As a kid I went to the same hockey tournament every year. 

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It was part of a large Indigenous festival and though hockey was only a small part of it, it was probably the most exciting part. Apart from the powwow and talent show and jigging competition, the hockey tournament drew the largest crowds, stirred the most competition and rivalry from the rez teams repping the pride of their cousins and aunties and nephews. The festival, which still takes place every year in the same small city, was a time to look forward to—hotels were booked solid and Native people were everywhere: the rinks, the streets, the restaurants. You could say it was a safe space.  

I still remember the shirt I bought one year at the festival because my grandmother hated it. She hated the words on the front, which said, in big letters, “Indian Hockey Kicks Ass.” I remember taking it home and wearing it proudly. I thought the shirt’s meaning was simple: that hockey, and the Indians who played it, were good, talented—hence, we kicked ass. But my grandmother took it the other way, that the slogan suggested us Indians were a violent bunch—that we literally kicked ass on the ice.

For us Indians, the feeling of coming-of-age—of becoming aware of the world around us and our place in it—can feel more like a dark initiation.

She knew, I later understood, what the world already thought of us and those words only confirmed it. Savages. Stay away. 

As kids, though, we idolized Indigenous NHLers like Jordin Tootoo and Theo Fleury, because they were tough and didn’t turn down a fight. Because when they fought it felt like they were fighting for us, for our place in the world. We wanted to be like them and fight like them, too. If we couldn’t be the best—and we rarely were—then at least we could claim to be the toughest.     

In Canada, children come of age on the ice, which is another way of saying we come of age surrounded by violence. Hockey is, after all, an inherently violent game. It’s the only North American sport—aside from actual combat sports—where fighting is an acceptable form of conflict resolution.  

Sports, at the end of the day, don’t really mean much. The wins and losses and trophies won or lost aren’t going to change the world or solve our most pressing problems. For Indigenous peoples, they somehow mean both nothing and everything. Hockey in particular is bigger than anything for us Indians in Canada. It brings us together annually, like the powwows and ceremonies that were banned by colonial regimes, and reminds us that we survived impossible odds.   

This is true for many of the characters in my novel Small Ceremonies, a coming-of-age story about a handful of young and not-so-good Ojibwe hockey players and the adults who struggle—and often fail—to love them. Hockey offers them a sense of freedom and joy and beauty, however fleeting it may be. At the beginning of the book, their high school team, the Tigers, learns that they’re being thrown out of the league for reasons that aren’t clear and seemingly unfair. And so for Tomahawk (an image-obsessed senior dealing with the absence of his mother) and Clinton (a rez kid trying to avoid being dragged into gang violence by his older brother) and Floyd (an undeniably talented player grappling with his multiracial identity) it’s their first glimpse at the harshness of the real world.

I was young when I first heard racial slurs hurled at me from someone on the other team, and I was just as young when I fought back or threatened to fight back. I was even younger when my rez squad won a regional championship and the league, possibly cheering for the other guys, refused to give us the trophy. And I was in college when a junior hockey team from the Peguis First Nation went on a miraculous win streak to take home the title and the following season, for reasons unclear, the teams from white rural towns separated to create their own league without any rez clubs.

I thought about my childhood and all those Native tournaments, and realized the game was ours as much as anyone else’s.

Hockey is, for many reasons, mostly white and mostly exclusive to those who can afford it. It’s the Canadian pastime, and perhaps nothing generates national pride and justifies Canadian nationhood more than the sport of hockey. It’s a sort of ceremony, ritualized in our young minds from the moment we lace up our skates. It’s just as big, if not bigger, than football in America. And like any tradition that gets this big there will always be those who try to claim ownership over it. In Small Ceremonies, I write: “The Tigers knew that hockey was an arena where all the illusions Canadians convinced themselves to be true evaporated along with the moisture in their breath, a wound that still hadn’t been tended to, blood gushing.” 

I learned this around the same time the characters in my novel did—in the early 2010s when Canada was reckoning with its horrific, genocidal treatment of Indigenous nations. Because for us Indians, the feeling of coming-of-age—of becoming aware of the world around us and our place in it—can feel more like a dark initiation. It packs a punch, no matter how hard you prepare for it.  

For a while these realizations ruined my relationship with hockey. I quit after high school and didn’t return to the game recreationally until my late twenties. I wanted nothing to do with being Canadian and, as a result, nothing to do with hockey. But I missed the joy of it, even if that enjoyment had always been contingent on being made to feel different, less than human, as if me and my friends and relatives weren’t supposed to be there, which, if we go by history, we weren’t.

But, weirdly, I also missed this, too—that is, being an Indian playing hockey. I thought about my childhood and all those Native tournaments, and realized the game was ours as much as anyone else’s. It’s also why I wrote a novel about a bunch of Native kids trying to survive a world hellbent on destroying them. And they do it while playing hockey, while trying to be beautiful, to create beauty out there on the ice. 

I recalled the “Indian Hockey Kicks Ass” shirt to my grandmother recently. 

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It was just ugly.” 

We talked about all the talent streaming out of Indigenous communities these days and how happy that made us.  

“So I guess we’re doing both,” she laughed. 

What she meant was we’re not one thing and as much as the world has tried to make it that way, we never have been. We’re not a monolithic people. We’re good like Floyd and strong like Tomahawk. We’re dangerous like Clinton’s older brother and brilliant like Tomahawk’s sister Sam. We kick ass—in that non-violent metaphorical way and sometimes literally—in more ways than one. 

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Small Ceremonies by Kyle Edwards is available from Pantheon, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.