Indian Horse Summary

The book “Indian Horse” by Richard Wagamese features an Indigenous man named Saul. The book begins as Saul, now 30 years old, recounts the difficulties he had to endure growing up as an Indigenous boy. Saul’s family is in constant fear that he will be abducted by European Canadians, as two of his siblings were. One of his siblings, Benjamin, escapes and finds his way back to Saul’s family. In efforts to escape his captors, Saul’s whole family travel to a place called God’s lake where they harvest rice until Benjamin’s health becomes very poor and he dies. Following the separation from his parents and the death of his grandmother, Saul is found alone and taken to a residential school called St. Jerome’s. The children are physically and emotionally

Foucault says that “discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies”, and that those with disciplinary power “have hold over” these bodies (Markula and Pringle, 2006, p. 39). Docile bodies are subservient and can be controlled (Fusco, 2018). They are produced for the purpose of being “economically efficient” and “politically obedient”; “ideal for … the capitalist workforce” (Markula and Pringle, 2006, p.40). This can be applied to the residential school that Saul was taken to in “Indian Horse” (Wagamese, 2012). In this school, the authority figures held the disciplinary power, trying to turn the students into docile bodies. They did this by punishing the students for doing anything that did not fit into their strict set of rules, not even allowing the students to communicate in their own language, Ojibway (Wagamese, 2012). Some students came to the school as bright and spirited, but were slowly broken down by the severe mental and physical abuse, surrendering to docility. The power over the children was so strong that the only way they could resist it was to commit suicide, which many of the children chose to do (Wagamese,