of all the little discrepancies of hockey to fandom I’ve read in heated rivalry & gcu fics, the absolute absence of Native people is probably the most jarring. I think it’s because hockey is the one place on TV where we’re not invisible.
it is striking to me that even fics focused on race in hockey or ones creating original characters in general completely ignore the possibility of a FNMI player. i suspect this fandom treats Indigenous absence as a given because it is a group that tends to engage with fictional stories rather than sports. and in north american fiction, the white people are the natives, and all the natives are dead.*
but for those who do watch hockey … we are never fully erased. one original six team has played wearing a caricature of our features for over a century. other teams wear ads for tribal sponsors, on their jersey or on the ice. rez boys and urban ndns with talent are sponsored by Indigenous orgs to chase their dreams and find their place in the ever-more-inaccessible national sport of a country built on their dispossession and exclusion.
this erasure is made more bizarre, of course, by the fact that the legend of the real Montreal team during the time period in which Heated Rivalry is set, is himself a Native man.
* see Eve Tuck and C.Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting”
