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How the Colored Hockey League Pioneered Modern Hockey

 

 When we think of hockey in Canada, who do we think of? Most people think of Wayne Gretzky or Gordie Howe, but did you know that Black men in the 19th century were some of the first hockey players who helped revolutionize the sport? 

Decades before there even was an NHL there was the Colored Hockey League, a group of 12 teams comprised of African-Canadian players from across the Maritimes. This league pioneered many of the most used techniques in hockey today, while rising to levels of popularity that were largely unheard of for Black leagues at the turn of the 20th century. Until politics, war, and changing societal factors brought about the end of the league, and its near erasure from history.

In Canada, hockey has earned a reputation as a “white man’s” sport. This may be the case since white historians gathered most of the data and records used to establish hockey history in Canada. Few people knew about black men’s contributions to hockey in the 19th century. Hockey is not typically associated with the word Black in people’s minds.

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Between 1895 and the early 1930s, all-Black ice hockey teams in the Maritimes thrilled mixed audiences and news reporters alike as they challenged each other to exciting matches and vied for the ultimate prize — the Colored Hockey Championship. More than a century ago, hockey played a huge role in Canadian Black culture on the east coast. The Black leaders of the day recognized it, and they used hockey as a vehicle for advancement.

Hockey fans may know of the Montreal Wanderers, the Ottawa Silver Seven, the Winnipeg Victorias, the Vancouver Millionaires, the Seattle Metropolitans, and some of the teams from the early years of the Stanley Cup. But very few have ever heard of the Africville Sea-Sides, the Halifax Eurekas and the Halifax Stanley, who were the original teams that formed Canada’s first organized hockey league, the Colored Hockey League.

The Colored Hockey League has perhaps the most intriguing history of any sports league in North American history. It was formed in 1895, pre-dating the formation of the NHL by more than 20 years. The league also pre-dates the Negro Baseball League in the United States. What makes it interesting is that the league was actually formed by the Baptist Church. The mandate of the league was to use hockey as a way of advancing young Black men to a level equal to their white brethren through a game that would instill the qualities of leadership, community, organization, pride, teamwork and determination.

Created as a means of drawing more men to church and strengthening their religious path, all-Black hockey also served to dispel myths about Black people’s abilities. With their fast-paced, physical games and down-to-the-ice style of goaltending, the players made real contributions to the game. While winning on the ice was a moment to celebrate, the greater triumph was the pride experienced by Black communities across the region.

“I grew up watching hockey without knowing the legacy of these teams,” said Craig Smith, President of the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia. “Telling this important story will broaden the public’s understanding of the contributions of the African-Canadian community in the Maritimes to our national winter sport.”

The St. Catharine’s Orioles were the first all-black hockey team in Ontario. The group was formed in 1932 by three white men- Ben Walker, a local quarry operator, H.G “Touch” Woods, and Wally Walker (Wilks, 2018). The Oriole’s played in the Niagara District Hockey league in Southern Ontario against white teams. They paved the way for future African Canadian hockey players such as Herbert Carnegie and Willie O’Ree. The team’s history has been “overlooked, erased, and ignored” (Wilks, 2018), even though their contributions to hockey shaped the game we know today. 

The St. Catharine’s Orioles: A Forgotten History 

When we think of hockey in Canada, who do we think of? Most people think of Wayne Gretzky or Gordie Howe, but did you know that Black men in the 19th century were some of the first hockey players who helped revolutionize the sport? 

   

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Who were the St. Catharine’s Orioles?

The St. Catharine’s Orioles were the first all-black hockey team in Ontario. The group was formed in 1932 by three white men- Ben Walker, a local quarry operator, H.G “Touch” Woods, and Wally Walker (Wilks, 2018). The Oriole’s played in the Niagara District Hockey league in Southern Ontario against white teams. They paved the way for future African Canadian hockey players such as Herbert Carnegie and Willie O’Ree. The team’s history has been “overlooked, erased, and ignored” (Wilks, 2018), even though their contributions to hockey shaped the game we know today. 

St. Catharine’s Orioles 1937.  

One of the only known pictures of St. Catharine’s Orioles is a group photo of the entire team. The photo first resurfaced in the 1970s in a newspaper called St. Catharine’s Standard. The photo plays a part in remembering the team’s past and has an important significance. It was taken beside the British Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Catharine’s. The church played a crucial role in the Underground Railroad, offering refuge and support to thousands of people escaping slavery. The pastor of the church, Ivan J. Moore, was a part of the team; all players were congregants there (Robson, 2016). The church is also closely associated with Harriet Tubman, who helped African Americans escape slavery in the United States. She lived near the church between 1851-1858 and eventually started attending there. The church is an integral part of Oriole’s history and the history of Black Canadians.

