WANEEK HORN-MILLER
Waneek Horn-Miller comes from the Bear Clan of the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory. In 2000, she was co-captain of the Women’s Waterpolo Team at the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. Her team won the gold medal. She has participated six times in the North American Indigenous Games. Through her work as a sports commentator for CBC and APTN, Waneek Horn-Miller has become a community advocate for sport, fitness, and wellness. Currently she is working with the Assembly of First Nations as the IndigenACTION Ambassador, supporting their efforts to create a sport, fitness, and wellness strategy
Who was your inspiration when you were growing up?
My family and older sisters, especially my oldest sister. I have two sisters, and they were both good at sports. But my oldest sister especially, that’s who I wanted to be. Both of my sisters are doctors: one is in medicine and one has a PhD. They are overachievers and I always looked up to them for inspiration.
We were raised by a single mom. My mom is one of those moms that will never take credit for anything. She feels like that’s what moms do. They’re supposed to help their kids realize their potential. She never was like, “You have to become a doctor!” or “You have to be an Olympic athlete!” Her attitude was, “Do everything to the greatest of your capability, and if you’ve done that, then I’m happy with that. But don’t do anything half-assed.” That was her attitude.
were there any issues you dealt with as a young per- son that you see young people dealing with today?
Today there is so much more bullying, and it happens online now, which is almost worse. I went to school on and off reserve. I experienced bullying in my community, and today bullying is a major issue for our young people. When I was a kid, other kids had to bully you to your face. But now anyone can be a bully and can be anonymous. It’s even worse now because the online bullying never gets deleted and is there to stay. It follows you forever and it haunts you—you can’t get away from it. There are so many more ways of sharing information now. There’s a lot of pressure to grow up fast and for youth to be more adult than they should be. I think in a lot of ways we are missing our chance for kids to be kids, and it’s really sad.
What is the role of a leader in the community?
There are all different kinds of leaders, and the loudest and the proudest are not necessarily always the best. We need someone that is steadfast; a leader is someone that is con- sistent and can be counted on. I’m a Mohawk woman—our role is to be leaders of our families. Children belong to us, the women, so our role is making a steadfast and consistent en- vironment for our children and our families. It extends to our clans and extended family.
What advice would you give to youth who are planning on becoming the leaders of their communities?
Prepare to dream big and work really hard. Prepare yourself for the obstacles you’re going to face and just try to know that there’s always a solution—you have to find it. Whatever your dream is, find allies, find your support network. Also, don’t forget to be other people’s support network too. Work hard, and dream big.
If you had one message for the aboriginal community what would it be?
The best for our people is yet to come. We have to stop thinking we were in our prime 200 to 300 years ago. The generations that are coming, our children and grandchildren are the ones that are going to be born without many of the burdens we carry with us today. A lot of parents are working really hard to provide a safe, happy home, and to lift that huge weight from the past. The best way to honour our ancestors is to do our best in all we do and be the best we can in supporting each other by being positive towards each other. Our children are the best of us to come. Our people are evolving. We are inclusive people and we only learned how to exclude from the colonial government—we learned that concept from them. We were always a very inclusive people. I look forward to the future—it’s really exciting.
Why is education important for our young people and their communities?
Education is not a new concept to us; we always educated our kids. We have to find that balance between the Western style and traditional style of education. It’s important. Educationis just a fancy way of saying “rite of passage” and “learning new skills.” That’s how you overcome obstacles on the way to whatever you want to do—what your dream is—it’s through educating yourself in every way possible.
Our communities, whether urban or on the reserve, need more young people to go home and help after they gettheir education. Often our young people, when they gettheir education they feel ostracized. It’s important that we understand they are just learning new skills to help bring back to our communities. Our ancestors always did that; they would send people out to learn new skills to bring back home. And so that’s what education is. You can’t be afraid of it.
Did you have to overcome specific challenges to be where you are today?
The most important challenge I’ve had to overcome is racism, as a child and in my sport: discrimination and racism. My mother prepared me for that. She said that racism was going to be there. I had to overcome my own inner doubt and my own inner criticism. Were all those things that they said about Native people true—that we’re lazy we we’re quitters? All those things they said about Native athletes that I had heard my whole life, I was concerned that they would come true.
I had to overcome criticism from my community becauseI’m a little different. That’s probably the hardest, to be discriminated against by your own community. Whether they call you an apple or say that you’re not traditional. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to overcome these issues. It was just a part of life’s journey and you’re always going to find a way around it. When I felt like giving up, or I was exhausted from training, I thought of the next generation of athletes—what would they be able to follow? Maybe my struggles have made the path a little smoother for them That could be my legacy. I didn’t want to show kids how give up; I wanted to show them how to persevere and achieve.
What’s your story behind the story?
