From locker rooms to change rooms: The Beardy’s Blackhawks and transformative hockey spaces

Abstract

Ice hockey occupies a central place in Canadian popular culture and national mythology, routinely invoked as “Canada's game” and as a formative site for producing disciplined and socially valued citizens. At the same time, the sport has been widely critiqued for reproducing racialized exclusion, settler colonial power relations, and other forms of social harm. This article examines the intersections of sport, settler colonialism, and reconciliation through diverse engagements with ice hockey, focusing on the Beardy's Blackhawks, a U18 AAA boys’ team based in the Beardy's and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation in central Saskatchewan. For more than 25 years, the Blackhawks provided Indigenous and settler youth access to elite-level hockey within a culturally grounded First Nations context. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study, including interviews with Indigenous (First Nations and Métis) and settler players, the article traces how a sport historically used as a tool of cultural assimilation in residential schools has been reworked as a site of cultural affirmation, relationship-building, and intercultural exchange. We demonstrate that participation in the Blackhawks fostered community rooted in First Nation values while also prompting settler players to confront and unlearn racialized assumptions. While highlighting hockey's potential to support reconciliatory relationships, the article also underscores the fragility of such spaces, evidenced by the program's eventual dissolution and the loss of a rare high-performance pathway for Indigenous youth living on reserve.

Introduction

Scholars in sport studies have long documented the social and structural barriers that Indigenous Peoples face in accessing organised sport, as well as the historically repressive role that Western sport has played in Indigenous lives (Forsyth 2013; Giancarlo et al. 2025; Norman et al. 2019; Paraschak 1995; Robidoux 2004; Te Hiwi and Forsyth 2017). Hockey—often celebrated as “Canada's game”—epitomises this colonial entanglement. Nationalist framings of hockey as a unifying cultural symbol obscure the histories of Indigenous dispossession and marginalization enacted in the name of Canadian identity (McKegney and Phillips 2018). The sport was also central to the assimilatory agendas of residential schools, where it served as a tool to inculcate Indigenous youth into settler norms. As Robidoux (2012: 4) observes, “In early twentieth-century Canada, … sports such as hockey became perfect assimilatory strategies that government and religious organisations … could use to assist in incorporating First Nations peoples and making them productive members of mainstream society.” In this sense, “Canada's game” reflects not a shared national pastime, but a practice structured by white settler narratives and power relations.

While this critical framing remains essential, comparatively little attention has been paid to the subversions, contradictions, and alternative meanings that arise when Indigenous Peoples engage with colonial sports on their own terms. In recent decades, Indigenous Peoples have reclaimed hockey as a site of cultural resurgence, education, and nation-building. Indigenous-led leagues and tournaments—such as the Little Native Hockey League (LNHL) and the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships (NAHC)—create culturally grounded spaces that promote athletic excellence while advancing language revitalization, education, and community pride. Similarly, initiatives such as Hockey Night in Canada's Cree-language broadcasts, which reach over 86,000 Cree speakers nationwide (Statistics Canada 2023), expand Indigenous cultural visibility and challenge dominant narratives within mainstream sport.

This article explores these complexities by asking under what conditions sport can meaningfully support Indigenous sovereignty within settler-colonial contexts, as well as advance the aspirational goals of reconciliation. Specifically, we ask: How might sport function as a site for reconciliatory relations between Indigenous and settler participants? What social, institutional, and cultural conditions enable—or constrain—such outcomes? And what is lost when the possibility of reconciliation is foreclosed or silenced within the structures of sport governance and league organization?

To address these questions, we draw on an ethnographic study of the 2019–2020 U18 AAA season of the Beardy's Blackhawks, a boys’ hockey team based in Beardy's and Okemasis’ Willow Cree First Nation in central Saskatchewan. Prior to their removal from the Saskatchewan Hockey Association (SHA) following the 2019–2020 season, the Blackhawks were the only AAA-level program in Canada located on a First Nation—the highest tier of youth hockey in the country. The SHA justified its decision as part of a province-wide realignment aimed at expanding development opportunities through standardized organizational and educational benchmarks, including coaching resources, billet coordination, academic partnerships, and institutional infrastructure. While framed as a neutral effort to strengthen development pathways, this decision to remove the Blackhawks reflects a broader pattern in Canadian sport governance, where progress toward reconciliation has been uneven and often limited (Forde et al., 2024; Rajwani et al., 2022), even amid growing federal investment in Indigenous-led sport through initiatives such as Sport for Social Development in Indigenous Communities (SSDIC) and related support for Indigenous sport leadership (Aboriginal Sport Circle, 2025). Our fieldwork suggests that when sport is evaluated primarily through institutional capacity and competitive performance, Indigenous-led programs can be cast as deficient, obscuring the relational, cultural, and community-grounded dimensions that make them both distinctive and indispensable.

