Marion’s Story: Women’s Hockey in Indian Residential Schools
Abstract
We are lacking stories surrounding the meaning of sport in Indigenous women’s lives. Sport is a complex site entwined with culture, identity, and historical nuances for Indigenous people. This dissertation focusses on the use of sport, specifically hockey, by different structures and individuals in Indian Residential School (IRS). Historically, Indigenous women’s voices have been absent from IRS literature surrounding sport, I explore potential reasons for those gaps and fill them. The IRS system used sport as a tool of assimilation and control to aid in the attempt to rid Indigenous youth of identity and culture (NCTR, 2015; Te Hiwi & Forsyth 2017). However, stories that survivors have told in their own words, have shown the ways in which students made their own meanings out of sport in IRS (NCTR, 2015; Arcand, McKegney & Auksi 2021). These stories are predominantly from the male perspective, as sports in residential school were enforced alongside discriminatory gender ideologies, which meant that boys played sports and girls were slotted into activities that would prepare them for Canadian domestic life such as sewing, cooking, cleaning. While sport offered an escape for many Indigenous boys during IRS, girls were not exposed to the same activities, and thus, had to find other pathways to resistance and survival. This project, centers on a female IRS survivor, who when exposed to hockey, was able to execute her own agency and resistance through sport. Her oral narrative of her time playing on a girls hockey team in IRS in the 1950s is one of the first of its kind to be translated into text. We learn the ways in which this woman used sport to resist the systems being forced upon her, and how hockey was a site of complex meaning at the Spanish Indian Residential Schools. This thesis shows us how Indigenous storytelling is a process that can create rich cultural documents that challenge our history and lead us to question the ways in which sport can help us to dismantle colonial narratives about the past.