First Nations Hockey Research Receives Major SSHRC Funding

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Dr. Michael Robidoux has been awarded a significant grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He will use the funds to continue his ethnographic research into First Nations hockey in Canada.

Robidoux will receive $87,000 over three years to continue his research program titled An Ethnographic Study of First Nations Hockey in Canada: Constructing Cultural Identities Through Sport. He says the grant will help him continue the program he started two years ago.

The money allows me to physically get to tournaments and league games where I need to be, to hire students, and to buy proper equipment. Robidoux has made initial observations and contacts within First Nations communities the past two years.

He travelled to a hockey tournament played in by various bands of the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation in Northern Ontario in 2001, and has watched adult male aboriginal hockey extensively in Southern Alberta the past year. Yet, he says he has barely scratched the surface of this topic.

I’m trying to find how hockey is used, performed and displayed within First Nations communities to find out if there are local meanings and values associated with hockey. My research is about how people take cultural forms and manipulate them to become relevant to their community’s needs. I come to know the people through sport, but I also come to know how sport is a vehicle for expressing their identity, says Robidoux.

Robidoux examines how hockey was taken from European-Canadians and manipulated to reflect local meanings in First Nations communities, even though the game was originally used as a way to assimilate them. He says hockey is a way for First Nations people to communicate their cultural identity and cultural pride, and a sense of who they are as a people.

Some people would argue, How can they do that, it’s a Euro-Canadian game? But what I’m more interested in is how a group takes something, despite where it’s from, and makes it their own, says Robidoux. They’ve endorsed the game, they’ve embraced the game, it’s integral to these communities.

He says there are distinct uses of sport, and differences between sport, in aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities. Besides different ideas on sportsmanship, Robidoux found that science, technology and systematic structure haven’t affected hockey as much in First Nations communities, which promotes creativity in the game.

Modern hockey is all about systems and efficiency, but in the aboriginal context they have been able to still play in a creative way, which resembles true play, instead of the structured game we see now in the professional hockey and also even in high-performance youth hockey. I think that’s why they are so passionate about hockey.

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First Nations Hockey Research Receives Major SSHRC Funding