Interview: Dr. Courtney Szto, author of "Changing on the Fly: Hockey Through the Voices of South Asian Canadians"
Dr. Courtney Szto, Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, talks with Brenda about her new book, “Changing on the Fly: Hockey Through the Voices of South Asian Canadians” and breaks down the intersections of power and inequality as they present themselves in the world of sport and physical activity.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Brenda: I’m thrilled to have with us today Dr. Courtney Szto, an assistant professor in the school of kinesiology and health studies at Queen's University – that’s in Canada. Her research focuses on the intersections of power and inequality as they present themselves in the world of sport and physical activity. She is also senior editor of Hockey in Society, a hockey blog that explores critical social issues in ice hockey. Today I’m super excited, I’m pumped, because she wrote this beautiful book, which is beautiful as an object – really love the cover, we’ll try to have that somewhere in our interview – Changing on the Fly: Hockey through the Voices of South Asian Canadians, which was published just this year, hot off Rutgers University presses. So, welcome, Dr. Szto!
Courtney: Hi Brenda. Thank you so much for having me.
Brenda: Yeah, we are thrilled. One thing I just wanna start out with: so many times when I read sports history books I end up learning a whole lot about other things, and one of them was the South Asian community in Canada. Could you give listeners who just have no idea about when the South Asian diaspora came to Canada and where, could you give us a sense of what that was like?
Courtney: Sure, so, when we say ‘South Asian’ in Canada we’re referring largely to people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal. It’s kind of like the Canadian state’s interpretation of South Asian. South Asian migration to Canada started in the early 1900s really, and particularly with Punjabi, Sikh people from India. So that group has been in Canada for many, many years and you have multiple generations that have been part of the Canadian armed forces and really a big part of labor in Canada to make the economy what it is, especially in British Columbia with forestry and logging. So I would say that Canadian history is very intertwined with South Asian history. You can’t really separate them from each other.
Brenda: Yeah, and that was fascinating to me, because of course it makes sense – British empire, you know, what’s going on in the late 19th century with labor migrations. But part of why it doesn’t come to consciousness is precisely the topic that you write about, which is that a lot of the national supposed pastime of Canada is ice hockey, and that has been really coded as white and a particular kind of white masculinity. I wondered if you could talk about why. So, in this book you…It’s really great in the sense that it goes back and forth between some really sort of high theory which you explain in a very accessibly way.
Courtney: Thank you.
Brenda: And…[laughs] There’s a lot of it in here, actually. So that’s not an easy task to make that interesting to people who may not have read the entire works of Bourdieu. Yet it’s useful, you know, when you’re reading. Then you sort of find this way to weave in this ethnography, doing these interviews with all kinds of subjects that are South Asian and have been involved in ice hockey. Can you explain a little bit about what attracted you, I guess, to the project, and to that method of doing it?
Courtney: Yeah, it's a good question. I was struggling for a PhD project when I decided I wanted to do a PhD, and after my master’s I was so burned out that I was like, I’m never gonna do my PhD! It took me like three months, really, to be like, I wanna do a PhD. [Brenda laughs] What I had learned really from doing my master’s is that people do really cool things with the things that they love, and so I had done my master’s around tennis and that enabled me to immerse myself in something that I loved at the time. But I was like, oh, people do research on hockey, like, I can hang out at rinks and I can watch hockey and call that my work? So I was like, okay, I need to do something around hockey, I needed to figure out what that story was. Around that time the ‘Hockey Is For Everyone’ campaign was kind of floating around, and the Hockey Night Punjabi broadcast in Canada was starting to pick up steam. The Breakaway film came out at TIFF in 2011 or something like that.
