What are the characteristics of Saul in Indian Horse?

Saul is the protagonist and narrator of Indian Horse. The novel is framed as a memoir he is writing about his own life as a form of therapy.

Saul's people are the northern Ojibway, an Indigenous group who live along the Winnipeg river. His early childhood centers around his grandmother Naomi, who tells him stories and passes down Ojibway knowledge and legends. From a young age, he understands the danger of white people, who are responsible for abducting his mother and father, and later his brother Ben, to place them in “residential schools” for reeducation. Ben escapes and Naomi takes the family to Gods Lake, which will become the most important place in Saul’s life, the place where he lived Ojibway traditions and shared them with his family. When Ben dies of tuberculosis, the family splinters and Saul is taken to a residential school called St. Jerome’s.

For the rest of his life, Saul is marked by the past he lost at Gods Lake, and the traumas that replaced it once he arrived at St. Jerome’s. Saul watches as the students around him are subjected to constant emotional, physical, and sexual abuse with the aim of beating the Ojibway out of children and transforming them into Christians. He appears to find the beginnings of freedom with Father Gaston Leboutilier, who introduces Saul to hockey and presents himself as his friend. But by the end of the novel, Saul realizes that his pleasant memories of the priest were fictions born of self-preservation. In reality, the priest’s “affection” took the form of routine sexual abuse.

Throughout Indian Horse, Saul’s love of hockey is his lifeline. He’s an unlikely athlete because of his short stature, but he has an incredible ability to understand the motions of the game and predict where the puck will go. He uses this ability to control the ice and predict the movements of his teammates. It’s the place where he feels free—first from the horrors of St. Jerome’s, and then from his own memories, his abiding grief. However, he is also met with violent racism both on and off the court, which only increases the more successful he becomes. He begins to struggle with bouts of anger born of despair, with a feeling of darkness and hopelessness at the pit of his stomach. Although he spends a long time trying to remain stoic in the face of violence, he eventually gives in and fights back.

Hockey is important to Saul because it is an escape from the violence of everyday life, and because it is based in community. When he loses those elements of the game, he loses hope, and eventually slides into alcoholism. Later on, with the help of therapy and his ancestors, he realizes that Leboutilier’s abuse, and the other traumas he survived at St. Jerome’s, were the roots both of his dependence on hockey, and the darkness that began to overtake him. Ultimately, beating his addiction requires reckoning with his past, allowing himself to grieve for his family, and finding the strength to return home to the Kellys and live with his community.