Want to watch lacrosse? Check out the Six Nations Chiefs!
The Six Nations Chiefs, a lacrosse team based between Brantford and Caledonia on the Six Nations Indigenous reserve, is a part of the major series lacrosse league based in southern Ontario.
The league features four teams; the Cobourg Kodiaks, the Brooklin Lacrosse Club, the Peterborough Lakers, and the Chiefs. The Chiefs had a fantastic year, leading the standings by the end of the regular season with a record of six wins, three losses and one tie.
Despite the strong regular season, the Chiefs were unable to clinch the championship victory, as their second place counterpart, the Lakers, ended up winning the last game of the year, taking the title. The Lakers had a regular season record of five wins, five losses and zero ties, but thrived in the playoffs with a record of six wins and four losses. The Chiefs held the same playoff record, but lost the games that mattered most unfortunately.
In the finals the Chiefs played six games against the Lakers, winning games two and five, but losing games one, three, four and six. The championship game took place on Aug. 28 in Peterborough.
Through the regular season the Chiefs were good for 9.3 goals per game on average, but still held a goal differential of negative three. Their leader in goals and points was Austin Staats, who was in his second year with the team. He totalled 22 goals and 38 points on the year. Staats would also account for three game winning goals - the same total as the rest of his teammates combined.
Staats’ only point leader competition came from Cody Jamieson, the only other player to finish with more than 30 points. Jamieson would finish with 34 points while also leading the team in assists with 22.
A major missing factor for the team this season seemed to be Lyle Thompson, who scored seven goals in only three games played. Interestingly, two of his seven goals came as power play goals.
A major missing factor for the team this season seemed to be Lyle Thompson, who scored seven goals in only three games played. Interestingly, two of his seven goals came as power play goals.
It is not clear why Thompson was unable to play the entirety of the year.
Goalie Doug Jamieson also deserves significant credit for his performance on the year, maintaining a save percentage of nearly 80 per cent. He only allowed 66 goals in 326 attempts. In comparison, backup goalie Warren Hill kept a less impressive save percentage of 57 per cent, while playing just over half as many minutes as Jamieson.
A potential reason for success on the year was the rare requirement of call-up players. The team only had one game played with a call-up, which featured Mason Hill. The regulars were always on the field for the Chiefs.
The next priority for the club following the completion of the regular season and the playoff runs is the 2023 draft. It appears that Owen Sound and Oakville will be making a return to the league, based on the draft order. The Chiefs will have the sixth overall pick in all five rounds, excluding the third round. The Brooklin Lacrosse Club owns the rights to that pick.
C/O Feast Centre
The Silhouette: Please introduce yourselves.
Randy Jackson: I'm Randy Jackson. I'm an assistant professor in the school of social work with a cross-appointment in health, ageing and society and identify as Anishinaabe from Kettle and Stony Point First Nation.
Renée Masching: Hello, my name is Renee Masching. I work with [Canadian Aboriginal Aids Network]. I'm the director of research in this organization. I have bloodlines from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory and also [am of] Irish descent. I was adopted and raised in a family of Eastern and Western European descent.
What do you do at the Feast Centre?
RM: It's a great honour and privilege. Randy and I co-direct the centre and that is based upon decades of experience working together. My role in the Feast Centre represents community voice on behalf of and with many others on our team and supporting the centre. As we structure the centre, we want to be really clear about bringing diverse perspectives to the centre and particularly ground ourselves in a community-based research perspective. My ‘community hat’ is a reflection of the organization, where I work and the membership base that I represent, but, of course, recognizing I also have roles and responsibilities in academia and, for example, Randy would have roles in community as well.
RJ: To add to that, the Feast Centre is a five-year, close to $5 million undertaking that's looking to develop training opportunities for scholars and trainees and community members who wish to use Indigenous knowledge in their [sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections] research. For that, we work across the four pillars of health research, including clinical, epidemiology, basic science and the social sciences. We've developed a number of training opportunities and the centre of that would be our Learning Lodge Institute, hopefully drawing on land-based training opportunities for researchers. We're also developing a webinar series and a podcast series to go along with the Learning Institute. In addition to that, we offer grant opportunities for Feast Centre members who wish to be more focused on the kind of work that they're doing. So, we offer training grants to students across masters, PhD and postdoc. We offer training opportunities for undergraduate students to become involved and learn about Indigenous STBBI research. Just a whole range of things that we've been developing over the last year and a half or so.