So, I saw all these narratives coalescing around this idea that maybe hockey isn’t just a white man’s sport. It coupled with personal experiences that I had working at Sport Chek which is our equivalent, I guess, to Dick’s Sporting Goods in the States. I worked in a very heavily South Asian populated area and I would help a lot of South Asian kids go through the process of buying hockey equipment because they wanted to participate. There was one young boy who came in one day and he had a small patka on his head, and we just tried to find a helmet that would fit him safely and also allow him to exercise his Sikh identity, and we just couldn’t find a happy medium. Him and his mother had a conversation in the store in Punjabi and he took off all the equipment and he left the store. It was one of those things that really stick with me at the time, like ten years later, I was like, oh, maybe hockey isn’t for everyone, because that wasn’t an experience that I had seen anybody else have in the store. It’s not a conversation that other families normally have in a Sport Chek.
So it just kind of led me down this path of questioning really who does hockey include, who does it exclude, and in what ways? It was just kind of a fortuitous coalescing of different media things and personal experiences that brought me to it. I had certainly believed the idea that hockey was a white man’s game, like, I grew up with that idea and I bought it hook, line and sinker, because it just made sense. I think one of the first things that my PhD supervisor did was he read my introduction and he was like, “You need to go back and do more research, because this is not actually the way it is,” and that’s when I learned about the colored hockey leagues of the Maritimes and Indigenous contributions to the game. I was like, oh, okay, I have been cut off from a whole lot of Canadian history that is supposed to be as much mine as anybody else’s.
Brenda: Yeah, and one of the things, just speaking to your point that you really open up in this book, is that of course it is centered on South Asian Canadians, but you actually are constantly putting them in the broader context and in dialogue with Indigenous peoples, with other diasporic communities that are in Canada, with Black Canadians. You’re both kind of interested in how that community’s integration or lack thereof has been similar and different to others. I wanted to ask, as someone else who did a national history, if you’re dealing with Indigenous peoples as sort of a central piece – is there some way in which that group challenges the very idea of a nation? Should we be doing, to some extent, should we breaking open some of these national narratives going forward?
Courtney: I think the simple answer is yes, [Brenda laughs] and I think this is kind of a contentious thing that we’re getting to with hockey in Canada that it’s like, how do you talk about “Canada’s game” when it’s built on settler colonialism, it’s inherently racist in the segregation that it was formed upon? It forces us to question a lot about what we think we know as a nation and what we are supposed to be as a people and I think that that’s why we don’t talk about race and hockey in particular. It challenges the notion of Canadianness, that we’re supposed to be welcoming and multicultural, but once we start pulling at that thread it comes apart pretty quickly.
Brenda: In your book it comes apart really quickly! And in some very heartbreaking ways. I mean, the story of throwing alcohol on the Indigenous teams, the racial abuse of the South Asian players that you’re studying. So, could you talk a little bit about how your study…I mean, it just takes apart the idea that Canada is this multicultural mecca.
Courtney: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the “fun part” about it, is that I’m pitting these two quintessentially Canadian myths against each other. One that hockey is Canada, and two that Canada is ‘multicultural’ – so if they’re true separately they should be true together, but that’s exactly when they start to fall apart. So the reality is that racialized contributions have been erased out of hockey’s history, and because of that we have this strong nationalism built on the lie that hockey is a white man’s game. From there we see everybody that’s new to the game, that’s Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. It’s like we’re welcoming them into something that is not theirs, so I kind of interpret the work that I’ve done around this as a returning of hockey to its actual multicultural roots.
Brenda: Yeah, and for me that really speaks to something similar with gender. When you repeat the myth over and over again that women didn’t play then what you’re doing is legitimizing the current media’s standard argument which is that things are just getting better, this is very new, things are just getting better. So to be able to debunk that, to have some of this history, in many ways in the most optimistic ways as scholars, you know, it’s probably a great resource for some of these institutions, and you talk about some of them doing the work to be able to point to the history and say, actually, the reason that we haven’t made this progress is systemic racism – not because we haven’t been playing, not because we’re not here. You’re systemically neglecting and marginalizing our experiences.
