Indian Horse is in the form of a memoir written by Saul at the New Dawn Centre, as an alternative to him telling his story to the group there.
According to Wagamese, he originally intended to write a novel about hockey, but the legacy of the residential school system gradually became a focal point of the story. He said that writing the book took him about five times longer than it typically would have "because of the emotional territory it covers". Although Wagamese did not attend a residential school, he was affected by that system because his mother, aunts, and uncles were residential school survivors.[6][7]
