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Kinship and Conditional Belonging: The Dressing Room as a Site of Peril and Possibility

When asked why they love hockey, multiple interviewees discussed the significance of the “team game.” Sydney Daniels states,

I love that it’s a team sport, and you can’t just play it yourself. It takes a collective effort to win, and to work together in order to reach a common goal, and I’ve always valued working with other people and growing with other people.

Meghan Big Snake, who transitioned to hockey from what she describes as the “very individual” and “competitive” sport of figure skating, lauds hockey’s capacity to foster comradery and connection: “Why I love hockey is the family part of it. I just love the teamwork, and the friends that you make ... . The long-lasting relationships are just key ... . It’s awesome being a part of a team.” All participants spoke of meaningful relationships forged throughout their hockey careers with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous teammates, often pointing to them as evidence of hockey’s capacity to break down barriers and generate solidarity and shared purpose.

Throughout the interviews, it became evident that players’ experiences of dressing room environments were affected by whether those dressing rooms were predominantly White-settler spaces, Indigenous spaces, or somewhere in between. Participants described a variety of team settings, including local teams populated primarily or entirely by Indigenous-identified players (as was the case for McLeod in Aklavik and Big Snake at Siksika), local teams populated by a mix of Indigenous and settler players (as was the case for Jacobs in Wallaceburg and Gardner in Warroad), and local teams upon which they might be the only Indigenous-identified player (as was often the case for Daniels during her youth in Massachusetts); competitive and/or regional teams made up entirely of Indigenous players (including those at the LNHL tournament and the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships [NAHC]); and elite teams upon which there might be no, one, or a handful of other Indigenous player(s). McLeod notes that the SAIT team in 2020 boasted 10 Indigenous players, so they experienced “the glory of almost being a majority in there.” Reflecting on this rare experience at the college level, she explains, “it’s been really nice to be surrounded by those people and to say things that other people wouldn’t necessarily understand just because—even though they grew up in the provinces with their Indigenous family, and I grew up up North—we’re still living the same life.” Daniels, who played mainly with non-Indigenous players while growing up in the United States, expresses the importance of returning to Canada to play in Indigenous tournaments like the NAHC: “those experiences ... felt a lot closer to my heart ... . It felt like I was playing for more than just a hockey team. I was playing for my First Nation. I was playing for my parents, grandparents, and I had all my cousins in the stands! And all my uncles and aunts, and so I think if anything those experiences were almost more emotional ... . It just felt more powerful. It felt greater than the game of hockey itself.”

Not all hockey environments, however, have proven equally welcoming of Indigenous culture and identity. Participants identified multiple experiences as targets and witnesses of anti-Indigenous racism. Some of these involved racial slurs, as McLeod experienced from an opposing player in a college game in 2020. Others involved the denial of opportunities and playing time by scouts, management, and coaches. As McLeod argues, “Anyone who has grown up white and not in an Indigenous area has probably been told at one point or another in their life that Indigenous are lazy, they’re just taking all the government’s money, like they don’t work, they’re alcoholics, they just don’t care. Like they’re useless, all of this stuff ... . And some people don’t unlearn those things that they’re told. And some of those people become coaches.” The impact of biased coaching has deleterious consequences for the experiences and development of players, particularly, as McLeod notes, for those Indigenous players who must travel from their home communities to play at the elite level:

When ... you have someone who is homesick for their family, has grown up in a rural area, is trying something completely new, is scared, and then they fumble the puck a little more than usual when they’re actually really good at it, and they’ve just been a superstar in their hometown that long. Because they feel the tension, and they feel that coming from someone who should be there to help them prosper. I can assume that there would be more names in hockey today. There would have been more Ethan Bears if that wasn’t the case, and that’s really sad.

Big Snake argues that it is difficult for Indigenous players to intervene in such experiences due to the power dynamics at play, the invisibility of racism, and the disincentivizing pressure of seeking future elite opportunities:

With the coaching thing, I’ve been in that position before where you kind of have the tell, and you could make an educated guess as to why some things were happening, and it was because of who you were and where you came from, but to actually do anything about it ... because you didn’t wanna come off as that aggressive person.

