Beyond the Rink, Behind the Image

Teammates, champions, Survivors

In 1951, after winning the Thunder Bay district championship, the Sioux Lookout Black Hawks hockey team from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School embarked on a whirlwind promotional tour through Ottawa and Toronto. They were accompanied by a professional photographer from the National Film Board’s Still Photography Division, who documented the experience. The tour was intended to demonstrate the success of the residential school system to the broader Canadian public and introduce the Black Hawks to “civilizing” activities that showed the ideals and benefits of assimilating into Canadian society.

The tour left a complex legacy. For some of the boys, it was the beginning of a lifelong love of hockey. But, at the same time, playing hockey became less about the sport and more about escaping the brutal living conditions and abuse at the residential school.

In Beyond the Rink, Behind the Image, Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, and Braden Te Hiwi collaborate with three surviving team members—Kelly Bull, Chris Cromarty, and David Wesley—to share their stories behind the 1951 tour photos. This book recontextualizes and repatriates photos from the tour and from their everyday lives at school, bringing together Indigenous studies and visual sociology to reveal the complicated role of sports in residential school histories. Accessible and moving, the Survivors’ stories commemorate the team’s stellar hockey record and athletic prowess while exposing important truths about “Canada’s Game” and how it shaped ideas about the nation. By considering their past, the Survivors imagine a better way forward not just for themselves, their families, and their communities, but for Canada as a whole.