Summary Of Shatter The Indian Horse By Richard Wagamese

Shatter the Indian, Save the Man
Indian Horse, a novel by Richard Wagamese is a heartening story about a boy named Saul Indian Horse who attended residential school. This novel brings a depressingly believable story of a 1960’s residential school to life, through Saul, an Ojibway boy from northern Ontario. Saul’s character evolved through the challenges that he faced in his adolescent and adult life such as feelings of neglect, abuse and fault due to the gruesome environment that no young child should be in no matter they’re ethnicity.
Firstly, Saul began to feel overwhelmed by the system even before he started to attend St. Jerome’s. His parents were survivors of the schools and they still felt the shame to practice their own culture. His

The family managed to avoid the authorities for a while, but Benjamin was eventually captured by government agents and placed in a school in Kenora. He escaped a few years later and returned to the family, but he also returned with tuberculosis and he died later on. Saul’s parents disappeared with Benjamin to take him to the priest and that was the last time Saul saw his parents. Saul had experienced and had seen a lot of hopelessness in his family. Losing family members was a very difficult time for him because all he could do was watch his family members struggle with the burden of losing their children. He watched as his father went through alcoholism and how his mother went through depression. Saul was too young to understand the emotions that his parents felt and how to help them cope with them. When his parents left him, it worried him that they hadn’t come back to the camp since it began to turn autumn. Saul was left with his old grandmother who died while he was in her frozen arms. He was devastated by the fact that she was the last family member he had and he was all alone. Sadly, many Aboriginal students have

The men on the crew were not respectful to him and treated him differently. They tried to find a weakness in him by name-calling and swearing at him. “When your innocence is stripped from you, when your people are denigrated, when the family you came from is denounced and your tribal ways and rituals are pronounced backward, primitive, savage, you come to see yourself as less human”. (Wagamese 81) Saul struggled even more than before and started to use alcohol as his support system. He was so ashamed of his identity that he took the blame upon himself for being treated awfully because of his background. Saul started to speak less and drink more, he became addicted to the pleasure of feeling nothing. He spent a couple of years working in low-paying jobs. Saul met a kind farmer named Ervin Sift, who provided him with shelter and care for a little while. With Ervin’s support, Saul attempts to cut down on drinking, although he eventually relapses, and begins drinking more and more heavily, and is so mortified of himself for this that he leaves Ervin with no excuse. When he finally realized what he thought he needed to survive was actually killing him, he checked into the New Dawn Center, an alcoholism treatment center to begin his journey of healing. Aboriginal communities are and have been