Playing the team game

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This article was published 24/05/2025 (437 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Small Ceremonies is the debut novel of Kyle Edwards, an Anishinaabe writer and journalist from Lake Manitoba First Nation and a member of Ebb and Flow First Nation. Edwards was previously named Emerging Indigenous Journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists, and is currently a provost fellow at the University of Southern California. (In 2014, Edwards was the Vince Leah intern in the Free Press sport department.)

Despite its title, the novel engages with big societal issues through vibrant, colourful characters. The novel takes place in Winnipeg’s North End and explores the lives of urban Indigenous people, most of whom lack connection to a First Nation, except for one family displaced by flooding.

The book’s central characters are Tomahawk (Tommy) Shields and Clinton Whiteway, two Grade 12 students attending the fictional St Croix high school, where they play for the Tigers, the school’s hockey team. The team has never won a game in living memory; this could be its last season, as the league plans to expel the Tigers, supposedly due to safety concerns of visiting teams.

The book takes place over Tommy and Clinton’s final year of high school as the Tigers battle through loss after loss, getting close to victory but never quite tasting it.

This is a symphonic novel with a large number of characters, each receiving their own chapter or chapters, reminiscent of katherena vermette’s The Circle, where each participant in a sentencing circle is given an opportunity to speak their truth. In Small Ceremonies we hear from an unnamed omniscient narrator and 13 other characters. It can be difficult at times to keep track of the relationship between characters and the main plot of the novel, the further the narrative strays from the Tigers and their hockey season. However, these other voices provide a deeper understanding of the forces working against Tommy and Clinton.

An important theme of the novel is the challenge faced by Indigenous youth from the North End as they attempt to better themselves. Some of the novel’s most poignant moments come when Edwards describes the lives of criminally involved individuals and how pressure from others, bad choices, trauma and substance abuse come together in a potent mixture: “to this day I can hear the cracking sound of his head hitting the ground, and as I darted toward my Corolla he stayed there, motionless and unconscious, and if I could do it differently today I believe I would stay there with him until help arrived. I have to believe it.”

Another heart-wrenching chapter describes Tommy’s alienation when he visits the University of Manitoba as a prospective student. As he approaches the campus, Edwards writes “He knew nothing of the southern neighbourhoods of the city other than that’s where richer people lived, and that’s where the university was. He wasn’t sure of the statistics, for all he knew he was wrong, but he was pretty sure no one like him lived out here, they were only visitors made to feel welcome.”

However Tommy is resilient, as are many of the novel’s characters, and later as he looks down at the Red River from a student residence, Edwards writes “He had never seen the river from this high before, never fully grasped its size and beauty, how it appeared to be alive. He wondered where it began and why it was coming all this way and where it would take him.”

The large cast of characters also provides insight into the various perspectives that exist within Indigenous communities. We see the struggle to fit in experienced by Floyd Redhead, a St Croix student who is Afro-Indigenous. We also get to enjoy a success story via Tommy’s sister, Sam, whose academic triumphs provide a needed injection of hope. Another character who is in many ways a success is Pete Mosienko, of mixed-race Indigenous and European heritage, who works at the Tigers’ home arena and faithfully tends to the building and the ice despite the disappointment in his own past.

As Tommy and Clinton careen through the hockey season, they encounter adults who help them and try to change the course of their lives for the better, as well as others who severely let them down. We see the impact of intergenerational trauma intersecting with systemic racism against Indigenous people, as illustrated by the continued lack of success of the Tigers, season after season. The hockey team’s continued effort to buck the trend comes to embody the hopes of the entire community, which are very modest: one win would mean the world.

The end of the novel may not satisfy all readers, as it feels a little rushed, and Edwards chooses stark realism over emotional fulfillment, allowing “bad” characters to escape without consequence while “good” characters pay the price.

However, Small Ceremonies is an important and very moving read that brings attention to a part of our city where the stories of the people who walk the streets every day seldom enter the consciousness of those beyond the railroad tracks.

Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based writer of short and long fiction. Her debut novel The World So Wide was published in April.