Why Anishinaabe writer Kyle Edwards sees hockey as a ceremony
He discussed his debut novel, Small Ceremonies, on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Before becoming a writer, like many kids in Canada, Kyle Edwards dreamed of playing in the National Hockey League.
Edwards, who grew up on the Lake Manitoba First Nation and is a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation, has complex feelings towards the game he loves — and how it doesn't always love Indigenous people back.
Edwards' debut novel, Small Ceremonies, follows a hockey team of Ojibwe high schoolers from Winnipeg, who are chasing hockey dreams and coming of age in a game — and a place — that can be both beautiful and brutal.
"There is just a hierarchy in sport, in the same way there is in the world, and I think a lot of times sports is a reflection, a mirror of the real world," he said on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
Edwards joined Roach to share how sports reflect society and how hockey is its own type of ceremony.
Mattea Roach: What kind of a pull does hockey have on you personally?
Kyle Edwards: I think it was probably like my first dream as a kid, other than being a writer. I wanted to be a hockey player. When I was growing up, I wanted to go to the NHL. That did not happen. But I loved it.
I loved playing the game growing up and I think I always had this sort of conflicting relationship with it just in terms of the different types of violence that are associated with it — mostly on the ice. I think it was where I experienced violence for the first time, both physically and verbally, but I love the game.
I think it's very beautiful and poetic and I love how much it means to Canadians and Indigenous people. It's held on such a pedestal that I felt like I really wanted to write about it in this book.
What was it like engaging in hockey as an Indigenous person growing up?
It was difficult. I grew up on a rez, so you're constantly playing teams from small towns. There's this sort of racial aspect to it, the team from the rez and the team from this small, probably mostly white town and just the history of violence that is Canada. I think it just sort of creates this arena for different tensions and histories that sort of play out on the ice. That was difficult.
As a child, there was a time where I just didn't want to be associated with it. But Native people in Canada, Indigenous people in Canada, we just love this game so much. It's really beautiful to see. It brings us together all over the country. There's Indigenous only tournaments all over Canada.
Indigenous people in Canada, we just love this game so much.- Kyle Edwards
I think we just fight through that. Hockey is known for being such an exclusive sport. It's very exclusive to people who can afford it. People who are of a certain social class. Indigenous people aren't often seen as part of that. But we really don't care in a lot of ways. I haven't been to a rez in Manitoba that doesn't have its own hockey rink and hockey rinks are not cheap.
What is the kind of relationship between passion and violence that you wanted to explore in your novel?
Passion and violence can be kind of closely related and hard to distinguish in this game.
Small Ceremonies follows this team that's sort of being thrown out of the league because they're being perceived as too violent. But one of my biggest concerns while writing the book was that people are going to think this is unrealistic, that this could never happen in Canada.
It has happened. This is probably the journalist part of me. It's not directly based on this, but around the time that I was going into university in 2017, there was this really good junior hockey team from this First Nation in Manitoba. They were really good.
They went on one of the craziest winning streaks that their league at the time had ever seen. And they ended up going out to win the championship.
The very next season, all of the junior teams from small white towns voted to separate from all of the teams that were based on First Nations, including Peguis, who had won the championship, to create their own league because they didn't want to travel to these teams anymore.
This was only a few years ago. This all happened before I even started writing the novel. I remember reading that and I was like, "Wow, that's just so typical."
You probably wouldn't expect that sort of thing. I wanted to evoke that same sort of shock in this story because I feel like there's going to be a lot of people reading this, a lot of Canadians in particular, who think that this is a type of story that would never happen, but it happens all over the country and it happened not too long ago.
The title of the book is Small Ceremonies. What does ceremony mean to you and to the characters in the book?
Ceremonies can be anything, things that get you through the day. Definitely, hockey is one of those ceremonies.
There are so many characters in the book that have little things that they cling onto on a daily basis that sort of help them just survive in a way.
We think of ceremonies as these huge things, but I think they can be quite small.- Kyle Edwards
We think of ceremonies as these huge things, but I think they can be quite small and hockey is a ceremony because it brings us together in the same way that powwows and sundances do and other different ceremonial things within Indigenous cultures.
There's this chorus of characters and each of them, I hope, has their time to shine in the book and they also have very distinct things — they do different practices and rituals that are just so unique to them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.
