Indian Horse By Richard Wagamese Essay

Indian Horse is a novel by Richard Wagamese that beautifully explores the idea of family, and what it means to have people around you that make you feel at home. The reader is bombarded with an overwhelming sense of family and betrayal in the first few pages of the novel. As Richard Wagamese continues to write, one is able to see how safe Saul Indian Horse felt with his biological family, and he also shows how lost he felt without their love when he was taken to the Residential School. The school he was brought to was drained of all consensual love the moment it was open, and continued to fill the children with horrible feelings the entire time they were there. Indian Horse was unable to really feel as though he still had family while he was in the

As much as Wagamese shows the importance of family, he also shows that family does not have to be biological. With this though the reader is also able to see that sometimes love can not conquer all.

Saul Indian Horse was removed from his family environment and taken to a Residential School where anything relating to his culture was forbidden. Saul had no family, and no belongings from his home. The toll that this experience has on a child is very harsh, and is difficult to recover from. “In what seened like an instant, the world I had known was replaced with an ominous black cloud”(Wagamese 47). This quotation shows how quickly the environment he was put in became unwelcoming. Indian Horse went from a welcoming and loving family environment to one where he was not allowed to be himself and was forced to comply with the rules the church has set. The sense of family is explored at the residential school because the children there did not have any. There were siblings that may have gone together but when the Nuns shaved their heads and removed their cultural clothing everyone became unrecognizable. There was a sense of understanding that all the children had though, each one of the kids