The St. Catharine Orioles were often referred to as “the first all-black hockey team in Canada,” but this is not true. While the Orioles were the first all-black team in Ontario, they were not the first in the country. The Colored Hockey League was the first all-black hockey team in Canada. Founded in 1895 in Nova Scotia, The Colored Hockey League ran for three decades and consisted of over 400 players. The Colored Hockey League (CHL) members were sons and grandsons of enslaved people who escaped to Canada through the underground railroad.

https://kpe.utoronto.ca/black-canadian-hockey-histories#:~:text=Black%20Canadians%20are%20pioneers%20of%20hockey.%20Two,over%20400%20players%20in%20a%20three%2Ddecade%20span.

https://thehockeywriters.com/colored-hockey-league-black-history-month/

https://defector.com/the-all-black-league-that-invented-hockey-as-we-know-it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e8sLVgOpsg

https://thehockeywriters.com/colored-hockey-league-black-history-month/#google_vignette

https://knpe397.wordpress.com/2022/10/20/st-catharines-orioles/

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Black Jesus: Black DNA Just Broke Science — This Changes EVERYTHING!

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What if Black DNA holds secrets that challenge everything we thought we knew about human history, science, and the Bible? In this groundbreaking episode, Black Jesus reveals how recent genetic discoveries about Black DNA are shaking the scientific world and confirming truths long buried by religious and academic institutions. Black Jesus explores how Black DNA links directly to ancient civilizations, lost tribes, and biblical prophecies—proof that the roots of Scripture run through Africa. This isn’t just about race. It’s about identity, purpose, and reclaiming a legacy that was erased. As the world begins to uncover the truth, Black Jesus dives deep into what makes Black DNA unique—and why this knowledge has been hidden for generations.

