Richard Wagamese · 2012 · survival

Richard Wagamese's 2012 novel. Saul Indian Horse is taken from the Winnipeg River country to a residential school, finds hockey there, and is good enough at it to get out - and then discovers that being good at it in white rinks costs more than staying would have. He tells it from an alcohol treatment centre, thirty years later.

1. 1
   The Winnipeg River

   Fish Clan country, where the river opens wide before crossing into Manitoba - and where Saul's family are still living the old way in the early sixties, moving with the season and staying out of reach of the school buses.

2. 2
   Gods Lake

   The family paddles to the ancestral place, and Saul has a vision there of his people at the water's edge and then crushed under rock - and it is here that his brother dies and the family comes apart.

3. 3
   St Jerome's

   The residential school: hair cut, language forbidden, the strap and worse - and a young priest who builds an outdoor rink, and a boy too small to play who gets the job of clearing it at four in the morning.

4. 4
   Manitouwadge

   He goes to live with the Kellys and plays for an all-Indigenous team that beats white teams and is hated for it - the happiest stretch of the book, and the only place Saul has felt at home since he was eight.

5. 5
   Toronto

   Signed by the Marlboros, and the crowds christen him the Rampaging Redskin - and he starts fighting instead of playing, gets benched, and walks out of the game and into twenty years of drinking.

6. 6
   Manitouwadge

   He goes back to Gods Lake and remembers what Father Leboutilier actually did to him, and then back to the Kellys - and puts on skates again on an outdoor rink with people who know his name.