76 pages • 2 hours read
Richard WagameseIndian Horse
Richard WagameseFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 37-39Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 37 Summary
Toronto is very unfamiliar. A “mad jumble of speed, noise and people…There was nothing wild” (158). The couple he is billeted with are the Sheehans: Patrick, an ex-player, and his wife Elissa. At training camp, he is the only brown face and is roundly ignored by the other players. Only three of thirty players will be chosen for the team but the talented players around him “made [him] reach deeper, fight harder, skate more deliberately” (160).
Chapter 38 Summary
Saul makes the team and trusts the ability of his teammates, making his passes “the solder that welded [their] attacks together” (162). Unfortunately, Saul remains an outsider to both his teammates and audiences. The press covers his play in racist terms, saying he is “taking scalps” or “counting coup.” As he says: “I wanted to rise to new heights.... But they wouldn’t let me be just a hockey player. I always had to be the Indian” (164). As in Ontario, he begins to be checked and hit frequently and in one game, snaps. A player from the rival team slashes him behind the knees and Saul punches him in the face. His game changes. He becomes a puck hog, and continually gets in fights. He says he’s giving the people what they want, and though he plays well, he also spends an enormous amount of time in the penalty box and is ultimately benched completely. After spending a single night in the stands, he takes a bus back to Manitouwadge.
Chapter 39 Summary
Saul recounts the story of a young pair of sisters at St. Jerome’s. The younger sister is scared of the nuns and tries to run to her sister Rebecca for comfort, which gets her sent to the basement and the Iron Sister. Rebecca, while trying to protect her young sibling, also ends up getting put in the Iron Sister as punishment. While there, her younger sister dies mysteriously in her sleep. Rebecca stands in the Indian Yard, singing an Ojibway mourning song and, before anyone notices she has a knife, stabs herself in the belly and dies. Everyone sings the mourning song in their forbidden tongue.
Chapter 37-39 Analysis
Nothing about Saul’s life in Toronto is comfortable or familiar, and it holds none of the sense of home that he found in Manitouwadge. The city itself has no wildness to anchor him, the way his short time at Gods Lake or stolen moments at St. Jerome’s had. He is surrounded by white players, a white host family, and a white crowd.
Though he maintains his status as a team player and expert passer, saying, “My passes were the solder that welded our attacks together,” (162) he is never accepted by his teammates. At first they show indifference, which “hurt a lot more” (163) than meanness. While they aren’t openly racist, they only refer to him as his number, and then move away from him on the bench for not retaliating. And once he begins fighting and hogging the puck, he and the team reject each other.
While at first he still feels the joy of the game due to the high level of play, it doesn’t last. Chapter 38 is when he finally breaks. The endless taunting from players, crowds, and press, the distillation of him down to his ethnicity makes him snap. “If hockey had been the only arena in which I was tested, I would have won in a rout. But it wasn’t” (161). Just as he had been trapped between his whiteness (bookishness, passion for a white man’s game) and Indigenousness, he finds himself trapped between his ideal of the game and everyone’s expectations. He’s tired of the insults, the stereotyping, and the isolation. When he gets in his first fight, he sacrifices the joyful game that provided his escape to fully inhabit his own sense of rage at his past, and the continued racism that emphasizes his lack of belonging.
“That was the end of any semblance of joy in the game for me…. I wanted the game to lift me up. To make the world disappear as it always had. But as a Marlboro, I could never shake being the Indian,” (165) he says. Hockey finally stops offering him an escape from his pain. In losing the joy, his sacred vision, and the sense of community he found with the Moose, it loses all healing and transcendent powers and all he is left with is the rage over his difficult youth, exacerbated by the racism and rejection.
Chapter 39’s short anecdote (seemingly out of nowhere) describing the experience of watching a horrible scene of violence and mourning unfold at St. Jerome’s offers a hint of a pathway forward for Saul. While Rebecca is unable to survive, the Ojibway mourning song she sings carries the rest of the children through. It is an example of how tradition, the old ways, and a sense of community can carry someone through adversity, and help heal a broken spirit.
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