During their final season, the Blackhawks roster comprised twenty players, nearly half of whom identified as Indigenous. Interviews revealed that participation in this unique sporting environment fostered a collective sense of belonging among players and families, grounded in Indigenous relational values and community-based practices. For Indigenous players, the team offered a rare opportunity to pursue elite hockey while maintaining connections to community, language, and culture. For settler players, it provided an embodied encounter with Indigeneity that disrupted taken-for-granted assumptions about privilege, place, and reconciliation (see McKegney et al. 2021; Rathwell et al. 2022). Together, these dynamics produced a sporting environment in which young people could learn, compete, and build mutual understanding across difference—demonstrating how a First Nations-led hockey program can unsettle the colonial logics embedded in “Canada's game” while reimagining what hockey might mean in a decolonizing future.

Historical and cultural background

In June 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) presented its Final Report to the federal government in Ottawa, concluding more than 6 years of testimony from Survivors of the Indian Residential School system. For over a century, this network of state- and church-run institutions forcibly removed more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children from their homes—many of whom never returned. The schools were established, as the TRC (2015: v) notes, “to separate Aboriginal children from their families and communities in order to minimise family ties and cultural linkages.” In doing so, they sought to suppress Indigenous languages, spiritual practices, and knowledge systems, replacing them with Euro-Canadian norms and values.

In addition to documenting these truths, the TRC issued 94 Calls to Action to guide Canada towards reconciliation. These Calls addressed reforms across multiple sectors, including education, justice, and sport (Calls to Action 87–91). The inclusion of “Sports and Reconciliation” as a sub-category in the Calls demonstrates recognition of sport's complex dual role in Canada's colonial history: once used as an instrument of assimilation (and often still serving the reproduction of settler-colonial structures of power), sport retains the potential to foster healing, relationship-building, and Indigenous nationhood (Arcand et al., 2021).

Beardy's and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation is home to a vibrant Cree community of approximately 3800 members, many of whom have grown up with hockey as a central element of community life and identity. The community's rink serves as both a training ground and a gathering place—a site where youth, families, and Elders come together to celebrate Cree identity through sport. This dynamic positioned the Blackhawks as more than a competitive hockey team. The program functioned as a living expression of reconciliation in practice, fostering everyday relationships among Indigenous and settler players, coaches, and community members.

The tension between sport as a colonial tool and sport as a vehicle for resurgence is vividly illustrated in the history of the Beardy's Blackhawks. In 1995, the St Michael's Thunder joined the Saskatchewan U18 AAA Hockey League. Soon after, the team was rebranded the Beardy's Blackhawks—a deliberate move to distance the program from the legacy of St Michael's Indian Residential School in Duck Lake. This renaming signified more than a change in identity: it marked a conscious effort to move beyond the colonial histories of residential schooling and to establish a hockey program grounded in the cultural values and aspirations of the Beardy's and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation. The new name and logo, inspired by the Chicago Blackhawks of the National Hockey League, carried layered meanings that reflected broader movements of Indigenous resurgence, pride, and sovereignty within hockey (see Robidoux 2006).

The historical backdrop of this transformation is significant. St Michael's Indian Residential School, which operated from 1894 until its closure in 1996, was among the last residential schools to shut down in Canada. The creation of the Beardy's Blackhawks in the wake of this closure filled both an institutional and cultural void—transforming a site once associated with assimilation and loss into a space of self-determination and renewal. Relocating the team from Duck Lake to the Beardy's and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation, situated just south of Prince Albert and roughly an hour north of Saskatoon, reinforced this shift. Unlike the more common pattern in which Indigenous players must join settler-led programs in order to pursue elite opportunities in hockey, often as the only Indigenous participants and thus vulnerable to racialization and marginalization (McLeod et al. 2023; Schinke et al. 2010), the Blackhawks reversed this dynamic. The program welcomed non-Indigenous players and families into a First Nation-led organization, challenging conventional power relations in Canadian sport and creating opportunities for intercultural engagement on Indigenous terms.

