The best books about the game of hockey

Most Canadians are likely unaware that Canada has an official national summer game and that it is lacrosse. Even fewer realize that the sport reflects a tangled story of appropriation and reappropriation that exposes complex relationships between European and Indigenous peoples.

In a provocative and creative book, Downey, an Indigenous historian, uses First Nations storytelling and his own rigorous research to follow the transformation of lacrosse by Anglophone Montrealers and their exclusion of Indigenous players.

By the end of the nineteenth century, lacrosse was the most popular sport in Canada, before giving way to hockey. Then, almost a century later, the sport was reclaimed by a new generation of Indigenous athletes and activists who used the game as part of a broader cultural and spiritual renewal.

For these athletes, the current goal is to have the Haudenosaunee Nationals recognized as an independent participant at the Olympic Games in 2028.

This book is a great read, a superbly written morality play about the triumph of the underdog and the cathartic effect of sport. Brown, a former teacher of creative writing, now specializes in dramatic narrative nonfiction.

In The Boys in the Boat, Brown recounts the efforts of a group of young men at the University of Washington to reach their dream, winning gold in the coxed eights at the 1936 Olympics. The book vividly captures the physical and psychological demands placed on the neophyte rowers, demands that winnow out all but the toughest competitors.

Brown grounds his story by focusing on Joe Rantz, a working-class adolescent hardened by personal adversity for whom rowing is the route to redemption. The clash in the finals of the working-class Americans against a German boat backed by Hitler makes for a dramatic finish (even though an American coxed eight had won gold in the previous five Olympics). 

Canadians have long worried about their national identity. Indeed, some have considered whether or not there even is one.

Poulter, in her innovative and stimulating book, examines an early attempt in the mid-nineteenth century to create an imagined Canadian identity. Wishing to distance themselves from a quintessential “British” identity, second-generation Montreal Anglophones were searching for a new way to identify. They saw themselves as “native Canadians”.

To solidify this identity, they pursued, as Poulter explained, “national attributes, or visual icons, that came to be recognized at home and abroad as distinctly “Canadian.’” It meant, in practice, taking up propriate costumes and sports such as snowshoeing, tobogganing, winter hunting, and lacrosse. All of these activities – undertaken in sartorially correct attire – had previously been the preserve of the Indigenous and French Canadians. Here, was an Englishness reimagined on a frozen landscape.

By imposing perceived British attributes of order, discipline, and fair play onto these activities the Anglophone minority created their new image of “Men of the North”. A century and a quarter later, the NBA’s Toronto Raptors would renew again this frontier identity, asking their fans to cast themselves as “We the North”.