Hockey in the United States,

Hockey

In the United States, hockey is sometimes the subject of light-hearted mockery about its being the "whitest of sports." Part of the reason is that it is true - few sports in North America have a higher percentage of white players. But the other part of the reason is that hockey's racial makeup often goes undocumented or consigned to the curiosity bin. Canadians celebrate that Jackie Robinson played in Montreal before breaking baseball's colour barrier, but few would recognize the name of Willie O'Ree. Fans are familiar with names like Bryan Trottier, Wade Redden and Sheldon Souray, but few could tell you that they are all Metis. This paper will explore the topic of race as it relates to Canada's national game. Is the perceived whiteness in hockey the result of racism, ignorance, or demographics?

The Backcheck website presents a view of hockey that is largely white, save for the page on Aboriginal Hockey that outlines the rich history of native involvement in the game. This would seem to indicate that hockey is, simply, a white game. The demographics support this contention, to a certain extent. Until recent decades, Canada has been an overwhelmingly white country. Aside from the aforementioned O'Ree, natives were the only non-whites to play in the NHL. As Canada became more multicultural and the NHL added more teams, more natives and more blacks had the opportunity to play in the NHL. In recent decades, Canada has become significantly more multicultural. This has given rise to more non-whites in the NHL but as yet their numbers lag that of the population as a whole.

Probably the oldest ethnic group yet to make an impact in the NHL are Asians. The Chinese played a vital role in building the transcontinental railroad in the 1800s and went on to become of Vancouver's founding cultures. Yet, the game has failed to take hold in that community. Gruneau and Wilson (1993) examine the role of masculinity in hockey. The game, they point out, is a "continuous contest in which the use of force to neutralize the speed and skill is a matter of course." Asian culture does not support the ideals of the application of force, nor does it support hockey's other ideals such as the emphasis of individualism. Indeed, hockey was borne of a certain set of cultural attributes in 19th century white society that were, and are, by and large incongruous with Asian cultural values. As a result, neither Western sporting culture nor any of the individual sports that emerged from that period took hold in Asian countries (Brownell, 1995). Furthermore, the typical Asian phenotype of small physical size creates a non-cultural barrier to hockey participation.

The other longstanding cultures - black and native - did embrace hockey, however. The issue with natives sometimes boils down to ignorance. The white historians and pundits either do not know which players are native or they do not care. Hockey has long been a melting pot. As a uniquely Canadian cultural artifact, immigrants from other countries arrive unfamiliar. They adopt the game as a means to fit in. This assimilation comes at a price. In the Puck Artist, Levi Dronyk addresses this issue in discussing his lack of skills in his native Ukrainian. "To compete with the English," he points out, "is to learn their language." As a child growing up in Canada, there was a rift between the pull of community and the need to interact, especially on the ice. Even between English and French, the there was considerable need for children to stay within strictly defined cultural norms, as shown in Roch Carrier's the Hockey Sweater and Michael McKinley's Next Year. In both of those stories, the narrator faced pressure to only cheer for the local team. If that sort of pressure existed between whites in French and English Canada, the pressure on non-whites to follow the norms must have been considerable.

The spectre of assimilation, was even more pronounced in the native community. In the Hockey Game, Wes Fineday relates the memory of a game played on his reserve. Children were taken to boarding schools, where even the food was unfamiliar. Hockey was the one thing that Fineday could relate to and it brought him fond memories of home. The boarding school experience illustrates Canada's policies towards natives for most of the 20th century. This contempt towards native culture coloured the histories of hockey from that era. Thus, the history of hockey writing was coloured by racism that specifically excluded any special recognition of natives. Thus, even today it is mainly native people who are versed on the history of hockey among native Canadians.

Another contributing factor to the whitewashing of hockey's history is the fact that hockey is viewed as a national icon. Hockey is "an authentic and autonomous expression of Canadian culture" (Gruneau & Wilson). The very definition of Canadian culture, however, was largely shaped by whites. Whites controlled the media, and as we have seen discounted the role of native Canadians is the country's culture and history. It can be reasonably argued that it was not until the recent years that native Canadians became recognized by the majority of Canadians as a distinct and integral component of Canadian culture. By then, hockey's history had already been written without them. Furthermore, the waves of immigration that would reshape Canadian demographics did not begin until the late 1960s. The forces of assimilation cannot be reasonably expected to have an impact of the demographics of the NHL in the first generation or two.

When comparing the different stories, one interesting aspect stands out. For both McKinley and Carrier, as for all immigrant communities, hockey represents assimilation into the dominant culture. Yet for Fineday, hockey represents an opportunity to escape from the dominant culture. He relishes the memories of games on the reserve. Even when those memories are triggered by a white player, they hold deep meaning to him in the context of his own culture. Hockey is a place, unlike for Dronyk, where his own people and own language are points of reference.