Introduction
Many cultural traditions and social practices that are widely known today are taken for granted, with people not thinking about their origins or meanings because they consider them not relevant anymore. However, delving deeper into the history of some practices, including sports, illustrates that there tend to be Indigenous roots to them, which might have been overlooked. In Canada, hockey has long been a subject of heated debates within sports due to the disagreements behind its origin. The arguments were said to be similar to the matters of “Creationism” over “Evolution” intended to determine where and when the sport emerged. As with many other sports that date back to ancient times and evolve with society to take new forms and types, hockey was found to have Indigenous roots, and this has begun being discovered only relatively recently. Hockey as a sport was found to be connected to Mi’kmaw people belonging to the First Nations who played varied games on the ice. Nevertheless, these findings have not been widely publicized because of the presence of a Eurocentric perspective on the development of the sport.
Roots of Canadian Hockey
Going back to the roots of Canadian hockey as they were traced in history, Europeans who arrived in the new land witnessed the Mi’kmaq people play a version of hockey back in the late seventeenth century. The sport was called Duwarken, with pucks carved from cherrywood that was used until later in the century when Euro-Americans imported rubber to replace the wooden puck. In the game, players had to hit a round stone on the ice with a stick (puck) that was referred to as the Duwarkenaught by the Mi’kmaq (Bennett 2019). The striker was to hit the stone ball, causing it to roll on the ice and get chased by other players to be overtaken. Even such a short description of the sport played by the Indigenous people allows us to instantly make connections to what is known as hockey today.
Games played on the ice were present among Indigenous people and the Mi’kmaw society in particular at the time of and shortly after their first contact with Europeans arriving on their land. This was proved by Bennet in their exploratory article “Reimagining the Creation: ‘The Missing Indigenous Link’ in the Origins of Canadian Hockey. The researcher pointed out several important Mi’kmaq words, such as “oochamkunutk,” which referred to the field and ice games, that eventually melded with European-influenced ice hurley to transform into a distinctly new game called “alchamadijik” (Bennett 2019). According to the scholar specializing in the Mi’kmaw language, Bernie Francis, the Mi’kmaq people had different ways of describing the act of playing hockey, depending on the region and location. For instance, the word “alje’ma’tijik” is said to originate with Mi’kwaw that lived in what is known today as New Brunswick. “Alje’ma’tijik” is translated as “they are playing hockey,” and taken together, the presence of the mentioned words in the Indigenous people’s vocabulary is a testament to the prevalence of early forms of hockey (Bennett 2019).
In addition to language, the artifacts that belonged to the Mi’kmaw people that were found and studied provide additional support for the claims that hockey’s roots lie with the Indigenous population. It was discovered that the Mi’kmaq played Duwarken using spruce roots, which gives insight into the origins of the hockey stick. As mentioned by the art curator David Carter, the hockey club that originated from spruce roots melded with the stick that was used in the Irish ground game of hurley. Carter mentioned that the hockey stick is a product of the evolution of various objects and sources. The contribution of the Mi’kmaw people is essential because of their deep understanding of different species of wood and carving skills, which allowed them to fashion wooden handles and use coopering tools to make sticks of a specific shape.
As the surviving sticks made by the Mi’kmaq people were studied and their handles and materials looked at closely, researchers were confident that the spruce root and the hurley-on-ice sticks pointed to the evolution of the “MicMac” brand sticks, a forerunner of the modern hockey stick. With every discovery, both ethnologists and anthropologists got closer to explaining cultural transmission points, profoundly exploring the evolution of the Indigenous game into the emerging hybrid of alchamadijk, the most likely precursor to what today is known as hockey.
Impact of Colonialism
As the current discussion presents some undeniable evidence of the connections between the Mi’kmaw practice of Duwarken and modern hockey, it remains to be explored why the discoveries are being publicized only fairly recently. Research articles dedicated to studying the impact of the Indigenous population on modern sports all agree that the legacy of imperialism and settler colonialism had a significant effect on shaping historical narratives (Bennett 2019). There is a dominant perspective that sport was initially invented in industrializing modern Britain and was disseminated across the world by enterprising missionaries, teachers, the army and the navy, public servants, and others who traveled and settled in new regions (MacLean 2019). To some degree, this argument holds some ground because Britain viewed the dissemination of sports practices, the ideology of athleticism, and manliness as its imperial mission. Thus, when it comes to Indigenous sports, the situation affecting the population is intensified by specific characteristics and forms of settler colonialism.
