Indigenous Hockey Cards shine a light on First Nations players

“It’s kind of like someone calling you 40 years after your 18th birthday and saying, ‘Hey, you’re turning 18,'” Nolan said. It wasn’t as exciting as it would have been if I’d actually gotten it when I was a freshman, but just the same, I’m very honored to get it, especially when it has an Indigenous component because (for a lot of our kids) representation that really matters, and the more children see these types of things, the more they can dream.

That was the hope of Naim Cardinal, a collector of indigenous cards, who first proposed the idea at a fair a few years ago. There were some players missing from his collection that he felt deserved their share.

“We thought it was an interesting concept,” said Paul Nguyen, senior marketing manager at Upper Deck. So we asked other members of the hockey community to see if there was an appetite for such a series, and we heard back.

The group, made up mostly of members of the Indigenous community, worked to limit opportunities to players who had never before held an officially licensed NHL trading card. The result is a set featuring Nolan, Dan Frawley, Jason Simon, Bill LeCaine, Rocky Trottier, Victor Mercredi, Danny Hodgson and Johnny Harms.

The cards, including each logo, were designed by artist Jacob Alexis Alexis of the Nakota Sioux Nation, while Cardinal wrote background content highlighting the players’ Indigenous heritage and family history.

Nolans card showing him in a Detroit Red Wings uniform shows that he is Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) from Garden River First Nation, Ontario and not only played in the NHL with the Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins, but became a successful coach. and has two sons who made the league, Jordan and Brandon.

Getting a rookie card like his sons is a great development for Nolan, who said: It’s like a family thing. Going one step further, the cards are not sold, but distributed at the 3NOLANS First Nation Hockey School and other Indigenous hockey camps and events.

Nolan hopes that showing the cards to kids will have the same effect on them as having the likes of Stan Jonathan, Gary Sargent and Jimmy Neilson look up to him growing up.

You could walk into school the next day and be very proud of those gentlemen (because even though we didn’t know them, they looked a lot like you), he said. Now you can’t just talk about it. You can actually show the pictures that it really happened.

In recent months and years, hockey historians have begun to delve into the role of some of hockey’s first non-white pioneers, including Native American defenseman Taffy Abel and Henry Elmer Buddy Maracle.

After more detailed information has been revealed Canada’s history of boarding schools forced First Nation children to assimilate into white culture From the 1800s to the 1970s, Nolan prides himself on being an example of an athlete who embraces his Indigenous heritage.

We had a lot of our elders and a lot of our chiefs that showed us the way, and especially the residential school survivors and how hard they fought to keep who we are, said Nolan, who coached parts of six NHL seasons and won the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year in 1996-97. I’m just a part of it, trying to build on the legacy of our ancestors and make the next generation even stronger than this generation.

Nguyen said this set of cards has been years in the making, noting that it comes at a good time, especially given the ongoing dialogue in Canada about the treatment of indigenous peoples and what can be done now to learn from it.

It’s continuing the conversation with everyone and not just letting it lie, he said. It puts it in a really good light for people to talk about.

Follow AP Hockey Writer Stephen Whyno on Twitter at https://twitter.com/SWhyno

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