Lacquette had a rough road to gold-medal game
GANGNEUNG, SOUTH KOREA >> The Olympic Games are a celebration of the resiliency and strength of the human spirit.
Just about every athlete at Pyeongchang ’18 has overcome some form of adversity on the way to the Games.
Few, if any, have followed a harder journey to these Olympics than Team Canada defenseman Brigette Lacquette, the first Indigenous woman to play for Canada.
“It’s been a long road to get where I am,” she said.
The road began in a place few escape, Mallard, Manitoba, pop. 120, not far from a Waterhen First Nations reserve, more than 200 miles northwest of Winnipeg.
“The middle of nowhere,” she said.
Lacquette’s father Terance is Metis from the OChi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation. Her mother Anita is from the Cote First Nation in Saskatchewan.
Lacquette became obsessed with hockey after watching Jordin Tootoo, an Indigenous player now with the Chicago Blackhawks, play in the 2003 World Junior Championships.
The closest indoor rink to Mallard was more than an hour’s drive away so her father built one in the family’s yard, Lacquette and her siblings and cousins hauling water they pumped from an underground well to the space Terance had carved out.
“I got bullied when I was younger and I had to develop a thick skin,” Lacquette told reporters last week. “Hockey was kind of always my way out. When I got out there on the ice, I would just forget everything.”
That thick skin came in handy when Lacquette began playing games in Winnipeg and around other parts of Manitoba. She stood out as the only First Nations player on the ice, regularly enduring taunts and racial slurs.
Fans called her a “dirty Indian” and told her to “go back to the reservation,” Lacquette told the CBC.
“I got told a bunch of things growing up,” she said. “I always remember the first time I left my community and went to Winnipeg. The first time I faced it, it caught me off guard and obviously it was very tough for me and my confidence.”
But she followed her father’s advice: “Just beat them on the ice.”
Lacquette usually did, playing for the University of Minnesota-Duluth and for Canada in two World Championships. She was the last player cut from the 2014 Olympic team. Again Lacquette fought on.
“I’m proud of who I am,” she told reporters. “I’m proud of where I come from. I’m excited to represent my people here. To be that first person, I feel like I just opened a lot of doors for a lot of First Nations kids across Canada and to be that person for them, it’s pretty special for me.”