Unique Indigenous Perspectives
The exploration of Indigenous people’s approach to sports may help to reveal their attitudes and practices, which are highly important for showing the difference with the Western approach. In his article “Beyond Competition: An Indigenous Perspective on Organized Sport,” Rice emphasized the mismatch between the community-oriented understanding of sport within the Indigenous perspective as opposed to the Western individualistic one. Notably, when researchers were observing how Indigenous players engaged in sports activities, the result of the games never seemed to matter to them unless they played with an outside team. From the Western perspective, competition is the main reason the sport is played, while among Indigenous players, the main objective is participation and engagement with a team of peers. Winning at all costs was not an option – in their team culture, every member mattered and was listened to avoid negative consequences for them. Moreover, in an Indigenous team, everyone is given a chance to play despite their level of skill, which is quite rare in other cultural contexts.
The attitude of support in sports and the strive for equality is reflected in early Indigenous teachings. Rice gives an example of the Anishnabé culture’s wolf teaching, which stands for humility. The culture has other value-based teachings such as love, courage, truth, honesty, wisdom, and respect, each of which was represented by a particular animal considered valuable to the worldview of the Anishnabé people (Rice 2019, 168). In their culture, wolves are viewed as sociable animals who live in packs but are private when they encounter others. It is quite rare to see wolves in their natural surroundings because they prefer not to reveal themselves to others (Rice 2019, 168). Similar principles applied when Anishnabé people played sports, with players never putting themselves above others or acting in a self-adulating way. The selection of leaders occurred based on people being able to lift others and inspire them rather than criticize them.
To understand the impact of colonial history on the historiographic narratives of the development of sports, it is necessary to include the perspectives of the Indigenous people, the history of Indigenous athletes, and their continued participation in games under question. This should be done while also “navigating the ambiguities, contradictions, and uncertainties in the historical record” (Downey 2022, 23). Such a perspective laid out by Downey was further supported by MacLean and Bennett, who agreed that the historiography of Indigenous sports was laced with colonial narratives, which contribute to unnecessary contentions. The decolonization of sports history and the Indigenization of the subjects at hand may help reconfigure the meaning of modern sports for developing a more flexible and dialogic approach to the practice of historiography (MacLean 2019). It is essential to establish a degree of parity for reaching a common ground between the colonial and Indigenous perspectives, especially since sports such as hockey developed as a result of influences from both areas.
In Bennett’s view, using Indigenous principles for understanding cultural and social phenomena inherent to the population could help bring out a more open view of the subjects under study. The researcher refers to this principle as “two-eyed seeing,” which signifies the combination of the “Aboriginal way of knowing” and the “best in the Western way of knowing” (Bennett 2019). Within this practice, the colonial perspective is not abandoned but rather enhanced through adequate criticism and pointing out the positive characteristics. Importantly, the “two-eyed seeing” is a valid perspective that can be used when analyzing the history of any sport, including lacrosse, the study of which has been significantly affected by being slotted into Western frameworks despite its complexity (Downey 2022). As the exploration of Indigenous sports begins to open up and get less affected by the narratives of the colonization, it becomes apparent that their origins go back in history much earlier than recognized previously. Through the “two-eyed seeing” approach, scholars may learn that different sports games appeared in various geographic places and that the Indigenous contribution caused particular developments and helped them evolve.
Conclusion
The history of sport and hockey, in particular, reveals a crucial contribution of Indigenous culture and practices in the development of sport as it is known today. The longstanding impact of colonialism and perspectives that favor it have ongoingly sheltered historical discovery from showing the Indigenous roots of many sports. Therefore, it is high time to acknowledge the Indigenous heritage of sports and view them as the results of an evolution of practices and a combination of cultures and approaches. Sports history can significantly benefit from the “two-eyed seeing” approach, calling for the movement of decolonization and enhancement of valuable academic tendencies present in the Eurocentric approaches.
Bibliography
Bennett, Paul. 2019. “Reimagining the Creation: The ‘Missing Indigenous Link’ in the Origins of Canadian Hockey.” Acadiensis.wordpress.com. Web.
Downey, Allan. 2022. The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood. Vancouver: UBC Press.
MacLean, Malcolm. 2019. “Engaging (with) Indigeneity: Decolonization and Indigenous/Indigenizing Sport History.” Journal of Sport History 46 (2): 189-207.
Rice, Brian. 2019. “Beyond Competition: An Indigenous Perspective on Organized Sport.” Journal of Sport History 46 (2): 166-174.