At the All Native Basketball Tournament, Stoking Friendship and Pride

The sound reverberating around the basketball court is deafening.

From behind the net, Simoyget (Hereditary Chief) Yahaan, who also goes by Donnie Wesley, has been watching the game intently, arms crossed, occasionally chatting with his seatmates. Every year, Yahaan travels by ferry from his home in Lax Kw'alaams, 30 kilometres north of Prince Rupert, to occupy these same courtside seats at the All Native Basketball Tournament.

Yahaan’s community is facing off against Masset, a village on Haida Gwaii, in a sudden-death match for entry into the semifinals. While Lax Kw'alaams has been leading Masset by a comfortable margin, it’s still anyone’s game. With less than three minutes left on the clock, Masset ties the score. A cacophony of chanting, clapping and stomping fills the gymnasium.

Suddenly, Yahaan jumps to his feet.

“This is why I come to the All Native,” he shouts over the din.

In February, thousands of people travel to Prince Rupert for the weeklong All Native Basketball Tournament. The population of the small northern city, which has just over 12,000 full-time residents, swells by about 4,000 people. The event is one of the largest basketball tournaments, and among the biggest Indigenous cultural events, in B.C.

All along the north coast, small First Nations villages empty as people fill Prince Rupert’s hotels and jockey for seats in its restaurants. The influx provides a welcome mid-winter bump for businesses that rely on cruise ships and other tourism traffic for their existence.

At the Jim Ciccone Civic Centre, fans watch intently from the stands, some spending more than 12 hours each day sitting courtside in seats they reserve year after year. Many are former players and coaches, and they share stories about taking home championships and Most Valuable Player awards. Now, they watch their children and grandchildren play.

They are here for the basketball. But they also come to reconnect with family and friends. They come for the village pride.

And while the tournament strives to be apolitical, there are most certainly some politics being discussed at the games, held this year from Feb. 8 to 15, that have attracted First Nations teams from across B.C. and southeast Alaska.

Uniting nations divided by colonial borders

The roar from the stands can be heard outside the civic centre, where Art Sterritt is explaining the tournament’s history.

“It’s a long story,” Sterritt says. “It’s this culture on the coast, about us owning and being here forever.”

Sterritt’s father, who was Gitxsan, coached basketball, and Sterritt — a master carver and former executive director of Coastal First Nations — spent his early years watching from the players’ bench. By 14, he was on the court. Sterritt went on to spend 20 years chairing the All Native and spent even longer on its executive committee. In 2011, he joined its hall of fame.

The All Native takes place within Ts’msyen (or Tsimshian) traditional territory, a group of First Nations that includes the Gitga’at, the First Nation Sterritt married into, as well as Metlakatla, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Kitselas, Kitsumkalum and Lax Kw'alaams communities.

Lax Kw'alaams is further divided into nine allied tribes, on whose territories Prince Rupert was established in 1910. The nations share a similar language with their neighbours to the north and east, the Nisg̱a’a and the Gitxsan.

Archeological evidence has repeatedly upheld what the First Nations’ oral histories have always told: Indigenous occupation in this region goes back since time immemorial — longer than anyone can remember. A recent dig unearthed cultural evidence dating back 15,000 years.

“That’s the oldest that’s ever been found in British Columbia,” Sterritt says.

The Tlingit were once among the First Nations that occupied this area. Over centuries, they were pushed north by the Ts’msyen. Today, Tlingit territory overlaps the far northwest of B.C., southern Yukon and the Alaska Panhandle.

That history all helps to explain what makes the All Native so popular, Sterritt says.

Russia at one time claimed Tlingit territory, including the “finger” that is now the Alaskan Panhandle, as its own. In 1867, Russia sold Alaska, including the panhandle, to the United States.

That isolated some villages, like Haida communities on Prince of Wales Island, which became separated from Haida Gwaii by an international border.

Then, in 1887, Ts’msyen living in Metlakatla near Prince Rupert had a falling-out with the Anglican Church, which imposed wine through religious ceremonies like the sacrament — despite a community ban on alcohol. When the Canadian government backed the church in the dispute, many decided to leave, Sterritt says.

