New book about hockey team from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School set for Thunder Bay launch

CBC

15-05-2025

The story behind Pelican Lake Indian Residential School's hockey team
5 hours ago
Duration 4:38
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Beyond The Rink: Behind The Images of Residential School Hockey is a new book that tells the story of the championship hockey team from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School near Sioux Lookout, Ont. It's set to launch in Thunder Bay on May 21.
The authors say the 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.'
Janice Forsyth is co-author of the book and a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation.
She spoke with Mary-Jean Cormier, the host of Superior Morning, about what she hopes readers take away from it.
Forsyth said the survivors of residential schools are finding the language to tell the stories so that other people can understand more about their experience.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mary-Jean Cormier: What an amazing and oftentimes heartbreaking book. Can you tell us more about this story?
Janice Forsyth: The story started with a series of photographs from the National Film Board that I saw with one of our co-authors, Kelly Bull at his home in Timmins many years ago. It started to unfold from there because I wondered what was the National Film Board doing taking these really professional photographs of those residential school hockey teams on this tour of Southern Ontario, because you don't just send the National Film Board on a tour like that.
So, over the years, I wondered what did the photographs mean? What did the boys think about that hockey experience, especially coming through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC], the whole era of litigation and thinking through their own histories? What did they think about the future, not only for Indigenous youth, but for Canadians more broadly?
So, the pictures sparked some really important conversations on a whole range of important issues.
MC: This is a project that's happened over time, correct?
JF: Yes, more than 20 years ago, which really goes to show how long some of these projects do take. I think sometimes people believe that these "research projects" can be carried out in the span of a year or two years. And you see this often with government funding or some types of research funding, but the really good stories take a long time to tell. They will often change in the retelling as people think more deeply about things and as time passes by and other events that shape their understanding of life take place.
MC: You collaborated with three surviving members of that championship hockey team for the book, can you tell me a bit about those men and what it was like hearing their stories first hand?
JF: There was actually a much larger team that was part of this research. Over the years, the number of people kind of came and went. A couple of student theses were written about the project. Fatima Baba did her MA thesis initially interviewing two of those survivors.
And then Braden Te Hiwi, who is also an author on this book, wrote a history of sport and recreation at Sioux Lookout Indian Residential School. And then Alexandra Giancarlo, who is really the first author on this book, she worked with the three survivors, doing in-depth interviews over a couple of years with them to try and kind of suss out their story now that we are well past the TRC.
So, I really only knew Kelly Bull. He's one of the three survivors and he's kind of been in my life for many, many, many years. My mom knew him when we were all living in Timmins, Ont., and she used to support his coaching and sport and recreation endeavours in northern Ontario. He actually helped me get into North American Indigenous games way back in 1995, so he's been a mentor in my life and so I can really only speak to knowing Kelly.
What's really important for me is just how deeply Kelly and the other survivors think about their experiences in the residential school system. I think a lot of what the public thinks about the TRC and the Indian Residential School system is told from a particular angle, which is often what they see in the media and the abuses that they suffered at school. And that's very true because that definitely happened, without a doubt.
But they think about it also in so many more complex ways and in this case, it's about the role of hockey in particular in shaping his identity as an Indigenous person and trying to make sense of that experience in the context of residential school. How do you take this experience where he formed friendships and had experiences that he didn't otherwise have, and yet reconcile that with an education system that was hell bent on changing him and erasing him from his identity? That's really heavy stuff to think through.
So, I think it really goes to show that the residential school survivors really have a lot more to offer in terms of thinking about the future of Indigenous life in Canada and about, you know, Indigenous relations with Canada more broadly.
MC: You mentioned that there was a photographer from the National Film Board that accompanied the team on their tour and those images are part of what drew you in. What was that like when you first saw those pictures and started to hear bits and pieces of the story?
JF: That's how the book opens up, and I still remember it, although I recognize memory is fallible. But I still remember the feeling of sitting at his kitchen table and he was looking through these large photographs. Kelly would flip through the pictures and I was of two minds because I was busy looking at the pictures. I was really struck by the clarity and the quality of the photos and I knew right away that they were professionally taken. But also just the way in which the kids were posed. Some of them are really creepy, to be honest.
In one case there's this photograph of them in Ottawa and Parliament Hill and their heads are cleanly shaven. They've been dressed in these shiny uniforms and they're posed looking up at this kind of parliamentarian who's playing what I think is a recorder — almost like a pied piper kind of photo where the focus is really on the man who's playing the little flute and the kids are there looking up at him adoringly.
He wasn't talking about the photographs like we might talk about a photograph, he was actually talking past them about something much bigger.
There's other photos that are staged where there's these images of "Indianness" in the background, like this massive totem pole where the kids are kind of looking at this man who's pointing up at the totem pole as if he's teaching them about their past, even though totem poles would not have been part of Cree or Ojibway culture. So you go through all of these photos that are clearly educative, they're meant to tell a story, but they're meant to tell a story from Indian Affairs point of view because at that time, Indian Affairs could hire the National Film Board to take photographs for your own department, especially if they were in service of telling a nationalist narrative.
I also remember Kelly looking through the photographs and my head was kind of just lost in the photographs at the same time that I remember him talking about the photographs. He wasn't talking about the photographs like we might talk about a photograph, he was actually talking past them about something much bigger, about the erasure and all of the different types of abuse that were happening in school. So, it was almost like he wasn't mindlessly flipping through the photographs, he was almost using them as touchstones. So, that's where I realized there was something much bigger going on here and so began the whole project, if you will, with him and with the team over the years because they ebbed and flowed to try and tell that story, like what is really going on here? What really happened in 1951? Why were those photos made? What are the residential school survivors now able to tell us about those photographs and what do they hope for the future?
MC: What do you want readers to take away from this book?
JF: All of the different authors will tell you different things, which I think is a beautiful part about stories because they're all equally true.
For me, I think, because I've been doing research in the residential school system, focusing on sports and games for more than 20 years, I just really like to emphasize how deeply residential school survivors think about and try to talk about their experiences, and rightly so. For many years the focus has been on a fairly particular story about trying to tell the story of abuse and about coloniality from a certain angle to do the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports. But I think now that we're 10 years past like the TRC, residential school survivors now think more deeply about their other experiences trying to tie in things like sport and recreation, and not just talk about it as a positive experience.
I think they themselves are trying to reconcile how is it that they really enjoyed these moments of freedom and other moments of expression knowing that those same activities were actually integrated into the school system to try and erase their identities? How is it that you can actually find meaning in these genocidal activities? And what do you do with that now?
So, I really think survivors now are thinking much more deeply. They're finding the language and we're helping them to try and find the language and tell the stories to tease out those threads so that other people can understand what their experience is about, and so the second generation survivors, communities and Indigenous nations and even Canadians more broadly can address those underlying tensions, especially in the space of sport, physical activity and recreation. That to me probably is the most important thing and the thing that I talk about most.