Indian Horse

Give 1 important quote from any Chapter from 12-22

Please explain the importance of the quote. I need about 7 sentences

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He was six years old. He was from a people who had forged survival out of the bush as hunters, trappers, fishermen. That way of being was tied directly to the power they felt everywhere around them, and he’d been born to that, had learned it like walking. The nuns found him hanging from the rafters of the barn on a cold February morning. He’d wrapped his own hands behind his back with twists of rope before he’d jumped.

Richard Wagamese. “Indian Horse.” iBooks. Chapter 12. Page 31.

This passage describes the death of Arden Little Light, the boy who the nuns subject to public humiliation because he won’t use a handkerchief. While describing their cruelty as a way to emphasize the violence of the residential school system, Wagamese endows Arden with a deep nobility. By centering his power, contingent on his people and the land, the novel itself provides a counterweight to the dehumanizing punishments of St. Jerome’s. These lines suggest, through the rapid shift from describing Arden’s old life to his death, that the residential school itself was equivalent to death; that there was no life in between his loss of the bush and his suicide. Nevertheless, the proximity of the two lives in this quote also emphasizes the continuity from one to the other—the fact that Arden remembered his past up until his death, regardless of what the school did to him.

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