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’s Still Photography Division, who documented the experience. The tour was intended to demonstrate the success of the residential school system to the broader Canadian public and introduce the Black Hawks to “civilizing” activities that showed the ideals and benefits of assimilating into Canadian society.

The tour left a complex legacy. For some of the boys, it was the beginning of a lifelong love of hockey. But, at the same time, playing hockey became less about the sport and more about escaping the brutal living conditions and abuse at the residential school.

In Beyond the Rink, Behind the Image, Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, and Braden Te Hiwi collaborate with three surviving team members—Kelly Bull, Chris Cromarty, and David Wesley—to share their stories behind the 1951 tour photos. This book recontextualizes and repatriates photos from the tour and from their everyday lives at school, bringing together Indigenous studies and visual sociology to reveal the complicated role of sports in residential school histories. Accessible and moving, the Survivors’ stories commemorate 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, the 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.

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Janice Forsyth is a member of the Fisher River Cree First Nation and a professor in the Faculty of Education, School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia. She is a recognized leader in Indigenous sport development in Canada. Her research has generated significant national and international attention among scholars and practitioners, and several of her studies are included in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2017, she was elected to the College of the Royal Society of Canada for her contributions to research and advocacy.

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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.

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