Indian Horse Analysis

Imagine your innocence and culture being stripped from you, your people denigrated. The family you come from is denounced and your tribal ways and rituals are pronounced backwards and savage by a more superior group of people wanting you to fit the image of what they think is correct. Your people are perceived to be less than human. In Richard Wagamese 1970s based novel Indian Horse this is the case for Saul Indian Horse and the rest of his family. While utilizing the concepts of the Post colonialism theory it can be argued that “Indian Horse’ ’demonstrates a time in which Aboriginal people are hunted down and forcefully taken out of their homeland, assimilated with foreign culture and converted into ideal members of society through harsh …show more content…
It felt as though they were trying to remove our skin” (page44) the people of the residential school were trying to do exactly that but not literally. The efforts of the school were to remove the Indian from the child “At St. Jerome we work to remove the Indian from our children so that the blessings of the lord may be evidence upon them” (page47). With the Indian child comes a unique skin tone that separates them from the white people. “The nuns shaved our hair down to hubby crew cuts with electric clippers. When I looked at the other boy he was crying. Hair is something very sacred to the aboriginal people, it is a big part of their culture and to just cut it off with no remorse shows the mentality of the school operatives and what they thought of the children and the lack of power the children had toward these individuals. The mental aspect of conversion however was much more difficult and inhumane. One of the boys in the school was six year old Arden little light. Arden had a nose running problem and to correct it the nuns placed him in front of students with his hands behind his back for days. This was humiliating and completely inhumane. Arden was eventually found hanging from the rafters in the school. “He was from people who had forged survival out of the bush as hunters, trappers, and fisherman. That way of being was tied directly to the power they felt everywhere around them, and he’d been born to that, had learned it like …show more content…
The hockey games he plays in become violent, especially when they play against white teams. Sometimes, Saul encounters white players who try to “rough him up” on the rink by playing more aggressively than is necessary, but he’s usually able to outplay them on the ice. Other times, big fights break out between players. When the team plays in Northern Ontario, they encounter hatred unlike anything they’ve ever had to experience before. The opposing team, see the team as “brown faces,” nothing more. Once, after winning a game, Saul and his teammates go to a local café to celebrate their victory. A group of white men approach the team and declare, “We don’t eat with Indians.” Virgil (teammate of Saul) boldly asks the men to step outside. A couple minutes later, Virgil staggers inside, his face covered in blood. Then, the white men order other players to step outside with them. Each time a player steps outside they would come back bloody and beaten. Later the boys explain how the men tormented and disrespected them on such an insane level. You later find out these men were urinating and beating up the boys.” But you know what the scariest thing was Saul? There was no yelling, no cussing, and no nothing. They did it silently. Like it was an everyday thing. I never knew people could be that cold” (page 136). In this painful passage the reason for the aggression of the white people is that Saul and his teammates won their game. So the racist townspeople’s