Indigenous Hockey Research Summit Recap

On October 19th, 20th and 21st, 2023, The Indigenous Hockey Research Summit took place in Montreal, Quebec. Hosted by the Indigenous Hockey Research Network (IHRN), the summit is “A gathering of Indigenous hockey players, advocates, researchers and communities in pursuit of a more just game.” The summit hosts were Davina McLeod and Mike Makwa Auksi,…

For the Growth of the Game: Addressing Racial Discrimination in Hockey Recap

Co-written by Brett Pardy, Madison Danford, and Martine Dennie On December 10th, the MacEwan University Office of Human Rights, Diversity and Equity held a virtual summit addressing racism in hockey. The event brought together people from academia, grass roots hockey organizations, the National Hockey Hockey League, and hockey media. Speakers included Harnaryan Singh, Play-by-Play Commentator,…

Players Against Hate Creates Reporting System for Racism

Last week, Players Against Hate (PAH) launched a database for reporting racist incidents in hockey. It is the first public database cataloguing racism in youth hockey. The fact that this kind of oversight and data gathering mechanism is new to hockey, is telling in and of itself. PAH received a grant from the Palmer Foundation…

Roundtable: Mitchell Miller and the Whiteness of Redemption

Roundtables are an occasional feature on Hockey in Society. Roundtables present brief commentaries from Hockey in Society contributors on pressing or timely issues within hockey and its culture, with the aim of presenting multiple critical viewpoints on the topic under discussion. In the 2020 NHL Entry Draft, the Arizona Coyotes signed Mitchell Miller (University of…

Brown Skin, White Ice: A closer look at Apna Hockey

In the summer of 2019, Alysha Bains (PhD student, Simon Fraser University, School of Communication) and I went to Calgary, Alberta for a week to hang out with Apna Hockey, an organization that aims to provide South Asian hockey participants with a safe space to enjoy and learn the game of hockey. We were going…

The NHL’s Inaction is Deafening

United. pic.twitter.com/wRgXRHVUsA — WNBA (@WNBA) August 27, 2020 On a night when the NBA and WNBA decided that the joy of basketball was inappropriate, the NHL decided to hit the ice. On a night when Naomi Osaka wrote, “I don’t expect anything drastic to happen with me not playing, but if I can get a…

Implementing Anti-Racism in Hockey Public Q&A – June 29th

On March 2, 2020, we published the first ever Policy Paper for Anti-Racism in Canadian Hockey. It was the result of the March 30, 2019 Roundtable on Racism in Hockey. To date, the policy paper has been downloaded almost 1700 times and shared across Canada and the United States with hockey organizations of all levels,…

Selling White Goodness: The NHL’s Tyler Seguin Video

The music swelled over 44 seconds of Instagram comments praising Dallas Stars forward Tyler Seguin, across images of Seguin at a Black Lives Matter Protest in a now deleted NHL.com video. The accompanying Tweet read “Listen. Learn. Use your platform to encourage others to do the same” (none of which this video was doing). The…