Methods

The primary methodology for this study was critical ethnography—a methodology that builds on traditional ethnography by combining close, community-based engagement with a reflexive awareness of the researcher's positionality and the broader social contexts shaping everyday life (Madison 2011). Like conventional ethnography, it seeks a holistic understanding of social and cultural experience through sustained, immersive participation and observation (Kawulich 2005). Critical ethnography, however, further emphasizes how interpretation and representation are shaped by the researcher's standpoint and by the historical and institutional contexts in which the research takes place (Breda 2013).

Fieldwork for this project was conducted during the 2019–2020 hockey season by the second author, Robert (Bobby) Henry. As a Métis scholar and former elite hockey player from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Bobby brought both experiential insight and a strong commitment to relational accountability to the research process (Henry, Tait and STR8 UP 2016; Wilson 2008). His familiarity with the significance of the Blackhawks organization for Indigenous and non-Indigenous families across central Saskatchewan provided important cultural and community context. At the same time, his awareness of the team's entanglement with colonial histories, combined with established relationships with coaches and management, enabled an approach grounded in both critical reflexivity and trust-based access.

Prior to the season, and before any data collection began, Bobby met with coaches, team managers, and community leaders to discuss the project's aims and design. Once the roster was finalized, he met with players and parents to introduce the study, outline its purpose, and explain the planned methods, including semistructured interviews and ethnographic observation. Players and parents expressed strong support and provided informed consent, welcoming the researcher's presence throughout the season.

Over the course of the year, Bobby traveled with the Beardy's Blackhawks, attending home and away games across Saskatchewan, as well as the Mac's World Invitational Tournament in Calgary, Alberta. He was granted access to dressing rooms and coaches’ spaces before and after games and joined players and families for postgame meals. This sustained engagement fostered trust and rapport with players, coaches, and community members, while providing insight into everyday team dynamics and informal interactions in locker rooms, on benches, and in the stands. This proximity also enabled ongoing refinement of emerging themes through informal feedback from team-affiliated stakeholders, who frequently shared their perspectives and added depth to the analysis.

In addition to participant observation, Bobby conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 players and 21 parents. Early in the fieldwork period, the research team became aware of the SHA's decision to eliminate the Blackhawks from the league, as well as the growing frustration this generated among players, families, and the broader Beardy's community. In response, the research team sought to support participants by articulating concerns directly to league officials, leveraging their limited academic platform to advocate for reconsideration, drafting formal letters of opposition, and contributing analysis to public-facing media outlets (see McKegney et al., 2019). Beardy's alumni also engaged local radio media to amplify their concerns beyond the hockey community. Despite these efforts, the SHA's decision remained unchanged.

All members of the research team were invited to attend the Blackhawks’ final home game on February 22, 2020. During this event, we conducted interviews with 16 alumni, along with several community members and coaching staff, to gather reflections on the organization's broader history and significance. Alumni perspectives were particularly valuable in illuminating the long-term personal and cultural impacts of participation in the Blackhawks’ program. A synopsis of these interviews was later produced as a short video and gifted to the team as a commemorative record of their experiences and legacy (see Henry 2020).

All field notes and interview transcripts were analyzed using an inductive thematic approach to identify recurring patterns and concepts related to belonging, reconciliation, and the decolonizing potential of First Nations-led sport (Braun and Clarke 2006). Through iterative coding and team discussion, three overarching themes were developed to capture the relational and cultural significance of the Blackhawks experience. These themes are presented and analyzed below.