How did you both get involved in and become inspired for the Feast Centre?
RJ: Well, the Feast Centre is really a two-decade-long collaboration between Renee and I working across 45+ different research projects over the last 18-20 years. So a lot of community-based expertise in this endeavour. Across those 45+ projects we did, we did a critical review on the way in which we were approaching research and I really wanted to share some of our knowledge around that. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is fine, but when you're in an Indigenous setting like we are, the development of it is a sacred pursuit. It's really about socially transforming society so that we're addressing disparities of health that Indigenous people experience because of structural disadvantages.
RM: Part of that vision is also recognizing the need for a response to STBBI that is meaningful and evidence-informed and it is also informed by the people who live every day in this reality. Both in the context of living with various infections, as well as the context of prevention work, so we're thinking of the researchers, the individuals, the healthcare practitioners and also, maybe a little bit self-serving, but we're really overworked. There is a lot of interest, and rightly so, in Indigenous health . . . but there's a very small cadre of people who are doing that work, particularly in the context of health and even narrower, in the context of STBBIs. So part of the vision of the Feast Centre is both to bring in new people and to recruit and encourage those who are involved in health research already to focus their attention and energy on Indigenous STBBI research. That's a combination of joining our fellow Indigenous scholars into the work, as well as working with our allies to do more to introduce and explain and understand how we would bring Indigenous ways of knowing and doing into research. This is so we can share the burden a bit and have confidence that good work and good research are proceeding as we understand it and as our team helps us to build that perspective. This also comes from a foundation of a response to HIV, particularly an activist response. I think an activist orientation and activist researcher orientation is exciting and necessary. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, knowledge for the sake of understanding, for instance, the philosophy and theory of Indigenous research is really important. But, every day, I have to go back to our community of people living with HIV, to our organizations that are responding. If I'm standing in front of a group of people saying: "Well we've learned about what it's like to live with HIV, that's really interesting" — that's an absolutely inadequate presentation for people's lives. We're celebrating the lives of people who are with us, we're acknowledging the lives of people who have passed. Research has to have an impact because people's lives are on the line. What we're learning and doing and why we're doing it is because we want people to live well and live longer. We want people to be in a place where prevention is in place so that people aren't living with STBBI . . . You know this matters, this is a commitment. We're really trying to make a difference in people's lives.
RJ: In addition to what Renee said, our centre draws on several sorts of methodological approaches, including decolonizing and Indigenous methodologies. But really, we're community-driven and that's really an important value that we try to articulate so community-identified concerns are really what drive the Feast Centre. We want a social transformation that positively addresses some of the disparities, issues that were identified by Indigenous communities themselves. We try to work from that perspective. The other perspective that I think is really, really important here is this idea of strengths. So there are enormous Indigenous cultural strengths that we want to foreground in the research that we do. It's that focus on strength that articulates a position you don't often hear in research literature about Indigenous people. That research that's being published overwhelmingly tends to focus on challenges and pathologies that Indigenous people are thought to live with, whereas we want to tell a fuller, greater picture about Indigenous people that focus on their strengths in the context of those challenges that they experience. We want to show that Indigenous culture is very efficacious in terms of helping people heal and live successful and productive lives. The responses to health disparities need to be grounded in Indigenous approaches and ways of being in the world.
What is your favourite memory of the Feast Centre?
RJ: What floats to the top of my mind right off the get-go here is the launch of the Feast Centre, which was about a year ago and you can watch the video on YouTube. We had a number of Indigenous artists participate along with us, a number of other people connected to the Feast Centre, the hope that they had for the Feast Centre. Renee and I talked in that video about how we orient ourselves to the Feast Centre and the work that we wanted to do.