I’m really stubborn and headstrong. I come from a family of very opinionated and headstrong women. My mom usedto always say, “Don’t ever give anyone the satisfaction of quitting.” She raised us with really strong messages. The strongest was shortly after the Oka Crisis. I was confused and traumatized. I had been stabbed by a Canadian soldier and
all I wanted to do was quit everything and crawl in a hole. My mother let me stew for a few days and then finally sat me down and said: “You may have the best reason to quit, but if you do that you’re always going to be someone’s victim.” She looked me right in the eye and she told me, “I didn’t raise you to be anyone’s victim.”
Leadership is something that you don’t always get recognized for; there are so many unsung heroes. Sometimes you have to be that loud and proud leader, but other times its important to lead by example. There are people back home that are leaders in our community—our youth workers, our teachers, and coaches that are there day in, day out, making a difference for our community.
What is your vision for your community?
Back home I come from a very tough and proud people. In the Mohawk community we’ve always been very industrious people—go get ‘em kind of people. I would like to see a little more balance. It’s all about being self-sufficient, and I feelwe need to be working towards a community of balance, surviving in our contemporary world without forgetting our traditional Indigenous sense of community.
Nationally as well as for my community, I believe sports have an incredible capacity to save lives and help build broken bridges. Canada’s Aboriginal population is really the biggest untapped resource that this country has, whether it’s through sports or academics. We as a people need to work to create opportunity and take advantage of opportunities. It’s really hard because never in our history have we had to be unified. We are nations, and we are different nations, and we have different histories and different personalities.
For my kids, I would like to see the day when Aboriginal Olympians are no longer an anomaly, but the norm, and the media isn’t going crazy because someone with Aboriginal blood is on the Olympic team. I want to sit back in my chair and see that there’s so many Aboriginals on the team that it’s like nothing new. It’s going to take a lot of work within our own community, as well as working on building bridges in mainstream, in providing opportunities and working together. I think we are embarking on a time when that is possible.
Just with my experience with Idle No More, I have seen so many non-Aboriginal people coming out and wanting to make change. It’s a time for change right now; it’s a time of opportunities.
What role should our traditions and cultures have in the lives of first nations youth?
We need to stop thinking of it like something that is our traditional life versus everyday life. You really need to makeit your life. As an Olympic athlete I had to figure out how to incorporate my cultural teaching. For example, ceremonies like the Sundance are our sports psychology. That’s howwe prepare our warriors for battle, whether it’s in a water polo pool, in an academic setting, on the business front, or political front, we need to have our grounding in that. We need to find a way of understanding it in a contemporary way without losing the essence, or the meaning of that traditional ceremony of life. The essence, the meaning, and the teaching of it will never change.
In some ways people are accustomed to looking at ceremony as kind of how some people see church—living the teachings only on Sundays instead of making it a way of life. Traditionally, our culture is as simple as how you speak to your husband, how you speak to your child, how you do good things every day. You spread that good medicine. That’s traditional life, in my eyes. It’s something that I don’t feel the need to go to any particular place to do.
When you’re an athlete you become very superstitious because there’s such a mental side to being an athlete. You have to find that place of serenity, and that place of security, whether you’re a traditional person or a Christian person. Wherever that place is for you, it has to be something that you work on every day. You have to build that special spot within yourself that gives you peace and serenity, to be able to conquer challenges. There’s always going to be stress. There’s always going to be traumatic events in your life—you can’t avoid it. But you have to create strategies for yourself to deal with those events. A lot of those are written into our traditional way of life or Christian way of life.
And it’s true. It boils down to whether you’re going to be someone’s victim or you’re going to be a survivor. It makes things a lot simpler when you look at it like that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking I could have done that but I chose to give up. We come from 500 years of ancestors that had that same stubborn streak in them—they just refused to give up.
You have to remember that blood runs in our veins. When I think of that I don’t feel so alone. They had to make those decisions to just keep going when it was really hard. I thought to myself being in this training or these little problems that I’m having are not as hard as some of the problems that they had to overcome, so I’d pull up my socks. You need to keep going. You take every little battle and every success over time. Next thing you know you’re wearing an Olympic gold medal or you’re walking in the opening ceremonies at the Olympics or you’re hauling the Stanley Cup around on the ice; you open your eyes and you’re like, “Oh my god, I’m here!”
Any closing words?
I’m a mother, and for me it’s always remembering that. People used to say this to me when I was younger: “Slow down and enjoy the day and enjoy the people around you.” It’s almost as simple as “Enjoy the smell of your coffee in the morning,” because that‘s what’s important. We’re in such a rush that we forget about just breathing and enjoying life. My water polo career is over, and I wish I had taken a little bit more time while I was in it to enjoy what I was doing. I enjoyed it—don’t get me wrong. I just wish I had taken a little more time to really appreciate it when I was in it.