Belonging and community

One of the earliest and most persistent themes to emerge from our fieldwork was the profound sense of belonging cultivated by the Beardy's Blackhawks. From the first practices and games, it was evident that the team operated differently from most Canadian hockey programs. Elders were regularly welcomed into the locker room to share teachings and conduct spiritual ceremonies, including sweetgrass and sage burnings used as cleansing rituals. Community members offered stories that situated the team within a broader cultural and historical context, helping players and families deepen intercultural familiarity and understanding. At select home games, Cree drummers and singers performed before the national anthem, filling the arena with local rhythm and song and weaving Indigenous musical traditions into the spectacle of sport. Through these practices, hockey became more than competition—it was folded into a cultural and spiritual fabric that positioned the rink as a space of collective renewal and connection.

For many Indigenous players, this environment offered something exceedingly rare: the opportunity to compete at the highest levels of youth hockey while remaining rooted in community, culture, and family. The Blackhawks consistently drew Indigenous athletes from northern reserves and small cities across Saskatchewan—players who might otherwise have been isolated or tokenized on predominantly settler teams. As one Indigenous player from the 2019–2020 roster explained, the team created opportunities that were often denied elsewhere:

You can showcase your talent [at Beardy's] against other teams that won’t give you a chance just because of where you’re from or where you live.

The significance of this environment becomes even clearer when set against the broader landscape of racism and exclusion in Canadian hockey. Former Blackhawks player Craig McCallum, from Canoe Lake First Nation, described how his earlier experiences on a predominantly settler U18 (formerly “Midget”) AAA team pushed him to the verge of quitting the sport:

I didn’t want to go to the rink. I didn’t want to hang out with my teammates. All I wanted to do was just get by. (McCallum, in McKegney et al. 2019)

McCallum's story resonates with accounts from other Indigenous players navigating settler-dominated hockey structures. For example, former NHL player and coach Ted Nolan, from Garden River First Nation, recalls that moving to Kenora for junior hockey transformed the game from something he loved into something he merely “survived.” In his autobiography Life in Two Worlds (Nolan 2023), Nolan recounts that during his very first skate, a teammate speared him and hurled a racial slur—an encounter that immediately escalated into a fight. This was not an isolated incident but the start of a relentless pattern:

The same thing happened the next day. And the next. And the next … They just kept coming. I’d occasionally heard bigoted insults from opponents in [previous] rec leagues, but never from my teammates and never accompanied by physical attacks. (Nolan 2025)

Many Indigenous women and gender-diverse athletes describe similarly persistent forms of exclusion—often more subtle but equally corrosive. Inuvialuk and Gwich’in player Davina McLeod reflects on her first months playing hockey in the south:

I felt like an outcast for sure … You would see other girls invited to things and you’re like, “I wonder why I’m not.” It was pretty easy to tell … (McLeod and McKegney 2021: 90)

Such experiences underscore how, in contrast to the rhetoric and popular mythology of hockey as emblematic of Canadian identity, what MacDonald and Edwards (2021) term the “neutral zone trap” operates as a cultural and structural framework that privileges a narrow subset of participants—often those who are read as white, heterosexual, and cisgender. ¹

Faced with both microaggressions and explicit racism, McCallum was on the brink of leaving hockey altogether. Beardy's reversed that trajectory:

But when I was at Beardy's, I couldn’t wait to go to the rink. I couldn’t wait to get around the guys. Everything changed. (McCallum, in 2019)

In an environment that affirmed and supported him for who he was, McCallum not only stayed in the game—he led the league in scoring and helped the Blackhawks secure their only league championship. His experience highlights how First Nation-led sport can disrupt the alienation that often marks Indigenous participation in settler-dominated teams. As Andersen (2014) notes, settlers typically retain the privilege of choosing how and when to engage with Indigenous Peoples—a privilege not afforded in reverse. In mainstream hockey, Indigenous athletes are often “the only one” (McLeod et al. 2023), burdened by racialization, exclusion, and representational pressures. The Blackhawks inverted this dynamic by creating a relational framework in which Indigenous communities determined who could participate and on what terms.

For younger Indigenous athletes, this framework translated into an everyday sense of ease, recognition, and comfort. As one player described:

I feel more comfortable [on the Blackhawks] because, you know, there's more kids like me… They come from the reserve, they know what it's like being out in the world … and I think it's definitely more comfortable to have some guys like you.

