Chasing Painted Horses

Winner of the 2020 PMC Indigenous Literature Award

When Ralph Thomas comes across graffiti of a horse in an alleyway in the early hours of the morning, he is stopped in his tracks. He recognizes this horse. A half-asleep Indigenous homeless man sees Ralph's reaction to the horse and calls out to him. Over the course of a morning's worth of hot coffee on a bitterly cold day, Ralph and the homeless man talk and Ralph remembers a troubling moment from his childhood when an odd little girl, Danielle, drew the most beautiful and intriguing horse on his mother's Everything Wall, winning the competition set up for children on the Otter Lake Reserve.

Ralph has lived with many questions that arose from his eleventh winter. What did the horse mean -- to him, his sister, his best friend, and, most importantly, the girl who drew it? These questions have never left him.

Chasing Painted Horses has a magical, fablelike quality that will enchant readers, and haunt them, for years to come.

Drew Hayden Taylor is an Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations in Ontario. He has performed stand-up comedy and was artistic director of Canada's premiere Native theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. He has been an award-winning playwright, a journalist/columnist (appearing regularly in several Canadian newspapers and magazines), short-story writer, novelist and television scriptwriter. Drew lives in Toronto.