When your innocence is stripped from you, when your people are denigrated, when the family you came from is denounced and your tribal ways and rituals are pronounced backward, primitive, savage, you come to see yourself as less than human. That is hell on earth, that sense of unworthiness. That's what they inflicted on us.
In The Autobiography of Mark Twain, the author at one point explains the apparent contradiction of his kind hearted, Christian mother being a slave owner. He declares that his mother had heard a thousand sermons from the pulpit justifying slavery and never one against it — the justification being that by stealing the Africans from their heathen homelands and exposing them to the good and God-fearing people of America (and other countries), the slaves would be offered the mercy and salvation of that same God. Even before Emancipation, Mark Twain knew that slavery was vile and reprehensible, but felt his mother's religious motivations excused her uncharacteristically unjust behaviour. It is incredible to think that the same misguided motivations prompted the Residential Schools in Canada, at the same time that slavery was being abolished south of the border.
From Wikipedia:
The system had origins in pre-Confederation times, but was primarily active following the passage of the Indian Act in 1876, until the mid-twentieth century. An amendment to the Indian Act in 1920 made attendance at a day, industrial or residential school compulsory for First Nations children and, in some parts of the country, residential schools were the only option. The number of residential schools reached 80 in 1931 but decreased in the years that followed. The last federally-operated residential school was closed in 1996.
1996! What a sickening notion, that while we in Canada take great pride in being the freedom end of the Underground Railroad, we were also rounding up all of the Native children, tearing them from their families, and placing them in institutions where they could have their culture, language and traditions literally beaten out of them. This was, of course, indefensible, but…I have to believe that, like the good mother of Mark Twain, there were people at the time who believed that the schools would be beneficial to the children; that they would be taught the language and the ways of the white man and therefore able to survive in the world that he was building; and that they would be offered the mercy and salvation of what they believed was the one true God. I'm not saying, of course, that this exonerates them in hindsight anymore than I would absolve the slave traders, but I don't believe that Residential Schools were conceived in evil.
When I read Sapphire's Push and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, I was shocked and disturbed by the unrelenting abuse that characters suffered at the hands of various individuals and society at large, and had to keep reminding myself that these were works of fiction, and if the authors wanted to push my tolerance, that's their prerogative; yet it was also my prerogative to reject the storyline when it went too far. Reading Indian Horse, I was similarly shocked and disturbed, but had to accept that Richard Wagamese was trying to tell a story with truth at its core; that this horrendous experience could have happened to Saul Little Horse. How could I dismiss that? I do wish that there had been even one good and kind white person at St. Jerome's: when the priests and nuns alike all engaged in physical and sexual abuse of the children, I was slightly taken out of the story (as I had been by Sapphire and Yanagihara). Even the nuns rape the children? Even the supposedly good Father Leboutilier? Because the experience seemed so extreme, it seemed, perhaps, untrue. But, as much as I would have liked to have seen any compassion at all shown towards Saul, this is his story, and just as there may have been one Residential School somewhere with loving and charitable staff, there undoubtedly was, to Canada's everlasting shame, these schools with none.
Richard Wagamese is a poetic and powerful storyteller. Many passages had me pausing to reread:
Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey water that peeled across our bow. The pellets of rain were warm and Benjamin and I caught them on our tongues as our grandmother laughed behind us. Our canoes skimmed along and as I watched the shoreline it seemed the land itself was in motion. The rocks lay lodged like hymns in the breast of it, and the trees bent upward in praise like crooked fingers. It was glorious. Ben felt it too. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I held his look a long time, drinking in the face of my brother.
We need mystery. Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel this. We honour it by letting it be that way forever.
You drink down to the place that only diehard drunkards know; the world at the bottom of the well where you huddle in darkness, haunted forever by the knowledge of light.
And the long passages about hockey are both lyrical and exciting. So why only three stars? Something about this book felt important yet superficial. Saul Indian Horse is fleshed out, but most other characters are not — just good Natives and bad whites, and the opportunity for a deeper understanding feels missed. The epigraph at the beginning is lovely and telling:
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
WENDELL BERRY, "The Peace of Wild Things"
So too does Saul Little Horse eventually return to the stillness of a wild place and become whole. Spiritually, that is beautiful. But if it's a political statement, what does it mean? I don't think the author is suggesting that Natives should return to a Pre-Columbian lifestyle in the wilds. And integration, especially through forced attendance at a Residential School, isn't a preferred solution. As we daily see images of Natives on reservations living in third world conditions, what is the solution? I'd hazard to say that the vast majority of Canadians want to see all Natives live fulfilling and autonomous lives and right now there are few solutions that will achieve it, not least because no one wants to make another disastrous decision like the one that led to the creation of the Residential Schools.
I see users here suggesting that Indian Horse should be required reading in Canadian high schools and that seems a good start to me: the subject matter is serious and important, and although I don't know if this is a perfect book, it adds value to the conversation.
Edited in 2021 to add:
In light of this week's horrific discovery of a mass grave of 215 children on the grounds of a former Kamloops Residential School, I came back here with a sense of dread at my own remembered insensitivity to the Residential School experience and the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of that indefensible practise. Rereading this review, my initial thoughts still stand (that there is a moral equivalence between institutionalised slavery in the US and the Canadian Residential School system — both are vile, racist, paternalistic; the worst expressions of Christianity and Capitalism), and I still believe that there were good-hearted Canadians who were brainwashed by their own times into believing that the Residential Schools provided some benefit to these stolen children. Of course we know better now, and in no way am I denying now (or meant to imply that I was denying back in 2013) the horrific abuses suffered by these children, but I still see no benefit in judging people in the past by the standards of today. Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese have led the way in educating Canadians about the truth of the First Nations' experience and my heart is open to that truth (even if I struggle to express the point I want to make here). If a reader comes upon this review and feels like I am still being insensitive to the realities of the First Nations' experience, know that I acknowledge the horrors of the past, the incomprehensible stalemate of the present, and sincerely support demands for an autonomous and dignified future.