RM: That was the first thing that came to mind. Running a major centre, running a major grant [and] working closely in partnership across distances and in COVID as we've tried to bring life to the Centre. The launch really culminated a lot of that passion and vision. The other side of that is we've stuck together and worked really hard and through hard times and through really exciting times.
On Sept. 27, hundreds of Hamiltonians gathered in Gore park to raise the alarm bell on climate change and urge leaders to take action.
The climate strike came as part of a week of mass climate actions from Sept. 20-27. Hamilton’s climate strike was one of many general strikes around the world, in which people walked out of school, work and their homes to raise the alarm on the climate crisis.
According to Global Climate Strike, an organization helping to coordinate the strikes, 7.6 million people around the world took part in actions around the world.
Since March, students from schools across Hamilton have been holding regular demonstrations at City Hall to bring attention to the climate emergency. They have been working alongside the Fridays for Future movement, in which students from around the world walk out of their classes to showcase the severity of the climate emergency. By missing out on classes and thereby making sacrifices to their education, they aim to demonstrate how deeply the climate crisis will affect their futures.
A 2018 report from the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change highlighted the severity of the climate emergency. According to the report, it is of critical importance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 45 per cent in the next 11 years. The report found that failure to do so will result in ecological degradation and major loss of life.
Climate Strike Canada, an organization coordinating climate strikes across Canada, provides a list of demands for protestors across the country. The list includes a just transition to a renewable economy, the legal entrenchment of the right to a healthy environment, biodiversity conservation, rejection of all new fossil fuel extraction or transportation projects and the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.
Makasa Looking Horse, a youth leader from Six Nations spoke at Hamilton’s climate strike. She described how Indigenous people are disproportionately affected by environmental issues, noting that only nine per cent of the community has access to a water treatment plant.
https://twitter.com/iancborsuk/status/1177622768600436736
“In Six Nations – only 30 minutes away from here – we’re having a water crisis . . . And that should not be happening when we’re surrounded by Toronto and Hamilton. Everybody else has simple rights to electricity, to clean water, those are all human rights that we should have,” Looking Horse said.
Speakers at Hamilton’s strike presented different perspectives about the best ways to address the climate emergency.
Lily Mae Peters, a student at Westdale secondary school and one of the strike’s organizers, urged people to change their consumption patterns and make sustainable lifestyle changes.
Lane O’Hara Cooke, co-founder of Fridays for Future Hamilton, urged people to look beyond individual solutions to the climate crisis. She noted that the climate crisis is a systemic issue that requires systemic solutions.
“It is the one percent, it is the fossil fuel industry, that is doing the most damage. We need to stop giving tax cuts to these fossil fuel corporations, we can’t do it anymore,” she said.
Peters stated that the purpose of the climate strike was to raise awareness of the climate crisis and educate the public. According to Peters, the organizers of the strike wanted protestors to remain in the park.
“Fridays for future needs to be a peaceful movement, we need to bring people to an understanding about how climate change is, rather than blocking roads and creating inconvenience,” she stated.
However, many activists believe that in order to make change, it is necessary to disrupt public life. By shutting down traffic, protestors disrupt the status quo, thus giving people no choice but to pay attention.
Acting against the orders of police, hundreds of protestors marched down James Street south to Jackson Street west, eventually arriving at City Hall. A student-led group then marched into City Hall and demanded to speak to the mayor about how the city of Hamilton is going to combat the climate crisis.
The group occupied the building for approximately 20 minutes. Initially, police officers asked for a few representatives from the group to speak to the mayor. However, people were wary of “divide and conquer” techniques and wanted him to address everybody at once.
Eventually, protestors left the building and Mayor Fred Eisenberger addressed the crowd on the steps of City Hall. He thanked the protestors for pushing the city to make changes and urged them to keep pushing for change.
After a brief address, police officers escorted Eisenberger back inside. He did not answer questions from the crowd.
A group of approximately 20 protestors stayed after Eisenberger’s address and tried to enter City Hall, but were blocked by police officers.
While protestors had different ideas about tactics, their message was clear: Hamilton’s youth are demanding action on the climate emergency, and they are dedicated to holding leaders accountable to secure their futures.
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