He turns to alcohol,

but that only worsens the trauma, as he ends up in a rehabilitation centre. To connect back to his core,

he visits the places in his past that had always haunted him, including the school and his childhood

environment, God’s Lake.

A close reading of the novel reveals the politics of power at play, with the white man trying to

emphasise the superiority of his ways over indigenous culture. The reader is immediately introduced to

the binaries of good and evil, Christianity and traditional religion, light and darkness, formal education

and communal learning, and the western culture compared to Indigenous ways. The more privileged of

the binaries take preeminence, and it is a victory guaranteed by guns.

On an ideological level, the Europeans visit a naming violence on anything in the Indigenous culture that

they find interesting. They change the name of the local river from “Manitou Gameeng” to “God’s Lake”

and rename all the Indian children who they successfully kidnap and bring to the residential schools:

“Saul,” Sister Ignacia said. “That’s a fine biblical name. We won’t need to change that.
But we’re going to have to do something about Lonnie Rabbit. I think Aaron is more
suitable. From now on you are Aaron Rabbit. Do you understand?”
 “But Lonnie is my dad’s name,” the boy said.
“Well, the Lord God is your father now and he wants you called Aaron.” (45)
The motivation for changing the names of the children stems from a belief that there is a difference

between Christian names and ‘heathen’ names. It was therefore important for the priests and nuns to

demonstrate to the children that their culture was primitive and had to be extracted from them, even if

it meant metaphorically murdering their parents.

The little children are also made to believe that there is a difference between the white man’s religion

and theirs. After beating Lonnie until he collapses, Sister Ignacia readily informs him when he comes to,

that at “St. Jerome’s we work to remove the Indian from our children so that the blessings of the Lord

may be evidenced upon them” (46-47). However, Christianit--a religion supposedly founded on love--

turns out to be evil in practice, as the priests and nuns visit unimaginable levels of physical,

psychological and sexual violence on the children. Recounting some of the experiences, Saul says:

I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St.
Jerome’s. I saw young boys and girls die standing on their own two feet. I saw
runaways carried back, frozen solid as boards. I saw bodies hung from rafters on thin
ropes. I saw wrists slashed and the cascade of blood on the bathroom floor and, one
time, a young boy impaled on the tines of a pitchfork that he’d shoved through
himself. I watched a girl calmly fill the pockets of her apron with rocks and walk away
across the field. She went to the creek and sat on the bottom and drowned. (55)
The children had to endure unimaginable levels of dehumanization and wickedness for ‘sins’ as trivial as

giving the wrong answer, speaking their indigenous language, trying to protect their siblings or even

trying to escape the inhuman treatment. Beyond the physical violence, there was a constant rape

culture packaged as God’s love. Angelique Lynx Leg, a female student at St. Jerome’s, was made to

believe that God’s love was what “Sister brings at night. What Father brings. To bless me. To nourish

me” (82).

On a metaphysical level, Christianity is projected as a religion of light, in sharp contrast with the dark

ways of the Indigenous people. But Saul laments:

 St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world. Everything I knew vanished behind
me with an audible swish, like the sound a moose makes disappearing into
spruce. (43)

The residential school which symbolised Christianity in its sophisticated form, deprived him of the light

which his Indigenous ways had provided him up till that point. As a young boy, he was already beginning

to get spiritual guidance from his ancestors. As he informs us, his “people have rituals and ceremonies

meant to bring us vision” (3). But all that is soon lost when he comes in contact with the Euro-Canadian

culture and values. He bemoans this loss when he says, “[o]f all the things that would die in the change

to come, the way to that sacred place was perhaps the most grievous loss” (6).

Intra-textually, the most compelling irony of difference comes towards the end of the novel. In the

earlier pages, Father Leboutilier is seen as the only exception out of a long list of wicked and perverted

religious priests. But when Saul chooses to finally fill in the gaps he had omitted during his time at St.

Jerome’s, we see a sexual predator who is just as terrible as the rest:

“You are a glory, Saul.” That’s what he always told me. It’s what he whispered to
me in the dim light of his quarters, what he said to me those nights he snuck into
the dormitory and put his head beneath the covers. The words he used in the
back of the barn when he slipped my trousers down. That was the phrase that
began the groping, the tugging, the pulling and the sucking, and those were
always the last words he said to me as he left, arranging his priestly clothes. (199)
Whatever kindness he showed Saul was done to buy his silence and make him at ease. Consequently,

the version of Christianity the white settlers sold to the Indigenous people was dubious, hateful and evil.

And like Saul admitted, “I could never understand how the god they proclaimed was watching over us

could turn his head away and ignore such cruelty and suffering” (52). In the end, the differences

between the binaries are apparent, but the irony is that the privileged of the binaries are the ones that

should be dismantled in order to have a return to harmony.

Nice paper Onyeka. You should number your pages. I think you do a good job of summarizing the book

and providing concrete examples to illustrate your points. I think you could still find a bit more c oncision

in your prose—there are ways to make the syntax more direct and powerful by cutting out superfluous

words. However, you provide an honest and detailed response to the work. Your review is convincing.

A (8.6/10)