1 As settler scholar Patrick Wolfe argues, “invasion is a structure not an event” (2006, 388) because in settler colonial contexts, the colonizers have not left, they often outnumber the Indigenous inhabitants they have displaced, and they continually work to naturalize and re-entrench logics and institutions that reify the legitimacy of their sense of belonging. We consider “decolonization” an expansive collection of activist practices and ideas that works to destabilize the authority of that structure, mute the expressions of its power, and open up possibilities for alternative ways of being in the world that emerge from Indigenous world views. Because hockey literature tends to obfuscate the horrific realities of settler colonial history and to reify the Canadian nation state, we write from the position that hockey literature is most often a colonial genre.
2 Tellingly, Saul describes Hockey Night in Canada as “the personification of magic” (Wagamese 2012, 59) when he encounters it in Father Leboutilier’s quarters at the residential school. Here, we rely on Benedict Anderson’s theorization of imagined communities (2006).
3 Note, however, that in Goldie’s use of “indigenization,” indigeneity is trapped within the semiotic, as images of indigeneity are mobilized by settlers in the absence of Indigenous people.
4 To reiterate, the ideological collapse between the game itself and the northern territory from which it is imagined “naturally” to have sprung enables white settler participants to marshal hockey in the (re)production of beliefs that they belong in the land they and their ancestors have colonized and that both the land and the game, in turn, belong to them—a self-perpetuating dynamic that undergirds Saul’s repeated lament that white players “think it’s their game” (31). Indian Horse is actively engaged with the destabilization of these persistent beliefs while making use of the very representational inheritance through which they have historically been reified.
5 In Native Men Remade, Tengan describes the “embodied discursive practice,” in which Indigenous “men come to perform and know themselves and their bodies in a new way” (2008, 151). Referring to rituals enacted at an event in Pu‘ukoholā, Hawai’i, in 1991, Tengan explains that “bodily experience, action, and movement played a fundamental role in the creation of new subjectivities of culture and gender” (87).