The DNA of Albert Perry may change the story of human origins. Perry was an African-American born into slavery in South Carolina. An analysis of the DNA of his descendants produced results that came as quite a surprise and have raised questions for geneticists around the world. It turns out that Perry carried a very different type of Y chromosome, never seen before. Every male has a Y chromosome, which is a piece of DNA inherited by sons from their fathers. But, unlike most DNA, the Y chromosome is not shuffled as it is passed down, and changes only slowly through mutation. Tracking these mutations allows scientists to create a genetic tree of fathers and sons going back through time. As a man may have several sons or none, some branches of the genetic tree die out each generation, while others become more common. Going back through time it is therefore inevitable that all modern Y chromosomes must descend from from one man at some point in the past. He has become known as “Y-chromosomal Adam”. This Adam was not the first man, or the only man, from his time to contribute to modern human DNA. It is just that, by chance, his Y chromosome was the only one to survive until today. This Adam was not the first man, or the only man, from his time to contribute to modern human DNA. It is just that, by chance, his Y chromosome was the only one to survive until today. What is surprising about Perry’s Y chromosome is that it did not descend from Y-chromosomal Adam’s. Or rather that the established “Adam” has lost his title to a new “Adam”, further back in time, where Perry’s branch split from the tree . While the former-Adam is estimated to have lived around 202,000 years ago, the revised one is thought to be about 338,000 years old. To find where Perry’s Y chromosome may have come from, samples from around Africa were tested. Several more from Perry’s branch were found amongst the Mbo people of Cameroon. So can this tell us anything about human origins? Central Africa contains Y chromosomes from both Perry’s branch and the former-Adam’s branch, while the rest of the world has only been shown to contain the former-Adam’s branch (with the exception of Perry himself). This suggests that our revised Adam may have lived in Central Africa. The oldest-known “modern human” bones are from East Africa. But if Adam lived in Central Africa, does that mean that modern humans could have originated there? Again, it is hard to say. By looking further into the genetics of modern people, the picture becomes even more complex. It so happens that, just like the Y-chromosome is passed down only from father to son, there is a piece of DNA which sits in a different part of the cell called mitochondria, that is passed down only from mother to her children. Tracing back this DNA in a similar way, leads us to a “Mitochondrial Eve”, estimated to have lived about 190,000 years ago. Eve possibly lived in south-eastern Africa. But modern humans have DNA both from Adam and Eve. Albert Perry carried a secret in his DNA: a Y chromosome so distinctive that it reveals new information about the origin of our species. It shows that the last common male ancestor down the paternal line of our species is over twice as old as we thought. One possible explanation is that hundreds of thousands of years ago, modern and archaic humans in central Africa interbred, adding to known examples of interbreeding – with Neanderthals in the Middle East, and with the enigmatic Denisovans somewhere in southeast Asia. The ‘extremely ancient' chromosome that isn't: a forensic bioinformatic investigation of Albert Perry's X-degenerate portion of the Y chromosome Mendez and colleagues reported the identification of a Y chromosome haplotype (the A00 lineage) that lies at the basal position of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. Incorporating this haplotype, the authors estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree to be 338 000 years ago (95% CI=237 000–581 000). Such an extraordinarily early estimate contradicts all previous estimates in the literature and is over a 100 000 years older than the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans. This estimate raises two astonishing possibilities, either the novel Y chromosome was inherited after ancestral humans interbred with another species, or anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged earlier than previously estimated and quickly became subdivided into genetically differentiated subpopulations. We demonstrate that the TMRCA estimate was reached through inadequate statistical and analytical methods, each of which contributed to its inflation. We show that the authors ignored previously inferred Y-specific rates of substitution, incorrectly derived the Y-specific substitution rate from autosomal mutation rates, and compared unequal lengths of the novel Y chromosome with the previously recognized basal lineage. Our analysis indicates that the A00 lineage was derived from all the other lineages 208 300 (95% CI=163 900–260 200) years ago. The Y chromosome of a descendent of Albert Perry, an African American from South Carolina (born circa 1819–1827), was recently identified as representing an out-group lineage to all other known Y haplotypes presently identified in the human population. We will refer to the Y chromosome as Perry's Y chromosome because the region of the Y that was examined is the X-degenerate, non-recombining portion of the Y, expected to be nearly identical between Albert Perry and his male descendants. This Y haplotype was dubbed A00, in reference to a previously recognized oldest lineage that was rebranded as A0. The identification of a novel Y haplotype is always exciting, and this new haplotype, in particular, is unique in its basal position on the Y haplotype tree, which justifies its moniker ‘the Y-chromosomal Adam haplotype'. However, the announcement by Mendez et al that the coalescent time of all human Y chromosomes or the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) is approximately 338 000 years ago (ya), with a 95% confidence interval of 237 000–581 000 ya, was surprising on many levels. First, this estimate is more than double the oldest previous estimate of 141 500±15 600 ya, and is hugely larger than all the other previous or subsequent estimates, which ranged from 46 000 to 160 000 ya. Second, it significantly predated the most ancient mitochondrial DNA, which Poznik et al had recently estimated to be only slightly younger than the Y chromosome (mtDNA:99 000–148 000 vs Y:120 000–156 000 ya). Third, this TMRCA estimate is 142 000 years older than the oldest known anatomically modern human, estimated to be 196 000±2000 years old. Thus, this TMRCA inference suggests that either this Y chromosome is from a different ‘species' (sensu Hammer), or that the ancestral population of anatomically modern Homo sapiens became subdivided into genetically differentiated subpopulations much earlier than previously known. One of the authors of Mendez et al even proposed that early Homo sapiens mated with ‘an unknown archaic species in western Central Africa'. Although either of the two scenarios above may be true, there is no scientific support for either one for the Y chromosome. We wondered whether a simpler explanation might exist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23240-the-father-of-all-men-is-340000-years-old/ https://theconversation.com/albert-and-adam-rewrite-the-story-of-human-origins-15835 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4135414/#:~:text=Introduction,identified%20in%20the%20human%20population. FamilyTreeDNA: Y-Haplogroup A Project - Y-DNA Classic Chart http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Haplogroup_A/default.aspx?section=yresults 2013 Mendez FL, Krahn T, Schrack B, et al. An african american paternal lineage adds an extremely ancient root to the human y chromosome phylogenetic tree. Am J Hum Genet. 2013;92:454–459. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.02.002. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] Cruciani F, Trombetta B, Massaia A, Destro-Bisol G, Sellitto D, Scozzari R. A revised root for the human Y chromosomal phylogenetic tree: the origin of patrilineal diversity in Africa. Am J Hum Genet. 2011;88:814–818. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.05.002. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] Thomson R, Pritchard JK, Shen P, Oefner PJ, Feldman MW. Recent common ancestry of human Y chromosomes: evidence from DNA sequence data. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2000;97:7360–7365. doi: 10.1073/pnas.97.13.7360. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google

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