Courtney: Yeah, and I think that optimism is an interesting aspect as well, because I started the project for sure…I talk about it in one of the chapters, I was like, oh, I’m gonna catalogue all this racism and we’re gonna show it and people will see that it’s a real thing, and then everything will change. Then I realized that I just kept gathering and gathering and gathering, and nothing was really changing. So that was kind of a kick in the teeth [laughs] as a grad student, to have that realization, but I think that that’s an important realization as well. It’s like, yes, we do the work to make sure that it’s there and it’s easily accessible, but the knowledge itself is certainly not what changes the institutions. We have to continue pushing back and challenging. So I think hockey is finally at least in that place, it realizes that it does have to change, so maybe we have gathered slightly enough evidence at this point. But, I mean, you continue to see it on social media and things where they’re like, “Prove it, prove that there’s racism.” Like, really? Are we still having this conversation? [laughs]
Brenda: At least for the first half of the book, and then you come back to it later, one of the touchstones of the book is Hockey Night Punjabi. So I was wondering, for listeners – because I immediately Googled it, and I’m not a hockey person and I was fascinated by its existence – could you talk about it? It’s importance to your study, and also to what you call ethnic media?
Courtney: So, ethnic media is really any kind of media that is created outside of the English language in Canada and the US, and it’s actually a very fast-growing segment of the media landscape, particularly in Indigenous languages and things like that. So if we think of language as cornerstone of culture and existence it’s actually quite important. Hockey Night Punjabi started in 2008 with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as really just an experiment in multiculturalism. They threw out a bunch of different languages to cover a hockey game, and Punjabi was the one that stuck. It really spoke to the community, and I think it hit a presentation that resonated with the community. I would say that it’s not necessarily easily replicated if you were just to call sports in a particular language, it’s not what it is, it’s the way it’s packaged, it's the way that the language is translated and in a particular way that the native speakers understand it as kind of welcoming, really.
So it kind of went through some stints of it was on the air and then it got cancelled, it was on the air and then it got cancelled, and the community always brought it back and now it has private sponsorship. So it’s been going I guess about 11, 12 seasons now, and 2016 is when it really took off with the Pittsburgh Penguins. Harnarayan Singh did a “Bonino! Bonino!” call that kind of went viral and they ended up being invited to the Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup parade. So that was a really nice thing to see, to watch these guys kind of ascend through sports media and transgress what was ethnic media into “mainstream” media. It raises some other issues about English media being the ultimate goal for folks, which I think can be problematic in some ways. But at the same time, to see people who have really earned their chops in a different way opens up sports media in a very cool manner for the future.
Brenda: So, one of the ideas that the book tries to maybe not debunk but certainly problematize is that sports are this great vehicle for integration. I kept feeling when I was reading the answers that you have from some of the young players in particular, where they describe their teammates asking them about their culture, about their food, about things like this, and on the one hand you’re showing their reticence to actually maybe talk about race very much, and on the other hand – and maybe these are related, and I wanna ask you – they also seem to be doing an awful lot of work for the white people in their lives. [laughs] I mean, it seems like there’s so much…Like, that multiculturalism in some ways is primarily benefiting white youth sports. Is that the case?
Courtney: Yeah, I think that’s a really succinct way of putting it. It was a realization that I had going through the data because the people who were changing from these interactions were not the South Asian players. So, you know, the white players would ask them about food and culture and language, so those white players then learn more about South Asian culture. But all the South Asian players I interviewed, they were born and raised in Canada. They don’t have questions in the other direction about what is Canada like, what is Canadianness about? It's an odd arrangement that we have created and it’s again like, oh, you are coming and joining us, and be like, but really you’re the one that’s actually benefiting from our presence here, you’re just not really seeing it in that light. So yeah, I think that’s definitely an important thing to understand about “integration” in the sport for sure.
Brenda: And I think we can extrapolate that to so many youth programs, whether it’s an elementary school that says we’re gonna have ‘Hispanic Heritage Month’ – whatever that means – and then we’re gonna make all of the Latinx families come in with food and give talks and read books. So on the one hand absolutely you have an opportunity to feel an expert and to have your expertise validated, but on the other hand how much are the Latinx kids learning from that experience and how much are they just doing a whole bunch of labor for white families?
