Beyond the Rink: Behind the Images of Residential School Hockey

by Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, Braden Te Hiwi

Genres: Nonfiction, Canada

204 pages, Paperback

Published April 10, 2025

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s said, a picture is worth a thousand words; with inflation sometimes a thousand stories – although, in this case, the story to be told is the one behind the picture; in a sense, the picture’s counter narrative. As the last twenty years have seen a growth in awareness about and understanding of the brutal and genocidal Indian Residential School system in Canada, we have also seen increasing discussion of them and the persistent powerful voices of apologists. One of the common claims by the apologists is that the kids (by which they mean almost exclusively the boys) got to play sport, and they seem to have enjoyed it… so they can’t have been all bad.

This impressive book unpacks one moment of Residential School sport, the high profile 1951 tour by the Pelican Lake school hockey team to Ottawa and Toronto, and at the insistence of some of the team members sets out to tell the story behind the tour’s photographic record – the story of residential schools and their sports. The story is a powerful one, of a propaganda tour where a dozen or so 12 year old boys were paraded round the core of the Canadian State – Parliament, the National Archives, and so forth – as evidence of the civilising power of the Residential School system and of modern sport – in this case, hockey. Along the way, they were accompanied by a photographer from the National Film Board – as much a propaganda agency of the state as anything else at the time – whose task it was to construct a photographic essay, a visual record, of the tour and the boys’ 'civilised' status.

Before going any further and for transparency, a declaration: the global community of academic sport historians is quite small, of those whose work focuses on Indigenous and First Nations peoples even smaller. I first met Janice Forsyth about the time this project was getting underway, and she has become an important compatriot in this work and I’d like to think good academic friend; I know Alexandra Giancarlo less well but she’s a valued fellow scholar in the field. I like to think I’d say the same things about the book if I didn’t know the authors.

The book has been 20 years in the making – and the back story matters, greatly. This is a ‘survivor led’ project, begun as so many research projects are – serendipitously, when one of the authors (Janice Forsyth) was home from graduate school in her small north Ontario town and decided to visit one of the former team members – Kelly Bull – simply because he was a family friend. It was during that visit that he produced a collection of photos by the NFB photographer, and they got to talking. Over the years two other former team members got involved – Chris Cromarty and David Wesley – and the conversations grew into a research project, drawing in the other two co-authors – Alexandra Giancarlo and Braden Te Hiwi. It is crucial to the wider understanding of the project that all six are seen as the authors of this scholarly book written for a greater than scholars audience.

This authorship matters for two reasons: four are Indigenous to the lands that became Canada (Forsyth and the former team members), Te Hiwi to Aotearoa (New Zealand), leaving only Giancarlo a settler scholar. When we add to this that the project and questions were largely shaped by the former team members – Bull, Cromarty, and Wesley – and that they insisted that the audience be as wide as possible, we can see that a key part of the project has been the repatriation of the photos and their stories to their Indigenous subjects, and that that repatriation included a major educational component. The upshot of this is that this is also a significant piece of decolonial scholarship, surrendering the power to craft the story to the marginalized subjects of that story, shifting the team’s subjectification/subjection to subjectivity, granting them ownership of the story and what happens to it.

The scholarship is impressive, the archival and other sources expansive, the evidence of a caring, ethical and moral relationship with Bull, Cromarty, and Wesley obvious: relationships of this kind take a long time to develop. The effect is a book that is well crafted, engagingly written, directed to a scholarly and general audience, well-illustrated (as you’d hope), and elegantly produced. It is an exceptional piece of scholarly sport history, modelling how it should be done.

[Val Wilde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-written and compelling, academic without being dense. It’s not about hockey as a sport, but as a symbol of Euro-Canadian identity, as political propaganda. But it’s also about memory, and about Indigenous people reclaiming those memories by re-interpreting historical photographs and artifacts: a really interesting and important project being quietly carried out in a number of communities.

[Dallas Boutet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this one. It explains in further detail the quality of life at the goverment funded residential schools. It also changed my perspective on how to look at photos from the past.

Was this person forced to smile?

[Enid Wray · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting visual history.

Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.

[Abbey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really love the restorying approach that is being used to reclaim the narrative of residential schools and Indigenous history, especially through photos. This project thoroughly demonstrates how photos and other media shaped and portrayed Indigenous assimilation to the Canadian public, through the mix of research and history, along with the Black Hawks survivors’ stories.