Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Categories: Indian Horse The Color Purple

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Power is the ability of one to do something or act in a particular way. It can also be the ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events. However, many believe that one having power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. One who has absolute power has a tendency to commit negative actions that could affect many others. A good example of this is Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany. He believed he could not be stopped and that rules did not apply to him.

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By being given absolute power, he corrupted the government. No attempt was made to stop this by the Germans, because of the control he had. People were either scared to stop this or were brainwashed into believing it.

This resulted in Hitler and the Nazi’s killing six million Jews. Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple both centre around the representation of power. Saul Indian Horse and Celie’s biological father and Sofia, are abused by others who have power over them.

Indian Horse centres around the protagonist, Saul Indian horse, who is an indigenous boy who is separated from his biological family when he was taken away from white men into a car and attends St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School where the teacher’s main goal is to remove the Indian from the children.

Adversely, The Colour Purple centres around the protagonist, Celie, who is a poor, uneducated, fourteen-year-old black girl living in rural Georgia.

Celie starts writing letters to God because her step-father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once. Celie gave birth to a girl, whom her father stole and presumably killed in the woods. Celie has a second child, a boy, whom her father also steals. Celie’s mother becomes seriously ill and dies. Alphonso brings home a new wife but continues to abuse Celie. Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple both imply that Power can corrupt, whether one has power because of ethnicity, age, or religion.

The power of ethnicity is demonstrated in the novel where Saul and Celie are powerless due to their ethnicity, Saul being Indigenous, and Celie being black. Representation of power is thematically present in Indian Horse and The Color Purple. The Protagonists of both texts are powerless due to their ethnicity which demonstrates that power can corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Saul Indian Horse was forced out of his home due to him being indigenous. This is demonstrated when Saul’s family is torn apart by white Canadians who steal away his brother, Benjamin, and his sister, Rachel, and force them into a Canadian school system for Indigenous children.

Later, Saul himself is kidnapped and sent to a residential school:” Somebody lifted [him] up…A car door opened and [he] was lifted inside and set on the seat with a blanket thrown over [him]… They took [him] to St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School” (Wagamese 42-43). This truly shows how vulnerable the Indigenous were to white Canadians during this era. Saul and his family were helpless because if they did not obey the commands of the white Canadians they would most likely have been killed. In the Residential School Saul faces brutal physical abuse and sexual abuse. The white Canadians are much more powerful than the Indigenous people simply because they are white. Similarly, another example which demonstrates how the blacks are powerless is found in the character of Sofia, the wife of Celie’s step son Harpo. She goes into town with her children with a man who happens to be a prizefighter, and there she meets the mayor and his wife.

The wife’s mayor stops and eyes Sofia’s children. She notices how clean and well dressed they are, and so she asks Sofia if she would be her maid. This condescending behavior resulted in a hostility in Sofia, and she replied by saying “hell no” (Walker 85). This answer drove the mayor to back up and slap Sofia for her attitude. Sofia outraged by this insult attacks the mayor with all her might and is thrown into prison with the charge of attacking a white man. Sofia declares later on that she did what she had to do to save her dignity and did not care about the consequences. Her hatred for white people drove her to be bitter towards them when they forced her to become the mayor’s maid. For years, she served her punishment as a maid in the mayor’s home and learned how racism is even taught without saying a word: “They got [her] in a little storeroom up under the house, hardly bigger than Odessa’s porch, and just about as warm in the winter time. [she is] at they beck and call all night and all day.

They won’t let [her] see [her] children. They won’t let [her] see no mens. Well, after five years they let [her] see [them] once a year. [she is] a slave” (Walker 103) Hence, Sofia is punished for standing up for herself and expressing her freedom of speech. She is treated like a slave in the category of a maid and is left to suffer the consequences of defying a white supremacist. The power of ethnicity is also present in the careers that Saul and Celie’s biological father attempt to achieve. Saul could not pursue his hockey career due to the effects of the racial slurs he received for being indigenous. During Saul’s time at the Toronto Marlboros, that “When [he] scored the ice was littered with plastic Indian dolls, and someone threw horse turds on the ice in front of [their] bench… players on the other team called [him] Indian whores, Horse Piss, Stolen Pony.”

Due to the amount of racism Saul received playing for the Toronto Marlboros, he reached a melting point to where he could no longer tolerate the amount of racism he received from the opposing team and stands that, “if an opposing player directed any kind of remark towards [him], [he] dropped the gloves and started swinging” (Wagamese165). Because of Saul’s retaliating playstyle, he racked up a total of one hundred twenty minutes in the penalty box. This resulted in Saul being kicked off the team and not being able to pursue his career in playing in the NHL. If Saul was not Indigenous, he would not have had a problem with facing racism at all, however since he was Indigenous, he was powerless because no one would stand up for him or do something to help make a difference. In Alice Walker’s text, Celie’s biological father was lynched for having a successful business.

Nettie, Celie’s younger sister, believing that Olivia and Adam are in fact Celie’s children, finally requests in private that Samuel explain how he adopted them. Nettie learns that Celie and Nettie’s father had been a farmer who decided to open a dry goods store. The store was very successful and always packed with customers. Competing white storeowners were furious at Nettie’s father for taking all the black business away from them, so they burned his shop and “the man and his two brothers [were] dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night and hanged” (Walker 174.) During this era, the white merchants had more power than the black civilians, as a result Celie’s biological father and two brothers were powerless because they could not defend themselves against the white merchants because either way they would die if they attempted to defend themselves for killing the white merchants.