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In Indian Horse, land isn’t just a setting; it's a character. This dynamic is introduced when Naomi teaches Saul about the family’s history with Gods Lake, which illustrates that land can have a specific character, and that it can choose to accept some people and not others. While St. Jerome’s, and settler colonialism as a system, asserts ownership of land through private possession and transformation, Saul and his Indigenous ancestors have a connection to Gods Lake rooted in a reciprocal relationship with it as a place. When Saul is suffering from alcoholism, land serves as an emotional haven, the place where he feels grounded and at peace. Saul’s ability to see into the spiritual world is also closely related to the land. When he leaves Gods Lake with Naomi, he is able to see the path his great-grandfather left when he focuses closely on the sound of the river, the taste of the air, and the feeling of the snow on his face. Towards the end of the novel, Shabogeesick appears again only after Saul spends a night in the bush, indicating that Saul needs to see and connect with the land in order for his vision to show him his great-grandfather.
When we laid him on the spruce boughs in the tent he seemed to sink into them, as though the land were already reaching out and claiming him.
But it wasn’t a yearning for new geography that drove me—it was my tiredness of the old. The bush had ceased to be a haven. A vacant feeling sat where the beginnings of my history had once been. That part of myself was a tale long dead, one that held nothing for me. So I was heading out to create whatever history I could with muscle and will and no constraints. I was leaving the bush and the North behind. I didn’t think I needed them anymore. The echoes of those I’d travelled with slid into the trees I was leaving behind.
Indian Horse
