(Release courtesy Janani Whitfield/CBC)
On a Friday night, the Lac La Ronge Indian Band’s hockey rink is the place to be. When the La Ronge Ice Wolves score, fans scream, with one of them hurling a frozen burbot onto the ice to feed the hungry Wolves.
For the team’s top-scorer Dayton Tailfeathers, from Kanai Blood Tribe in Alberta, the energy that comes from being the only reserve-based team in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League is special.
“There’s a lot of younger kids that look up to you just because you’re Indigenous,” he said, exchanging high fives and fist bumps with the younger kids clamouring for his autograph.
“So you want to be that role model for them and show them what it takes to play at this level.”
It’s been a long time in the making for Indigenous players like Tailfeathers to be able to play on a reserve-based rink.
And this rink is no ordinary one, according to Ice Wolves board member Ty Roberts, who calls it “the crown jewel” of La Ronge.
Roberts’s father was among those who made tireless efforts to fundraise and build the reserve a community centre and rink, with the latter opening in 2005.
For years, Jimmy Roberts long harboured a dream that the local SJHL team, the Ice Wolves, would relocate to the facility, according to his son.
“Unfortunately, in his lifetime we weren’t able to do that. But just last year, we made a motion as a board to move the team here,” Roberts said.
While Roberts has cherished memories of watching the team at the Mel Hegland Uniplex in La Ronge, the facility was beginning to show its age, prompting the team to make the move to the Jonas Roberts Memorial Community Centre (named after Roberts’s late uncle).
The team’s first season out of its new home has had a rocky start, with the Ice Wolves sitting at the bottom of the standings.
But Indigenous band members and fans have still been turning out in droves as the season winds down. The game starts with a spine-tingling rendition of O Canada in Cree, while many of the young Indigenous kids line up to greet the team as they take the ice and cheer them as they skate off.
For Roberts, the Jonas Roberts Memorial Community Centre is more than a rink or a gym. It’s the place where he spends Friday nights calling the hockey games. It’s the place where his son skates. It was the roof under which firefighters slept during last year’s devastating forest fires.
“This is our second home. We have weddings. We have funerals. We have elections. We’ve laughed here; we’ve cried here; we’ve danced here,” he said.
Now he has a new dream: that this is the place where another championship can be won by the SJHL’s only reserve-based team.
And while the Ice Wolves team and personnel work to make that happen, Roberts feels his late uncle and father would be thrilled to see the work they started to promote physical activity continue.
“I think if they were here with us today, they’d encourage us to keep pushing forward and keep building this program to what it can be,” he said, adding he wants to help create something his son can feel pride in.
“We’re trying to build a legacy here.”