Courtney: Yeah, and we see this in other programs like sport for development programs, or you kind of go abroad and volunteer and were like, “I’m gonna go help this orphanage, I’m gonna help these kids learn to play soccer,” but it’s really very consistent that the narrative is that the person who goes is the one that's changed when they come back. The community is kind of hit and miss. I would say that that’s the same with BIPOC sharing of trauma. When we had Eugene Arcand, who’s a residential school survivor and former Indigenous hockey player, talk at the roundtable on racism, him sharing his story about life in residential school was not changing for him. That was changing for the audience. We were really asking him to open up a wound there for us, and it’s for our benefit. So I think that was probably the first time that I really had that experience. I was like, oh, this is not about him at all, this is completely about me.
Brenda: And that’s so hard, because on the one hand of course there’s good intentions with giving those people space, and yet there’s also demands that come with that. You know, when people say, “I’m going to make my seat at the table,” and that’s great if you’re being served, but [laughs] you know, you also get this sort of feeling where there’s just a really tough…I have ambivalence towards it, or when I see it it looks to me as there’s a lot of contradiction going on there. You certainly want to provide the space, and yet realize that at least for me as a white person that I’m asking a particular kind of emotional and also time labor, and also opening of vulnerability because you cannot guarantee the response to that.
Courtney: Yeah, and I think it’s kind of that we need to look for a balance, and if people are willing to share that kind of experience and time and labor with you then you take it and you absorb it and you appreciate it. But when people are like, no, not now, and not for you – whatever the story is – then we have to respect that as well.
Brenda: So around the middle part of the book you really do a deep dive into South Asian masculinities and femininities, and I just wanted to see for listeners if you could kind of summarize your findings and why you thought that was important.
Courtney: Yeah, actually the editors asked for that chapter to be separated out. The data was in the thesis, we just kind of reorganize it so that it highlighted gender more specifically. So, I think one of the interesting things that came about from all the interviews that I did was that, or maybe we should expect this, but the men and the boys were not particularly keen to share in any detail their experiences with racism. It was kind of like, “Did you experience anything like…” “Yeah but, you know, it wasn’t that big of a deal, I just fought them or I got in their face and then it wasn’t that big of a deal…” Whereas on the other hand when I’m interviewing women hockey players we’re going into lengthy details about their racist experiences. So with the men their dominant response was really to kind of enhance their own physicality, and that’s the way to really survive racism in a white-dominated sport. So it’s like, the one thing that I can control is how I bulk up my body. So if I can make myself fit enough and strong enough that the racists aren’t gonna go after me then that makes my life easier and better, which is, you know, a reasonable solution.
The problem is that it doesn’t get rid of racism, it just shifts it onto the next more vulnerable person. So these individualized responses, you have to give credit in that, yeah, they're just trying to shrive, they’re just trying to play the game that they love, but it does not solve the problem as a whole. With women it's just like we’re struggling so hard to be women in a masculine space that we don’t have time to talk about racism – we’re too busy talking about gender, we’re too busy trying to establish ourselves and create a path for young women to be able to play hockey at an elite level and be paid for it, so there is no space to talk about racism in women’s hockey.
Brenda: Are there other differences that you found between the experiences of girls and boys or men and women?
Courtney: I mean, one of the participants talked about how when she would play with boys they just didn’t even really know what to do with her, but with girls there would be a lot more verbal attacks on the ice, whereas with the boys it tended to be verbal and physical. But on the whole I would say that the racism is pretty consistent and similar in boys’ and girls’ hockey, unfortunately.
Brenda: So there’s another stereotype, I mean, there might be particular truths to this, but it reminded me of a Bend It Like Beckham sort of moment that somehow South Asian families would limit girls’ participation vs boys. Did you find that in the Canadian context?
Courtney: Yeah, I mean, I think we still have that assumption, and it’s just really based down to the family, right, like all families are different. Obviously I found many young women to interview and their parents were very happy to have them in ice hockey, so I think it starts to chip away at the stereotype that South Asian families are really reserved and they don’t want their kids to participate in sport. That might have been more true for particular generations, because I felt like the girls that I was interviewing, their parents put them into sports, or their mothers put them into hockey because they never got the opportunity to really explore their own athletic opportunities. So, it kind of swings the pendulum in the opposite direction for some families.
