Indian Horse is a dark ride
SPOTLIGHT Richard Wagamese and
Valerie Fortney will appear Wednesday at the Barley Mill Pub at 7 p.m. as part of Word fest’s celebration of Freedom to Read Week.
“I just wanted to write a hockey novel,” explains author Richard Wagamese, describing the unlikely early blueprint for his harrowing new book, Indian Horse.
“There was an actual dream, alternate-reality sequence in which Saul Indian Horse faces off in a one-on-one shootout with Vladislav Tretiak. It was very much a ‘Shoeless - joedoes- hockey’ kind of story, with a residential school as a very, very nebulous kind of background.”
The book would eventually come crashing down to earth and into darker terrain, all at the behest of Wagamese’s publisher.
Far from being gun-shy about putting out a book that clearly indicts the Catholic Church for its role in the horror-filled residential school system, Douglas & Mcintyre wanted something that would accurately show this shameful period in Canadian history, Wagamese says.
The B.c.-based Ojibwa, whose parents and grandparents were victims of a school system that pulled native children from their family and culture in the name of assimilation, obliged.
“I came at it originally a little passively,” Wagamese says, from a hotel room in downtown Vancouver, where he was receiving a National Aboriginal Achievement Award for media and communications. The publishers “encouraged me to be a little bit more harrowing, a little bit more brutal and a little bit more truthful about the elements of that institutional history that is being revealed through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and being bona fide and been endured by any number of people. So I ratcheted it up a bit.”
Of course, Wagamese didn’t totally do away with the hockey theme. Amid the abuse suffered at a residential school, the titular character in Indian Horse becomes a force on ice wearing second-hand equipment and practising with frozen horse turds. But there’s a certain irony that Wagamese will be joining Valerie Fortney, Calgary Herald columnist and author of Sunray: The Death and Life of Captain Nichola Goddard, on Wednesday to discuss censorship in honour of Freedom to Read Week.
Because Wagamese, recently described by a reviewer as “getting right in the reader’s face,” admits he’s never endured any pressure from anyone to dial down the more controversial aspects of his writing.
“My own experience has been very, very limited,” he says. “Only in the realm of publishing of anything that even remotely smacked of that. But I discovered through the years that when I discuss things with my publishers there’s always a willingness on their part to understand what my aboriginal take is on an issue.”
The 56-year-old Ojibwa comes from the Wabaseemoong First Na- tion in Northwestern Ontario but spent years in Calgary. As a writer for the Herald in the 1980s and 1990s, he became the first Native Canadian to win a National Newspaper Award for column writing. What followed were a number of critically acclaimed novels and memoirs, including one that won the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature in 2011.
Still, Wagamese seems reluctant to suggest that his books are selfconsciously topical or political. He doesn’t buy into the theory — half-jokingly put forth by aboriginal playwright Drew Hayden Taylor — that being born on a reserve makes you political by default.
“I don’t know, in this novel, if Saul Indian Horse is affected by politics,” Wagamese says. “He’s affected by religiosity. He’s affected by an over-abiding sense of entitlement on the part of settler folk and settler culture and certainly settler government. He’s affected by the gradual dissolution of his cultural and traditional way. When I was writing it and considering it, I wasn’t thinking it was so much a (political issue) as it was an emotional and a spiritual and a psychic issue.”