Due to the subjective nature of coaching, it is difficult to prove that decisions to limit ice time or powerplay opportunities have been motivated by racism, even though one can “make an educated guess.” Furthermore, because players desire to progress within the somewhat closed system of elite hockey, and coaches remain gatekeepers, they are encouraged simply to endure and not come off as “aggressive.” Due to the “stereotypes” carried by many coaches and scouts, Daniels argues that:

We’re not given the benefit of the doubt. Young kids aren’t given the benefit of the doubt, and they’re already fighting people’s assumptions and stereotypes of them that they don’t even fully get to show their authentic self, and to me, that’s, that’s unacceptable. Like, I can give you countless examples.

Big Snake elaborates, “It sucks and it hurts and you just don’t know how to feel because you’re a kid still!”

While the disabling impact of prejudicial coaching and interteam racism demands further analysis, we focus in this paper on intrateam dynamics: more subtle forms of culturally and/or racially motivated exclusion and the capacity for change fostered by the team environment. The dressing room is arguably the most important place for teammates to bond and create lasting memories and relationships with each other. While all participants identified positive dressing room experiences—and some, like Taryn Jacobs, identified these as the norm, noting “we’ve always been like a family on my team. We’re really inclusive of each other”—some participants identified limits to the sense of belonging they have felt within teams on which they were a minority. Membership within a community—a hockey team—is dependent on the recognition of other members who set the de facto boundaries of belonging regardless of positionality or skills (Glenn, 2011). Despite the fact that Indigenous players have made the team and are a part of the roster, this does not necessarily equate to membership within the dressing room. Building from the work of E. N. Glenn, gender and sport scholar Ali Greey examines the experiences of trans people in locker rooms to consider the relationship between unbelonging in sporting spaces and the broader society. Greey argues that

The daily indignities that interviewees described experiencing within locker rooms impressed upon them the lack of their membership within these spaces and, thus, society (Glenn, 2011). Access to locker rooms, Glenn’s work would suggest, is about more than participation in physical activity; locker room access is about membership in the category of human. (p. 17)

Locker rooms tend to be governed by a dominant group that determines membership through performative acts of othering, which register the unbelonging of specific constituencies (even if those constituencies are officially part of the team and possess rights-based protections).

For McLeod, such feelings of exclusion have been almost ubiquitous:

With any team that I’ve been on, it has been a really hard first few months. Like I said, my skin colour, it’s different. And just, you see people getting invited out. You see people making friends ... . So that’s definitely tough. And as I got older and I played on many teams, it’s always been the same. I’ve just transitioned into the same team and the same dynamic, being who I am, a lot of the time ... . I’m sure they weren’t doing it intentionally at all. I just know it’s definitely a factor, and it’s played a factor on probably every team I’ve been on. Where it’s like, I have to prove myself, and they’re like, “Oh, you’re funny, you’re outgoing, you’re this, you’re that.” And it’s like I shouldn’t really have to be, to be included.

McLeod’s default experience on hockey teams since she left Aklavik has been as an outsider until she actively breaks down barriers. Not all players, however, are able to persevere amid such exclusion. These problematics motivate McLeod’s work with the IHRN: “If the Indigenous Hockey Research Network can do anything, I hope that goes away,” because “[f]eeling unwelcomed in the dressing room is huge—like it’s forced so many people to go home. I have friends who have been like, ‘The dressing room is just awful.’”

Big Snake describes an incident from her first day with her NCAA team that highlights how Indigenous belonging within hockey spaces can be called into question. When she arrived in the dressing room, an Alaskan teammate was wearing a shirt that read, “I’M NOT NATIVE”:

I knew as soon as I saw the shirt, the other teammates did, and they looked right away like, “What is she going to do?” And I just, took the high route, and I thought I’m not going to let this affect me because this is the first time I’m going to be on the ice here, I gotta keep in the zone and keep my eye on the prize, but ... it bugged me. And I did, I cried to my family because I didn’t know what that meant, but the thing was I didn’t react, and I took a step back and I thought, “Okay how am I going to approach this? I gotta be the bigger person, I gotta be the role model here,” and it’s how we move forward is important.

Faced with blatant derogation of Indigeneity, Big Snake was forced not only to deal with feelings of hurt but also to manage the discomfort of her non-Indigenous teammates, all of whom looked to Big Snake in this moment. This incident demonstrates the performative exclusion of Indigeneity from hockey settings and also that the context for dealing with such racism is often conditioned by the very racist stereotypes from which such exclusion emerges.