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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

INDIAN HORSE

Richard Wagamese

Over 100.000 copies sold in Canada
Saul Indian Horse has hit bottom. His last binge almost killed him, and now he's a reluctant resident in a treatment centre for alcoholics, surrounded by people he's sure will never understand him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that he'll find it only through telling his story. With him, readers embark on a journey back through the life he's led as a northern Ojibway, with all its joys and sorrows.

With compassion and insight, author Richard Wagamese traces through his fictional characters the decline of a culture and a cultural way. For Saul, taken forcibly from the land and his family when he's sent to residential school, salvation comes for a while through his incredible gifts as a hockey player. But in the harsh realities of 1960s Canada, he battles obdurate racism and the spirit-destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement.

Indian Horse unfolds against the bleak loveliness of northern Ontario, all rock, marsh, bog and cedar. Wagamese writes with a spare beauty, penetrating the heart of a remarkable Ojibway man. Drawing on his great-grandfather's mystical gift of vision, Saul Indian Horse comes to recognize the influence of everyday magic on his own life. In this wise and moving novel, Richard Wagamese shares that gift of magic with readers as well.

Richard Wagamese (1955 – 2017) was one of Canada's foremost Native authors and storytellers. He worked as a professional writer since 1979. He was a newspaper columnist and reporter, radio and television broadcaster and producer, documentary producer and the author of twelve titles from major Canadian publishers.
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Published 2023-05-11 by Douglas & McIntyre

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Editions Zoe

Quill & Quire has recently praised the film adaptation of the late Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse for “stay[ing] true to [the author's] voice.” The film, produced by Screen Siren pictures and directed by Stephen Campanelli, has been widely praised by critics and audiences alike, winning audience choice awards at several film festivals across Canada. In the Quill & Quire article, producer Christine Haebler credits Wagamese's voice and input as being “key to the success of the film.”

Screen Siren: The motion picture debut of Indian Horse (sold for distribution in spain, Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and China) was nominated in five categories of the Leo Awards and won in two categories! Read more...

At the beginning of this haunting and masterful novel from the late Wagamese (1955–2017), eight-year-old Saul Indian Horse is alone, having been abandoned in a blizzard in rural Ontario in 1961. He finds himself in this situation after his parents set off to bury his brother and are never seen again. Saul is left alone with his grandmother; the two then flee the family's ancestral home on Gods Lake to Minaki, trying to escape the cold. After his grandmother succumbs to the cold, Saul is sent to St. Jerome's, a Catholic boarding school run to forcefully assimilate indigenous children and “remove the Indian” from them. While his classmates succumb to disease, abuse, and suicide, Saul escapes when his natural talent for hockey lands him a spot on a local Ojibway team in 1966. Saul's career progresses from unofficial tournaments at makeshift hockey rinks to the minor league in Toronto. However, it stalls after his skills on the ice attract rage from whites “in the black heart of northern Ontario in the 1960s.” Denied acceptance in the world of his choice, Saul is forced to reckon with the trauma of his upbringing and carve out a place for himself. In spare, poetic language, Wagamese wrestles with trauma and its fallout, and charts the long, lonely walk to survival.

Milkweed Editions