Brenda: Towards the end of the book you talk about some of the organizations that are working towards changing…Or at least maybe even just if they’re memorializing the participation of people of color in ice hockey. It sort of gets to this question that bothers me all the time, and probably annoys my co-hosts to no end, which is: so, you’re looking at this landscape – is it possible to reform within the system, or is this something where the DIY as you call it, “DIY citizenship” – I like that a lot. Is this a situation where it’s gotta be agitation from outside the regular institutions? How do you see that right now in this Black Lives Matter moment?
Courtney: I see a lot of co-optation. [laughs] That’s what I see. So, yeah, we have things like the We Are Hockey museum exhibit that we started at the Sikh Heritage Museum and the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, Vancouver. We were trying to just tell counter-narratives about the history of hockey and write in all those people that had been written out by and large. So I see those as kind of like, yeah, you’re shaking the cage from the outside and the hope is really to bring attention to all these stories that we have been missing, so that maybe the Hockey Hall of Fame could be like, oh, people are interested in this, maybe we should start doing this as well. I will say that that museum exhibit has upgraded, so it’s been picked up by the BC Sports Hall of Fame and is allowed to expand and things like that.
But I think what we see a lot of and what we need to be careful of is organizations like Apna Hockey and Black Girl Hockey Club, which are doing great work and are absolutely necessary, that organizations like the NHL and Hockey Canada and USA Hockey tend to like to fly in and do photo ops and kind of look like yes, we’re gonna help, we’re gonna support, we want diversity. And yet the hard work doesn’t get done, the restructuring that you’re alluding to doesn’t get done. But we’re willing to do the photo ops, the hockey clinics, the come to a game/learn to play clinics – those are all the easy things with respect to access, but it doesn’t change the power and privilege within the game. So, yeah, I think we’ve opened the door slightly so that we can kind of stick our noses in and be like, hello, we’re here, can we have a conversation? But the conversation is not one of depth at this point.
Brenda: So, you mentioned Black Girl Hockey Club. Are there other organizations that listeners should be paying closer attention to that are really challenging this structure?
Courtney: There is a new Latina hockey club I think that popped up on Twitter recently. Puerto Rico has a hockey association that is really trying to rebuild their rink after Hurricane Irma and things like that and they really try to rally the Latinx community around hockey. Yeah, beyond that there’s not necessarily a lot. There’s Players Against Hate, and then again Apna Hockey, but yeah, it’s growing. There’s a Hockey Players of Color Movement, HPOC Movement, on Twitter as well. So with the summer of 2020 I think that there was a desire to create more of these organizations that take space for themselves and amplify their own stories. So yeah, I think in the next year we’ll probably see a large growth in that.
Brenda: I just don’t wanna leave these other facts before I have some personal questions from our co-hosts for you. But regarding the book, you really do a good job of explaining how racist hate crimes in Canada are actually really just as high or higher than in the United States, and yet Canadians are telling themselves over and over that they’re not the United States. What’s going on? [Courtney laughs] How are they able to maintain that? How can they maintain that?! How are people buying this?
Courtney: It’s a well-told story. I mean, that’s what we hang our entire identity on: we’re not the United States. That’s our identities by negative abstraction, really. But yeah, the reality is that hate crimes in Canada can and have been higher per capita than in the United States with Black Canadians, with Indigenous Canadians and with anti-Semitism, it’s very prevalent in Canada. So I think that we’re fooling ourselves when we say we’re this. Just because we’ve invited people together doesn’t mean that we get along, and I think that that’s really the thing that we mistake. David J Leonard has written it perfect in that proximity to diversity does not foster any sort of anti-racism. That’s not the hard thing. The easy thing is putting everybody together in a room, it’s like, how do you get these people to work together and appreciate each other? That’s the hard work.