Belonging, in this sense, was not merely emotional—it was structural. The First Nation-led environment provided forms of safety and familiarity integral to players’ success and well-being. Many athletes from northern communities described feeling more at home with the Blackhawks than they would have in larger urban centers. The rink at Beardy's became an extension of the community itself—a place where Indigenous youth could pursue elite hockey without severing the relationships and cultural grounding that sustained them.

Crucially, the Blackhawks also created belonging for non-Indigenous athletes. Many initially joined the team after being cut or overlooked by programs in centers such as Saskatoon. The coaching staff became adept at identifying “diamonds in the rough”—players who were undersized, late bloomers, or otherwise undervalued by conventional scouting systems but who possessed strong character and developmental potential. While these athletes rarely arrived with the explicit intention of engaging Indigenous culture, the team's ethos of inclusion invited them into an Indigenous-defined space grounded in reciprocity rather than assimilation. One settler alumnus (1999–2002) recalled:

You really felt like you were part of the culture, and they always wanted anybody who wasn’t Indigenous to be a part of it too.

Other settler players described similarly transformative experiences:

We did a lot of stuff in the dressing rooms before the game … traditional sweetgrass … drums and singing before the national anthem … you really felt that you were part of the culture. (Alumnus 2000–2001)

It's so special because I’d never experienced being on a team on a Reserve before … I wish everyone got to experience playing on a team like that. (Alumnus 2016–2019)

No other team would take me in … it was just a place that I could call home and have 20 other brothers … that I called family. (Alumnus 2015–2018)

These reflections underscore the Blackhawks’ broader social significance. The team modeled an alternative vision of Canadian hockey—one in which success is measured less by individual performance than by the quality of relationships sustained across histories, cultures, and differences. Through ceremony, kinship, and care, the Blackhawks transformed the rink from a site of exclusion into a living pedagogy of belonging.

Unlearning and reorientation

Another key theme that emerged through our fieldwork was that the Blackhawks program did not simply produce hockey players—it cultivated a distinct form of social and cultural education. Every game, practice, and road trip became an exercise in negotiating identity, community, and difference. Players left the program not only as athletes but as socially attuned individuals, equipped to carry these lessons into the wider world.

The process of unlearning surfaced repeatedly in players’ accounts. Trevor (pseudonym), a defenseman from Saskatoon, reflected on his personal journey from fear to familiarity:

I used to see Indigenous players not being treated well. When I was younger, I avoided being around them because I was scared. But since I met my teammates, my perspective has changed completely. Being friends with them, growing up alongside them, I’ve come to really appreciate their culture—it's amazing. Playing with a Rez team in a tournament in California and winning—it was just a lot of fun. It built friendships and deep bonds. They even joke that I’m a quarter [Indigenous] now.

Trevor's story captures the emotional dimension of unlearning: fear giving way to connection, estrangement replaced by intimacy. Within the Blackhawks’ First Nation-led environment, success meant growing into a more empathetic, culturally aware, and socially responsible person—someone who carried the lessons of respect and belonging beyond the rink.

Logan (pseudonym), a non-Indigenous player who joined the team as a teenager, described how seemingly ordinary gestures—waves, nods, casual greetings encountered throughout Beardy's—became powerful expressions of belonging:

Before, my fifteen-year-old year, I was a little sketched out, ‘cause I didn’t know many [Indigenous] People. But everyone would always wave, and it felt safe. Now it's my third year, and sometimes in Saskatoon I catch myself doing the wave, and people give me weird looks. But in Beardy's and Duck Lake, it's just what you do. It's a warm, welcoming community. The coaching staff—they took a chance on me, welcomed me in, and it just felt … it's a great feeling. It's like a second home.

Through these small acts of care and recognition, Logan came to understand belonging as something cultivated through relationship rather than determined by origin. What began as uncertainty gradually settled into comfort and connection, sustained by the everyday gestures that reshaped his sense of what community could mean.

For other settler players, these experiences invited a deeper re-evaluation of the assumptions that typically shape settler relations to Indigenous communities. Conner (pseudonym) reflected on how being embedded within Beardy's disrupted the invisible boundaries that often sustain settler estrangement:

You don’t know what Beardy's actually is until you experience it. Like, it may look like something from the outside, but on the inside—some of the nicest people I’ve ever met are these Native people. They’re so generous, amazing people. People need to see what Beardy's actually is.

