Picture in your mind what hockey looked like at the turn of the 20th century. What, where, and who do you see? Set your mental image in Canada, if you haven’t already, as the game had yet to spread much below the border. You probably imagine a less formal affair, games played on ponds and small rinks and not in packed arenas. The sticks are wooden, the players padless and without helmets; the sport itself is slower and more methodical, and any contact is incidental. And when you picture organized hockey’s earliest players, they’re probably white.
A group of Black Canadian intellectuals and churchmen of the time looked at the sport, and saw the same thing, and decided that simply because things were the way they were, that wasn’t how they had to be. So they started their own league, the Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes, which existed just long enough to invent much of what’s best about the modern game—before it was killed off by white business interests. As a result of its short lifespan, the CHL doesn’t get a prominent place in most tellings of hockey’s story, but its legacy is undeniable.
The Canada of the late 19th century had a much smaller black population than it does now (21,400 as of the 1881 census; nearly 2.2 million in 2016), after which the loosening of immigration restrictions in the 1960s paved the way for many more Caribbeans and Africans to call Canada home. Before that, the bulk of the black population in Canada came from the United States. Many were formerly enslaved persons who found refuge in British Canada, which had outlawed slavery decades before the United States.
But just because Canadian authorities welcomed those who had escaped bondage did not mean they viewed them as equals. It wasn’t out of altruism that British authorities in Canada first began offering sanctuary. There was a certain level of opportunism behind the invitation: a desire both to attract cheap labor and to harm America’s economy. Sometimes these refugees were given land grants, but not in the fertile plains of Saskatchewan nor the industrial heartland in Ontario. Instead, they were essentially pushed to the periphery of the Dominion, often forced to settle in the less productive Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Halifax, the largest city in the region, became a population and cultural center for Black Canadians.