The novel’s origin has nothing to do with residential schools. Wagamese picked up W.P. Kinsella’s ‘Shoeless Joe’ around 1986 and was seized by what Kinsella had done with baseball: bent the sport into something mythic. The book he originally drafted was a sports fantasy, its climax a one-on-one shootout between protagonist Saul Indian Horse and Soviet goaltender Vladislav Tretiak. That was the whole book.

Richard Wagamese

I loved the magic realism and I loved the way that he was able to capture the essence of the game. And I thought, someday I want to write a book like that. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

The novel’s pivot toward residential schools came not from research but from the character himself. Wagamese was on a walk in the mountains when Saul, by then fully alive in his imagination, pushed back against the story Wagamese thought he was telling.

Richard Wagamese

Characters sometimes inhabit you as much as you inhabit them. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

That interruption sent him back to rewrite the book from its foundations, grafting onto the hockey premise a history he had been carrying since his first year in journalism.

The rewrite revealed a structural logic: two things central to Canada had never been placed in the same room. Canada’s self-image was built on hockey, while the country’s relationship to Indigenous people was treated as a footnote rather than a foundation.

Richard Wagamese

There are two great Canadian motifs. The one is hockey because we self-identify internationally and domestically with that hockey motif as our identity as Canadians. And the other is aboriginal people. Only it’s not so pervasive as hockey is, but it should be. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

But the residential school material had been waiting longer than the hockey premise. In 1979, his first year as a journalist, Wagamese kept finding himself in conversations that curved away from whatever assignment had brought him there. Survivors whose names he would later put in the book’s acknowledgments told him things that wouldn’t leave him.

Richard Wagamese

And this was 1979. And at that time, our people, aboriginal people didn’t really talk about residential schools. And certainly the greater Canadian majority never spoke of residential schools. Most people had never heard of them. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

Wagamese spent years writing for radio and television before he wrote fiction, and those forms imposed a ruthlessness about language that he carried directly into the novel. The lean prose of ‘Indian Horse’ is not a stylistic choice made for effect; it is the residue of a professional training that had no tolerance for extra weight.

Richard Wagamese

In that way of writing you learn how to be sharp, simple and concise, and learn how to trim the fat from every sentence, and you learn how to say exactly what you mean and to mean what you say. That conciseness and that brevity that results in perfect clarity really served this novel well.

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theuncarvedblog.com, “Coincidences happened that introduced me to the great Ojibway storyteller Richard Wagamese”

For the residential school sequences, invention was never on the table. Wagamese went back to those 1979 testimonies, using the energy of what survivors had told him to build the atmosphere of St. Jerome’s, the fictional school where Saul is held. The question was whether Canadian readers would recognize something they had mostly never been asked to see.

Richard Wagamese

When I started to write about that residential school experience, I used the energy of those first-person testimonies to create the atmosphere of that school. And so what rang true for Canada was the energy of those stories. And people were able to read it and not identify so much but to feel empathy and feel compassion for people who might have been in that situation. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

Readers and interviewers repeatedly asked why the book was not longer, why the school sequences were not extended into something more exhaustive and accusatory. His answer was a statement about what the novel was built to do, not what it was built to avoid.

Richard Wagamese

It’s written almost journalistically, written really simply and directly and concisely. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

The principle he named most often as governing the whole project came from the painter Norval Morrisseau. It amounted to a discipline of self-removal: the writer’s job is to get out of the story’s way, not to press his own agenda through it.

Richard Wagamese

When I work for the story’s sake I leave my ego at the door and the energy of the story emerges without my interference. It’s why Indian Horse and Medicine Walk ring so resonant with people – because me and my ego are not in the way of the story pouring outward.

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theglobeandmail.com, “The best advice Richard Wagamese ever received: ‘Work for the story’s sake’”

At a MacEwan University event in 2014, where ‘Indian Horse’ was the Book of the Year selection, he named a further consequence of that same discipline. Writing into uncertainty, rather than from a predetermined map, changed the relationship between writer and reader.

Richard Wagamese

If I write what I don’t know, then the process of me discovering the answers to what I don’t know makes the journey of following the story in the book stronger for the reader, because we both get to find the answer together.

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theuncarvedblog.com, “Coincidences happened that introduced me to the great Ojibway storyteller Richard Wagamese”

Wagamese was removed from his Ojibwe family as a toddler during the Sixties Scoop, the government policy of placing Indigenous children with non-Indigenous foster families, and by his mid-teens he was on the streets. The education he built in that period shaped every sentence he would eventually write.

Richard Wagamese

I left home at sixteen, and I was effectively homeless from the age of sixteen to twenty-four. I spent the larger part of those years in the shelter of a library reading books—books after books after books.

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milkweed.org, “Richard Wagamese | Milkweed Editions”

His route into storytelling was not institutional but communal. When he found his way back to his Ojibwe community in his mid-twenties, he did not know what role he had in the circle. Traditional people answered him by listening first.

Richard Wagamese

At one point in my mid-twenties, I asked traditional people why I didn’t have a role in our circle [...] They listened to me tell my story about where I’d been, what had happened to me and how I found my way back home, and they said, ‘Well, the way you told that, you’re supposed to be a storyteller.’ And that amazed me.

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finearts.uvic.ca, “Richard Wagamese on the power of stories | Fine Arts Research”

The question audiences brought to him most often was a deceptively simple one: what exactly did residential schools take? His answer does not point to language or land or family in the abstract. It names something more primary, drawn from his own teachers’ teaching.

Richard Wagamese

They lost that spiritual, mental, emotional and physical contact with who they were created to be. My teachers tell me that the most fundamental human right in the universe is the right to know who you were created to be. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

Despite building a narrative around a child’s abuse and cultural erasure, Wagamese was firm that the novel’s gravitational center is not accusation. He pointed to Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, where non-Indigenous Canadians were broken open in the hearing rooms and then embraced their Indigenous neighbors, as proof that the human capacity the book describes is real and available.

Richard Wagamese

It’s about redemption and it’s about reconciliation and it’s about healing. It’s about that amazing human capacity that we all share to reclaim ourselves, to bring ourselves back into the form of our being and to learn how to pray and shout and laugh and dance again. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

He pushed against the idea that the novel belongs only to Canadians trying to understand their history. Responses came to him from Kenya, Europe, and the Middle East, from readers who found their own histories in Saul’s story.

Richard Wagamese

It’s not just a First Nations or an aboriginal book, it’s a human story. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

The specific conversation he wanted Canadian readers to enter was not an argument about policy but an act of collective acknowledgment. The word he kept returning to was simple.

Richard Wagamese

What we really need to say is, yes. Yes, this happened. Yes, this caused a collective bruise in our psyche and our consciousness. Yes, it was a shameful period in the history of Canada. [paraphrased from audio]

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The University of British Columbia, “Richard Wagamese - Indian Horse”

He was equally candid about what the writing did for him personally. By the time he finished the novel, he said, he carried less anger, less resentment, and fewer unanswered questions than when he had started. He made no large claim about what literature does. He simply noted what this book did for him.