Conner's reflection illustrates how embodied participation within a First Nation-led space can generate new forms of understanding. For players like him, recognition of Indigenous communities as places of generosity, vitality, and relational abundance replaced the static and deficient images so often perpetuated in settler imaginaries (Koch and Scherer 2016). This learning did not emerge through formal instruction but through lived experience: through being hosted, coached, and cared for within a community guided by its own values and protocols.

This observation resonates with what Glen Coulthard (2014) calls “grounded normativity”: an ethics emerging from place-based practices and relationships. For Coulthard, alongside scholars such as Donald (2009), TallBear (2013), and Wilson (2008), such experiences exceed recognition-based frameworks by foregrounding relationality, reciprocity, and lived accountability. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) suggests, transformation begins and occurs “through relationships.”

As one Indigenous parent noted, “those [settler] kids are given chances to break [the] moulds… to see something different.” For many, that process of unlearning was profound and enduring. Jackson (pseudonym), a settler winger for the Blackhawks during the 2019–2020 season, reflected on the transformative nature of such encounters:

Seeing Beardy's—it was the first time I ever saw it. You go into the organization and come out a whole different kid. You become part of a family. All those kids are going to miss that opportunity to see what a Native community is actually like. How it impacts you—it sticks with you for the rest of your life. That is a great place.

Jackson's words offer a retrospective view of the Blackhawks’ pedagogical power. Within the team's relational framework, players encountered forms of care, recognition, and reciprocity that directly challenged dominant settler narratives of deficiency, danger, and distance that have long shaped Indigenous-settler relations in Canada. For settler players, participation in the program was not merely an athletic experience but a process of unlearning—a gradual dismantling of stereotypes and inherited assumptions about Indigenous Peoples and life on Reserve.

Collectively, these narratives reveal that unlearning stereotypes unfolded not as a cognitive correction but as a deeply embodied process, sustained through the rhythms of everyday life—shared meals, long bus rides, and the daily work of practicing, competing, and caring alongside one another. The Beardy's Blackhawks functioned as a living pedagogy of relation, where settler players learned to inhabit new modes of perception and feeling. Anchored in an ethic of belonging, the team fostered humility and mutual accountability, inviting players to listen, to be changed, and to reconsider what community, competition, and reconciliation might look like when practiced on Indigenous terms.

From witnessing to experiencing racism

Alongside belonging, another theme that surfaced through our fieldwork and interviews—which builds directly on the processes of unlearning and reorientation described above—was how players encountered and grappled with racism in hockey, both as witnesses and, at times, as targets themselves. Anti-Indigenous racism has long been a documented reality for Indigenous athletes in hockey (Collings and Condon 1996; McLeod and McKegney 2021; McKegney et al. 2021; Rathwell et al. 2022; Robidoux 2004; Szto et al. 2020), as well as in other sports (Paraschak 2013). The experiences of Beardy's players were no exception.

For Indigenous athletes on the team, racist comments and gestures formed a familiar backdrop—something they were forced to navigate long before joining the Blackhawks. Mason (pseudonym), a Cree winger for the Blackhawks, recalled:

Well, just being Aboriginal, there was a couple times I’d get, I’d get some racial slurs called at me, but I just didn’t let it get to me because, just, not important—play the game, play my game …. I just use it as motivation to work harder and show them, prove them wrong.

Mason's response reflects a longstanding survival strategy among Indigenous athletes: coping with racism by staying quiet, deflecting attention, or converting hostility into motivation. Such strategies often arise from the awareness that responding too directly to racist taunts risks being labeled the “problem,” potentially jeopardizing one's place on the team. McKegney et al. (2021) describe this dynamic as “manufactured compliance”—a social pressure that conditions Indigenous youth to absorb and manage racism in order to advance.

What distinguished the Blackhawks setting, however, was how the First Nation-led environment frequently exposed settler teammates to the racism that Indigenous players routinely endure, inviting them to confront—often in a deeply personal way—the corrosive effects of racism and the humiliation of seeing it ignored or minimized by referees or league officials. Because helmets concealed players’ identities, the Beardy's logo sometimes triggered racialized assumptions that did not neatly map onto actual ancestry. As a result, non-Indigenous teammates occasionally became targets of anti-Indigenous slurs simply for wearing the Blackhawks jersey.

