My name is Saul Indian Horse. I am the son of Mary Mandamin and John Indian Horse. My grandfather was called Solomon so my name is the diminutive of his. My people are from the Fish Clan of the...
2
I wasn’t there the day the first Indian horse came to our people, but I heard the story so many times as a boy that it became real to me.The Ojibway were not people of the horse. Our land existed...
3
All that I knew of Indian died in the winter of 1961, when I was eight years old.My grandmother, Naomi, was very old then. She was the matriarch of the small band of people I was born to. We still...
4
After Benjamin disappeared my family left the bush and the shores of the river. We canoed out one day and left the camp behind. My grandmother came too though she’d argued against the move. My...
5
Then Benjamin walked out of the bush. He’d run away from the school in Kenora. People he met told him where we’d gotten to, and he’d followed the rail line north, and then the road. It was...
6
We made Gods Lake in the early afternoon of a day in late summer. It was a great bowl of inkpot black sunk into the granite and edged with spruce, pine and fir. At its shoreline, as my grandmother...
7
My grandmother never explained it, but there really was no need. I knew now why Gods Lake belonged to our family: because part of our family had died there, and their spirits still spoke from the...
8
My mother’s keening by the river was eerie. My father stood at the fire rubbing his hands together and mumbling to himself. My aunt and uncle sat with their arms around each other while she said...
9
The adults didn’t come back. When the autumn began to turn I could tell the old woman was worried. That terrified me. The sky turned to the pale, washed-out blue of late October. Geese were in...
10
Keewatin. That’s the name of the north wind. The Old Ones gave it a name because they believed it was alive, a being like all things. Keewatin rises out over the edge of the barren lands and grips...
11
They took me to St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School. I read once that there are holes in the universe that swallow all light, all bodies. St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world....
12
At St. Germ’s the kids called me “Zhaunagush” because I could speak and read English. Most of them had been pulled from the deep North and knew only Ojibway. Speaking a word in that language...
13
One afternoon, during some rare unsupervised time, a dozen of us escaped to the bottom of the ridge the school sat on. A small creek ran along the base of the ridge, curving up out of an inkpot lake...
14
I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St. Jerome’s. I saw young boys and girls die standing on their own two feet. I saw runaways carried back, frozen solid as...
15
Father Gaston Leboutilier came to St. Jerome’s the same year that I did. He was a young priest with a sense of humour that angered his fellow priests and the nuns, and a kindness and sense of...
16
Cleaning the rink became my assigned chore and I would rise to do it before anyone else in the school was up. Before the nuns, before the priests, before the cooks even got to the kitchen to start...
17
Father Leboutilier was my ally. When the nuns and priests got too hard on me, he was there to mediate and defend me. By the second winter, when I was nine, I’d become braver. I took to stashing...
18
Father Leboutilier worked the boys hard. He pushed them to do the drills and then to transfer that discipline into the scrimmage. He outlined what he wanted to see in the scrim of snow on the ice....
19
Father Quinney and Sister Ignacia protested at first about my age and small size and the effect that breaching rules would have on the rest of the children. But once Father Quinney saw me play,...
20
We played the town team three weeks after Father Leboutilier first let me skate with the bigger boys. My teammates laughed when they saw me in my uniform. Another town team had donated their old...
21
St. Jerome’s was hell on earth. We were marched everywhere. In the mornings, after the priests had walked through the dorms ringing cowbells to scare us awake, we were marched to the latrines. We...
22
When I hit the ice I left all of that behind me. I stepped onto the ice and Saul Indian Horse, the abandoned Ojibway kid, clutched in the frozen arms of his dead grandmother, ceased to exist.Father...
23
We were all a year older by the time winter came. I was almost thirteen. Our team looked bigger and more powerful when we took to the ice. Father Leboutilier had canvassed the other towns in the...
24
I spent the rest of that winter skating with the boys from the school. Our games were fast but scrambled. I’d send the puck out to a lagging winger and it would sit there spinning uselessly. Or...
25
Manitouwadge means “Cave of the Great Spirit” in Ojibway. That was funny, because it was mining that gave the town its life. Everyone in Manitouwadge worked in the mines or the sawmills, and Fred...
26
The Moose travelled to games in a pair of broken-down vans that Virgil worked his mechanical magic on to keep running. Fred’s shifts at work made it almost impossible for him to go with us as our...
27
Every reserve in the North had a team. Indian boys grew up in those communities knowing that when they got old enough and good enough they could wear the sweaters of their home reserve. Whenever I...
28
We won ten out of the fifteen tournaments we played that second year. We scored goals by the bucketful. Fred Kelly called us “a war party on skates.” He usually put me out on each of our three...
29
By February of that year, the Northern winter was at its deepest. The Moose kept winning and news of our success travelled beyond the confines of the reservation circuit. We were playing at a...
