PrimumHockeyist
Registered User
What rules did the native game contribute?
Hi again,
My own conclusion, as far as the birth of Halifax ice hockey is concerned, is that we have to apply and extend the generalizations that brought us the English theory, and the broader more settled one that says that Ice Hockey is derivative of 3 British games.
In these ways of thinking, the historians never try to prove which English or British community first introduced a given rule. They dodge the question, and instead say that the rule must have come from somewhere in England and or Britain.
As I went out of my way to point out in my first essay, this way of thinking does make a lot of sense, from North America and Europe's culturally dominant point of view. But real history requires that we consider Halifax-Dartmouth-Kjipuktuk which, when we apply the same logic, means that we say that any given rule "must have come from somewhere in England and or Britain. and/or the Mi'kmaq First Nation."
Kind of a copout, I suppose, but when one looks to Joe Cope's discussion of Byron Weston's Halifax ice hockey, we see references to face-offs, 10-player teams and so on. All chicken-egg stuff as far as I'm concerned, because I doubt that the Celts didn't have face-offs in their own game. The unanswerable question becomes, which ancient culture introduced the face-off first, the Celts or the Mi'kmaw? This is why the British stick game generalization is strong: because we don't know. And we we generalize.
A good generalization, but one that needs to be extended to account for real history, not a selective body of information that supports blatantly biased depictions of what we 'don't know." No adequate conversation of 19th century Ice Hockey history can take place without giving the Mi'kmaw their props. It is that simple.
As I wrote in my first essay, the grand irony of this ongonig national oversight is that the Mi'kmaw's participation in Halifax-Montreal "Ice Hockey" is what proves that the 'stick game that became Ice Hockey' was born in Canada, literally, and no earlier than 1749-50. It is, for the same reason that we were all born in a certain location and time: we all had to wait for our parents to hook up.
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