Adrian (pseudonym), an Indigenous player, described one such moment:

I remember [a non-Indigenous teammate] coming to me and saying, “what the fuck, this guy just called me a dirty Native,” and then [another Indigenous teammate] spoke up, like, “you know, it's just the Beardy's logo—you [non-Native] guys are gonna have to deal with it.”

We interpret “deal with it” as an invitation to become accustomed to experiencing anti-Indigenous racism, as their Indigenous teammates already had. For some settler players, these moments generated a distinct form of cognitive dissonance, revealing how deeply normalized anti-Indigenous racism is within hockey culture. Being exposed to these slurs unsettled assumptions about their own insulation from racialization and made visible the everyday dynamics that Indigenous players routinely navigate.

Trevor, introduced earlier as a non-Indigenous defenseman, described how he and other settler players were repeatedly misidentified as Indigenous on the ice:

During all my three years, I’ve been called just a bunch of dirty Natives and all that. Like, I have no First Nations in me, and it's, like, you hear lots of stuff like that—“go back to your teepee,” “go back to your drum circles.” A bunch of rude comments that are totally unnecessary, and when you tell the refs they won’t call penalties. It won’t get told to stop. Just nothing.

These encounters forced Trevor and his teammates to confront the realities of racism in Canadian hockey in deeply personal ways. No longer distant observers, they became unwilling participants in the racialized structures that Indigenous players routinely endure. Frustration grew over the double standards their team faced compared with others from predominantly settler towns, whose players were more readily believed and protected by officials.

With encouragement from coaches and community members, Trevor and other players began to reflect collectively on these experiences—discussing their prior assumptions, fears, and misunderstandings about Indigenous Peoples, and reconsidering what fairness and respect might actually look like in practice. Even when their complaints were ignored by referees or league officials, these conversations became spaces of critical learning: opportunities to interrogate inequities within the sport and to consider their own roles in perpetuating or challenging them.

To be sure, affective encounters such as these—while important in exposing settlers to injustice—also risk becoming “settler moves to innocence,” relieving settlers of feelings of guilt or responsibility while obscuring the continued need to relinquish land, power, and privilege (Gebhard et al. 2022; Tuck and Yang 2013). At the same time, though, settler societies are sustained by a broader structure of ignorance about Indigenous realities. This ignorance is not simply the result of insufficient information; it is produced and maintained through systemic obfuscation and occasionally unsettled through affective, often uncomfortable encounters and through direct exposure to injustice. For Indigenous players, these moments opened space to reframe endurance not as silent suffering but as a form of collective strength. In this sense, the Blackhawks exemplify a relational, community-driven form of critical consciousness-building and fraternity that contrasts with more formalized, state-led, or policy-oriented approaches, albeit one that remains limited in scope.

Furthermore, following Coulthard (2014), reconciliation cannot be confined to addressing harms experienced solely by Indigenous Peoples, as this framing risks positioning them as objects of state-led repair—and as the only subjects required to change. Genuine reconciliation instead requires a fundamental rethinking of colonial relations and the everyday structures and actions that sustain them. In a modest but meaningful way, the Beardy's Blackhawks embodied such reorientation: experiences of racism—affecting both Indigenous and settler players—made visible the persistence of colonial inequities within a physical and cultural realm of social significance to these young men and their families, and one that is deeply embedded in the national imaginary. At the same time, these encounters created conditions for reflection, accountability, and the possibility of transformation.

Conclusion

On November 12, 2019, the SHA announced its decision to remove the Beardy's Blackhawks U18 AAA program from Beardy's and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation as part of a province-wide realignment of elite hockey. While the SHA framed its decision as a neutral measure undertaken in accordance with dispassionate criteria that would foster player, team, and league excellence, such criteria reflect a narrow, technocratic vision of equity that privileges well-resourced urban programs and overlooks the specific historical, cultural, and geographic contexts that shape Indigenous participation in sport. In the case of the Beardy's Blackhawks, the application of these ostensibly neutral standards—decoupled from opportunities for intercultural engagement and commitments to reconciliation—effectively ensured the removal of the league's, and the nation's, only U18 AAA First Nations-led team.

