The movie, which opens on April 13 after winning audience awards at film festivals across the country, came about through an ambitious collaboration between white filmmakers and Indigenous talent. Murray Sinclair, who chaired the Commission. It’s even being screened early for politicians in Ottawa, including Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett, and Sen. And though the film was conceived in 2012, three years before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission thrust the historic crime of residential schools into the public eye, Indian Horse lands with auspicious timing. It romances Canada’s game while laying bare our national shame.
By turns inspiring and heartbreaking, the story forges a powerful drama out of two bedrock Canadian themes-the poetry of hockey and the oppression of Indigenous people. Its hero is Saul Indian Horse, a resilient Ojibway boy who becomes a self-made star on the hockey rink while enduring abuse by priests and nuns at his residential school. Based on the beloved 2012 novel by the late Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese, it’s a cinematic landmark, dramatizing Canada’s First Nations history and literature with unprecedented passion and fidelity. The scene was cut to a just few seconds of screen time, but it’s one of the extraordinary moments that make Indian Horse so much more than just another Canadian movie. I was reaching into the memories that are stuck in the body.” As she wailed in take after take, she recalls, “It was cathartic, very emotional. “What I did is I remembered my mother’s look and cry as she put me on the bus.
“I thought, ‘how am I going to do that?’ ” Manitowabi recalls, on the phone from her home on Manitoulin Island.
For an especially painful scene, the film’s director asked her to wail. Seven decades later, Manitowabi’s childhood trauma has come flooding back to her as she makes her acting debut in the movie Indian Horse, playing a grandmother in the 1950s who escapes with her family to an ancestral lake, desperate to protect her grandchildren from being abducted to a residential school. But that look on her face was imprinted on my psyche.” When I saw the look of horror on my mum’s face when she put me on the bus, I wondered what was going on. Edna Manitowabi was raised on Manitoulin Island’s Wikwemikong reserve in northern Ontario as the youngest of eight siblings-and in 1947, at the age of six, she was torn from her family and sent to a Catholic residential school. “All of us were taken,” she says today.
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