30
The Kapuskasing arena was new. The town had spent a lot of money on it and when we walked into the lobby the first thing we saw were glass cabinets along the walls filled with trophies and...
31
That game with the Kapuskasing Chiefs took us out of our shelter. Word got out about the Indian team that had beat the Senior A champions, and everyone wanted to play us. I wasn’t keen and Fred...
32
I started to notice things after that. I started to see a line in every arena we played in. It showed itself as a stretch of empty seats that separated the Indian fans from the white ones. Police...
33
Two things came out of that tournament. The first thing was that it made me tougher. I would not fight, but I was better able to handle the rough stuff after that; to churn my legs and use my weight...
34
I found Lanahan sitting in the stands reading a sports magazine. His raised eyebrows pushed down on his nose and the little glasses made him look like he was surprised at what he was reading. He...
35
It took them three weeks to get to me. We went to the scheduled tournaments and we played well, but there was a new energy on the team, not just on the ice but on the bench and in the dressing room....
36
In the end I played out the season and I agreed to go to the Marlboro training camp the next fall. I didn’t want the pressure of landing there midway through their season. I didn’t want to leave...
37
Toronto was a chimera, I thought as soon as I saw it. I’d learned about that monster in a book on mythology that I’d borrowed from the school library in Manitouwadge. The chimera was a...
38
I made the team as a rookie, and I had a new weapon in my arsenal now. Trust. I trusted that these elite players would go to the right place, make the right moves, put themselves exactly where they...
39
There was a girl I remember from St. Jerome’s. Her name was Rebecca Wolf and she arrived there with her younger sister. They were beautiful. When I saw them for the first time they were getting out...
40
It was late at night when I got back to Manitouwadge. I walked from the bus to the Kelly house, knocked on the door and then waited on the steps with my bag at my feet. After a minute I heard...
41
Fred Kelly got me on a forestry crew as a deadfall bucker that fall, and I became a working man. When trees fell down or when the wind knocked them over I took a chainsaw and cut them into lengths...
42
When I came out, I brought the intensity of the bush camp out with me. I was seventeen. I was still a boy. But this mistreatment made me hard. When I took to the ice with the Moose, the anger...
43
I left Manitouwadge the year I turned eighteen. I’d saved enough of my wages to buy an older-model pickup truck that was outfitted with a steel box to carry the tools I’d assembled. There was no...
44
I stood in the kitchen and looked out to where the boards of the backyard rink sat in the pale spring sun. There wasn’t a way that I could think of to tell them how the rage felt against my ribs,...
45
I don’t know what brought me back to northern Ontario in 1978. I don’t remember deciding to head there. I don’t recall thinking of it. I just wound up near Redditt where my brother had found my...
46
We’d play cards late into the night listening to the radio, and if I didn’t feel like talking he never pushed me to it. Instead, I always felt like he could see into me and understood that there...
47
It’s funny how bartenders always tell you to drink up. When you’re lost to it like I was, you always drink down. Down beyond accepted everyday things like a home, a job, a family, a...
48
There wasn’t much to write about after that, though. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t come up with anything else. I felt dissatisfied. I thought I’d discover something new, something powerful...
49
“I don’t know why I have to go. I just know I do.” That’s what I told Moses.He only studied me some and then nodded. He’d been around a long time and he knew drunks. “We’re here if you...
50
I slept on the bus ride north to Kenora. I stopped just long enough to eat in a small café, and then flagged a passing taxi that took me as far as Minaki. It was early afternoon when I got there....
51
I made Gods Lake by early afternoon. My insides still felt like sandpaper. There was an eerie silence as I made the portage, feeling the bush close off behind me. The shadows were deep and ominous....
52
I went back to the New Dawn Centre. I hadn’t planned on it. I hadn’t planned on anything. The only thing I had known for certain was that I had to backtrack, to revisit vital places from my early...
53
Virgil was a supervisor at the mine. He was married and had three boys. The days of the far-flung reserve tournaments had long gone, and there were Native teams in town leagues and amateur leagues...
54
He was leaning on the boards, directing the players with a hockey stick. I could hear him shouting orders as soon as I stepped away from the concourse and began walking down the steps. His back was...
55
We settled for sitting in the stands while the rink man cleaned the ice. There was a long silence and I struggled to find words to break it. Virgil sat with his hands cupped in front of his face,...
56
The white glory of a rink. I found a used pair of skates at the sporting goods store and a good stick and I stood at the door to the player’s bench looking out at the ice and trembling. I told...
Acknowledgements
It takes some doing to bring a book into the world. Despite the solitary seat at the desk or table, none of us ever really do it alone. I know I don’t. I never have. This book took an awful lot of...