With an on-Reserve population of 1295 according to the 2016 Census (Statistics Canada 2020), it was virtually impossible for Beardy's to maintain the kind of large minor hockey system demanded by the selection criteria. Moreover, because many off-Reserve players and their families preferred commuting to Beardy's for games and practices rather than residing on Reserve—reluctance that may reflect enduring settler colonial prejudices—the organization struggled to demonstrate a robust billeting system, another key requirement. As a result of these supposedly dispassionate criteria, Beardy's was one of only two teams removed from the league, the other being the Notre Dame Argos. Notably, Notre Dame retained another team in the league, leaving Beardy's as the only community to lose its entire AAA program.

Similar patterns have occurred elsewhere. In 2018, five southern Manitoba teams withdrew from the Keystone Junior Hockey League (KJHL) to form the Capital Region Junior Hockey League, leaving northern First Nations-led teams to compete largely among themselves in a diminished KJHL. Leaders from these northern teams argued that the split effectively segregated Indigenous and non-Indigenous programs, prompting lawsuits and accusations of racial division in Manitoba junior hockey. Peguis Chief Glenn Hudson, speaking on behalf of five First Nations communities, underscored longstanding tensions between northern and southern teams, framing the decision as discriminatory: “Junior hockey is an integral part of our northern First Nation communities … Our communities love the game of hockey and want to see hockey continue at the highest level” (Winnipeg Free Press 2018). In each instance, league decisions were presented as neutral administrative measures—concerned with travel, geography, or standardized development and schooling models. ²

We argue, however, that evaluating sport primarily through institutional capacity or competitive performance renders invisible the relational and cultural dimensions that make Indigenous-led programs both distinctive and indispensable. This invisibility is reflected in comments by SHA general manager Kelly McClintock, who remarked during an interview on CBC Radio's Blue Sky, “We are starting with a clean slate” (CBC Blue Sky with Garth Materie, 2019). The notion of a “clean slate,” however, obscures the reality that sport is embedded within historical and political conditions that engender ongoing responsibilities. It suggests that the work of reconciliation lies outside the purview of sport organizations, leagues, and governing bodies. We contend that this is untrue.

Elsewhere in the CBC interview, McClintock argued that “there's a lot more acceptance of Indigenous kids, and they’re no different than any other kid playing hockey. That if they have the ability to play at the AAA level, they should all deserve that opportunity.” Significantly, the locus of concern in these remarks is the individual athlete—his inclusion and development within an existing sporting structure—rather than the systemic conditions shaping opportunity and belonging. Yet the Beardy's Blackhawks program cultivated far more than elite players. It fostered relationships, responsibilities, and opportunities for cross-cultural engagement, while also creating spaces for cultural and historical understanding. By failing to recognize these contributions, the league's technocratic evaluation mechanisms enacted a form of colonial erasure, inadvertently reproducing the very forms of structural violence that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was mobilized to unearth, interrogate, and address.

The TRC's Final Report (2015) reminds us that reconciliation demands more than acknowledgment; it requires structural transformation. Calls to Action #87–91 identify sport as a vital site for rebuilding relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples, urging governments and sporting bodies to support Indigenous athlete development, dismantle barriers to participation, and embed anti-racism education within all levels of sport.

For over two decades, the Beardy's Blackhawks embodied these principles in action. Situated within a Cree First Nation, the program created a space where Indigenous youth could pursue competitive hockey while remaining grounded in their cultural values, languages, and kinship networks. It also provided settler players with opportunities to unlearn stereotypes, develop intercultural understanding, and experience First Nations community life in ways that no policy initiative alone could achieve. In this sense, Beardy's was not simply a hockey team—it was a living model of reconciliation through everyday practice.

Reflecting on the team's final game in the SHA, Rick Gamble, former Chief of the Beardy's and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation and Chairman of the Beardy's Blackhawks, observed:

I don’t think people understand what it means to a First Nations community to be able to host an elite sports program … Building bridges between Native and non-Native communities—that was one of the things we were able to accomplish. I think we educated a lot of non-Native people about our culture. And, to me, that's something I hold dear to my heart. It's something I’m going to miss.