I think with increasing immigration to Canada we will actually see more racial tension, it’s just the sharing of resources is what causes people to hunker down with their own and kind of see otherness where they want to. So yeah, I think we’re not really that different from the United States. I actually think it’s sometimes better in the United States because you’re willing to have conversations about slavery, right? We don’t even acknowledge really that slavery was a thing in Canada. So yeah, I think we’ve actually got a longer way to go. We just are very polite about it and that politeness covers up, unfortunately, a lot of inequality.
Brenda: Well, I’m not very polite. So if they need anyone to…[laughter] I’m kidding. There are some rapid-fire questions from co-hosts because Professor Courtney Szto has a lot of fans among the co-hosts of Burn It All Down.
Courtney: This is terrifying. [laughs]
Brenda: I know some of the answers to this, having read the book. But another teaser: did you play hockey yourself, and do you play hockey yourself?
Courtney: So, I did not grow up playing hockey, there was not a lot of girls’ ice hockey at the time. My parents both worked full-time, they couldn’t get me to the rink for practices. So I picked up hockey at the wonderful age of 21 which makes it so easy to learn at an advanced age. [laughs]
Brenda: What position do you play?
Courtney: My preferred position is right wing but I will play anything that the team needs me to – including, one time, goalie.
Brenda: Ooh! Nerves of steel. What is your favorite team?
Courtney: I mean, born and raised in Vancouver so the Canucks are quote-unquote “my favorite team.” Do I have a favorite actual NHL team these days? No, I do not. [laughs]
Brenda: Right, it’s very hard to be a Marxist scholar and maintain the love of such industrial titans. [Courtney laughs] If you had any player that you would induct into the Hall of Fame tomorrow, who would it be?
Courtney: Well, any player…I’m trying to think of somebody maybe who wouldn’t necessarily get the nod but we should probably acknowledge them. Maybe somebody like a Bev Beaver who was an Indigenous girl who played in, I want to say, the 60s. Girls weren’t allowed to play hockey at residential schools but she was one of the best on the team. She played for the boys until the boys got the play organized and then she wasn't allowed to play and then she pretended to be a boy so that she could continue playing hockey. Certainly doesn’t meet any of the criteria [laughs] that the Hockey Hall of Fame would want, but I think that she’s obviously somebody that should be memorialized in the broader story of hockey, especially in Canada.
Brenda: Yeah, that’s a perfect answer for Burn It All Down, right? We’re going to totally reshape all of the criteria for hall of fames. I think this is perfect. What is one place in the US you want to visit, that you haven’t?
Courtney: I wanna go to Yosemite National Park, that's the next one on the list.
Brenda: Okay. What is your next book?
Courtney: Um, why would we think that there’s a next book! [laughter]
Brenda: Because this one was good! Why stop now.
Courtney: I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. It’s kind of like when I was done my master’s and I was like, I’m never gonna do a PhD! It’s like, I’m never doing another book! That was kind of hard. [laughs]
Brenda: So you have 3 months til you change your mind, if it’s anything like your master’s.
Courtney: I guess, yeah. [laughs]
Brenda: We’ll come back to you in 3 months. Last but not least: besides Lindsay Gibbs, Jessica Luther, Brenda Elsey and Amira Rose Davis, who is your favorite co-host of Burn It All Down?
Courtney: I mean, you guys have had some really good guest hosts…[laughter] So, I mean, I guess if I have to say Shireen I’ll say Shireen. But I mean…
Brenda: Alright.
Courtney: That comes with a phone call and like a video call, there’s just a whole lot attached to it, so…
Brenda: [laughs] Okay Shireen Ahmed, you win. Besides Lindsay Gibbs, Jessica Luther, Brenda Elsey and Amira Rose Davis, you are officially Dr. Courtney Szto’s very favorite Burn It All Down co-host.
Courtney: You said there was editing, right?
Brenda: [laughs] This is staying in. This is the best part. I just wanna thank you so much, Dr. Courtney Szto. I love this book, everyone should go out and buy it. It is at Rutgers University Press and it is brand new and super interesting. I hope I’ve convinced you of that. So thank you for being with us, the author of Changing on the Fly: Hockey through the Voices of South Asian Canadians.
Courtney: Thank you so much, and I’m happy to throw flames right next to you folks.