The U.S. government offered them Annette Island, 100 kilometres to the northwest in Alaska, and many left. Today, about 1,100 people live in Metlakatla, B.C., while another 1,500 live in Metlakatla, Alaska.

They cross borders to come together at the All Native.

“This is not a basketball tournament, per se,” Sterritt says. Rather, the event is a vehicle to renew friendships and relationships.

Rivalries at the tournament also go back generations. The teams are “fiercely proud,” Sterritt says.

“But if they don’t win, they’re happy to have seen their cousins,” he adds.

‘You had a community hall, so you played basketball’

The tournament in its current form was first held in 1960 at Prince Rupert’s old civic centre. The tiny hall down by the waterfront was lit by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling and had change rooms the size of closets, former players remember. A blue haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air.

By the time the civic centre burned down in the late 1960s, the All Native had already outgrown the space. The high school gym provided an interim venue until the Jim Ciccone Civic Centre opened in 1971.

Some lore holds the tournament began in response to First Nations players being excluded from local sporting events — and that it was created to get around the potlatch ban.

Neither bit of lore is true, Sterritt says.

The potlatch ban was lifted in 1951, and not only were First Nations players participating in the Prince Rupert basketball league, they were dominating it, he says.

“They were the champs. They were famous for how good they were,” Sterritt says of players who came to the city from small coastal villages. “There was no place to play soccer. There was no place to play baseball. But you had a community hall, so you played basketball.”

The tournament began with two men’s divisions, intermediate and senior. The men’s masters and women’s open were added in 1993. This year, a women’s masters category was added, growing the tournament by another 25 per cent and bringing total participation to 62 teams over five divisions — a record surpassed only in the 50th-anniversary year, when 64 teams played.

Today, the tournament threatens to outgrow its current venue, which holds 1,200 people. The organizing committee sells up to 1,000 weeklong passes every year and equally as many drop-in tickets spread over the course of the week.

Despite Prince Rupert’s capacity to host visitors — it’s a jumping-off point for popular ferry routes like Haida Gwaii and the Inside Passage, and a cruise destination in summer — the popularity of the All Native pushes the city’s limits. Hotels book up months in advance, with some teams booking next year’s rooms on the way out of town after the tournament, says Jaimie Angus, executive director with Tourism Prince Rupert.

“We put people wherever we can,” Angus says. Finding enough service staff, particularly during the off-season, is an ongoing challenge.

But challenges aside, “it just breathes life back into the community,” Angus says.

“It unifies everybody,” she says. “It's so beneficial for our restaurants and retail stores and hotels, but it's also just an opportunity for people to come together and learn about Indigenous culture and be welcomed into these beautiful ceremonies.”

As the tournament has grown, it has also evolved.

Over the years, it has added an Indigenous craft fair and opening ceremonies, which feature dancing and drumming by a different host nation each year.

Last year, a sacred fire burned outside the event for the first time.

“We're taught that fire is a prayer amplifier,” Guu Gaa Jung [symbia barnaby], an Indigenous health equity coach of Haida and Mi’kmaq descent, says as she tends the fire. “It's about helping our community to heal.”

The gathering space provides a place for visitors to drop by for cedar brushing, smudging, a meal or just to sit and talk. People have dropped off firewood and donated deer, halibut and shellfish, which is turned into soups for sharing.

Guu Gaa Jung sought permission to hold the fire both from the Ts’msyen families with territorial claims here and from the City of Prince Rupert — the latter a process of educating and cutting through red tape, she says.

She hopes it will become a dedicated space for a sacred fire at future events.

“The origin of this tournament is about resistance,” she says. “They had culture sharing, they had drumming, they had food sharing.”

It offered a place to come together and talk about common issues, like land claims, she adds.

‘Everything’s political’

There remains no shortage of opportunities to discuss politics.

Amidst a wave of recent treaties and reconciliation agreements, a court case calling on B.C. to uphold its responsibilities under the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, and territorial disputes between nations, the gathering provides a chance to come together on important issues.

