Beyond the Rink, Behind the Image: Reclaiming the Story of a Residential School Hockey Team

Teammates, champions, Survivors

In 1951, after winning the Thunder Bay district championship, the Sioux Lookout Black Hawks hockey team from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School embarked on a whirlwind promotional tour through Ottawa and Toronto. They were accompanied by a professional photographer from the National Film Board who documented the experience. The tour was intended to demonstrate the success of the residential school system and introduce the Black Hawks to “civilizing” activities and the “benefits” of assimilating into Canadian society. For some of the boys, it was the beginning of a lifelong love of hockey; for others, it was an escape from the brutal living conditions and abuse at the residential school. 

In Beyond the Rink, Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, and Braden Te Hiwi collaborate with three surviving team members―Kelly Bull, Chris Cromarty, and David Wesley―to share the complex legacy behind the 1951 tour photos. This book reveals the complicated role of sports in residential school histories, commemorating the team’s stellar hockey record and athletic prowess while exposing important truths about “Canada’s Game” and how it shaped ideas about the nation. By considering their past, these Survivors imagine a better way forward not just for themselves, their families, and their communities, but for Canada as a whole.

Alexandra Giancarlo is a settler scholar and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary, where she applies her broad social sciences training to socio-cultural studies of sport and physical activity. The bulk of her work comprises community-engaged research with residential school survivors and their families.

Janice Forsyth, member of the Fisher River Cree Nation, is a Professor of Indigenous Land-Based Physical Culture and Wellness in the Faculty of Education, School of Kinesiology, at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination in Canadian Sport (2020).

Braden Te Hiwi is from Ngāti Tūkorehe and Ngāti Kauwhata, which are two communities from Te-Ika-a-Māui in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Currently he supports Māori language revitalization in Aotearoa and has previously published in the areas of Indigenous health, physical activity, and history in Canada.