“We still need the game. As Indigenous people, it’s in our blood.”: A Conversation on Hockey, Residential School, and Decolonization

Abstract:On March 18th, 2019, settler scholar Sam McKegney and Anishinaabe scholar Mike Auksi conducted an interview with Eugene Arcand at Queen’s University’s Isabelle Bader Centre in Kingston, Ontario in the territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe Peoples. Arcand had travelled to Kingston to act as a Keynote Speaker the following day at the “Roundtable on Racism in Hockey.” On Arcand’s insistence that the efforts, experiences, and ideas of roundtable participants be honoured in ways that promote tangible change, the roundtable’s organizers Courtney Szto, Bob Dawson, McKegney, and Auksi distilled the event’s findings into the Policy Paper for Anti-Racism in Canadian Hockey, which has since been downloaded over 7,500 times. The interview below is supplemented by a brief excerpt from a recorded conversation McKegney had with Arcand, his wife Lorna, and Craig McCallum at the Arcands’ home on Whitecap Reserve in Saskatchewan in the Spring of 2019.