“But it’s more on a social level,” Sterritt says.

One year, when Sterritt was president of the Tsimshian Tribal Council, then the governing body representing the Ts’msyen First Nations, the council took the opportunity of having everyone gathered for the All Native to sign the Northwest Tribal Treaty with First Nations from across northwest B.C.

But for the most part, organizers have worked hard to keep politics out of the event. At times, that’s proved difficult.

In 2012, hundreds of people marched to the Jim Ciccone Civic Centre to protest the organizing committee’s decision to accept sponsorship money from Calgary-based energy company Enbridge, which was proposing a bitumen pipeline through northern B.C.

In 2016, as more than a dozen LNG projects were proposed for northern B.C., roughly half the tournament’s sponsorship came from the fossil fuel industry.

Players objected. Some teams showed up wearing “No LNG” T-shirts.

Later that year, the board passed a motion to “step away from LNG sponsorship.” But it also banned anti-LNG messaging and other political symbols at the event.

“We hope all teams can just attend to play basketball,” organizers wrote in a social media post.

Players have pushed back against the ban, some years wearing “Wet’suwet’en Strong” T-shirts and rallying outside the Jim Ciccone Civic Centre on the heels of a five-day police action on Wet’suwet’en territory.

That rally ended amicably, says current committee chair Peter Haugan, with organizers asking protesters to remain outside while basketball continued inside.

“We try to keep politics out of our gymnasium,” Haugan says. “You just don’t bring that to the court.”

This year, international politics also made an appearance at the event. As Metlakatla AK, a team from Alaska, faced off against Bella Bella in the final, some fans began chanting “U-S-A!”

Their enthusiasm was met with a chorus of boos — likely a response to Canada facing steep tariffs and annexation threats from the current U.S. administration.

“Everything’s political,” Gaagwiis Jason Alsop says with a chuckle. “Politics are part of our lives, every day, as Indigenous people.”

Gaagwiis’s team, the Skidegate Saints, who have dominated the championships for more than a decade, placed second this year in the senior men’s division, losing to Burnaby on the final evening.

Early the next morning, Gaagwiis, who is president of the Council of the Haida Nation, was on a ferry home. A day later, he was in the gymnasium where he grew up playing basketball, this time to sign a title agreement with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

He says there’s “an interesting balance” to be struck between allowing players to express their politics and keeping the games focused on basketball.

“Sometimes, when you try to control what people do, it brings more attention to those issues,” he adds.

Gaagwiis has been playing since his early teens; he’s now 41. The tournament offers a place to reconnect across communities and generations, he says.

“Some of the guys we were playing against, we’ve played against their dads,” he says. “You stay connected to the people from the village you grew up with and spend years together playing a game that you love.”

The experience can be life-changing for young players, especially those raised outside their home community. In addition to promoting mental, physical and spiritual health, “basketball creates a great introduction to who you are,” Gaagwiis says.

“It’s one of the only times of the year they might really connect with their home community and their nation and meet a lot of their relatives.”

Yahaan has been making the trip from Lax Kw'alaams for the All Native since he was a kid. Many years, he came as a player, taking home the championship in 1974. Now he’s a dedicated fan. He reserves the same seat every year.

In the final moments of the game against Masset, he isn’t using it. As the clock winds down, the entire gymnasium rises to its feet.

It’s “bucket for bucket,” Yahaan says, as the teams hopscotch toward a win.

With less than two seconds remaining, Masset trails by two points. A player launches a shot from mid-court in a last-ditch effort to stay in the tournament.

It bounces off the rim.

When the buzzer goes, Lax Kw'alaams has won — 80-78 over Masset.

It was “the best tournament game I’ve watched in probably 20 years,” Yahaan says, exhilarated.

The tournament began at a time when “the Natives had nothing,” Yahaan says. But it capitalized on what they did have: Family. Community. Pride. A deep history in the region dating back millennia.

And, of course, a love for basketball.

“Nothing compares to the All Native tournaments in Prince Rupert,” Yahaan says. “Nothing.”