We had a lot of fun, and we were always finding different things to do. But we were always careful to never go over the edge, because if we did we would get the belt or the fucking wooden spoon when we got home. It’s a small town. If Jordin and Terence Tootoo were breaking windows, our parents would find out. So we would watch our buddies do it, but we wouldn’t do it—although even if we were around it, we’d be getting the boots from our parents.
We would come home and Mom would yell at us, or we’d get a fucking beating for some odd, stupid reason, or we’d be sent out to pick up Dad on the Ski-Doo when he was all pissed up and it was minus forty degrees. And we’d still have school the next day.
The truth is, my older sister, Corinne, was the one who put up with the worst of the bullshit, the verbal and physical abuse at home, because she was the oldest and because she didn’t have the chance to leave and play hockey the way Terence and I did. Drinking and abuse is a cycle for a lot of people in the north, and it’s hard to break. If I didn’t have hockey, I’d probably be a mechanic now, working for the town, living one day at a time, paycheque to paycheque. I’d probably have a bunch of kids running around. Leaving to go to Alberta for that tournament was huge for me.
When I do visits to other Inuit communities now, I talk about the importance of our culture and our traditions; you have to keep those strong. It all starts with the way our people carry themselves when they’re out on the land. Nothing else matters other than living in the moment. You can’t think beyond survival. You have one plan and that’s to make sure you bring food back for your family. For a lot of our elders who grew up on the land, can you imagine how draining it must have been to go out into this wilderness where there are thousands and thousands of miles of open land and you need to find food? How are you going to do that? Where do you go? Our people have to be mentally tough.
When I visit the elders in our communities, they don’t ask me about my hockey career. They ask how I am doing inside. It’s not like they’re proud of me because I’m an NHL star. That’s when I know I am around our people—good people. Our elders know what it takes to survive. There are days when I want to throw in the towel and call it quits, but then I think of them and about what our people had to do back in the day just to stay alive. I’m an Inuk deep inside and I’ve got to make sure that I carry on those traditions.
The other thing I talk about is education. The dropout rate in the north is phenomenal. The teenagers are thinking, Why do I need to go to school, because I’m never going anywhere anyway. In a lot of the isolated communities I also try to get the kids to experience southern life, because it opens up more doors for them. But they’re scared to leave. They all know about life in the south because of television, but they’re scared of being put in a situation outside of their comfort zone and not knowing what to do when times get tough. They know what to do up here, but down there it’s like a different language and, in a lot of ways, a different planet. That’s why they stay. And then they get trapped.
SO I GOT AWAY from Rankin Inlet, got away from my folks, got away from all of the drinking and all of the bullshit. I moved in with my billet family in Fort Providence.
I walked into this new place and it was fine and dandy for the first week, fine for the second week, and then … well, frick, if I thought I was getting away from booze by moving south, I had another thing coming. It was awful, but it was all normal for me. I never complained about it because I still thought life in Fort Providence was better than it would have been at home. You learn to kind of hold everything in, and so I did that and just battled through it. At least I didn’t have to worry about the belt or the wooden spoon like I would at home. So, no, I wasn’t homesick.
They had three kids, including one the same age as me, and he was like a brother. Fuck, it wasn’t healthy living, but to this day I still talk to those people. I guess I promised them that if I ever made it to the NHL, I was going to fly them down south so they could watch me play. They remind me of that when they come down to see me play in Edmonton or Calgary. I guess I never got around to it.
Outside of my billet house, I put my head down and just went about my business. But I was the new kid in school, and I ended up fighting kids all the time because I was picked on. I wasn’t one of them. They tried to bully me. Well, I didn’t take any shit from anyone. If you pissed me off, I’d beat the shit out of you. A month in, they knew better than to fuck with Jordin Tootoo.
It was a very hostile environment. But that’s what I was used to, so it wasn’t like I was shocked. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol. I tried marijuana there for the first time—it was a regular thing for a lot of these young kids because their parents did it all the time. But it just didn’t do anything for me. Booze: that was my drug. First time I had it, I thought it was the greatest. I didn’t care about weed. I never did hard drugs, cocaine or acid or whatever. It just never crossed my mind, because booze was always on my mind. I just thought it was natural because my parents did it and, well, fuck, if they did it, why couldn’t I do it, too?
I played in the tournament in Edmonton and I ended up steamrolling a lot of the younger Aboriginal kids. I think that’s when my name really started to get out there. They were saying, “Who is this Tootoo kid? We’ve never seen anything like this before.” I was just happy being away from home and having the opportunity to play in a big tournament.
Afterwards, a Triple A bantam coach pulled me aside and invited me to come to camp in Spruce Grove, which isn’t far from Edmonton, and try out for his team. He sent the paperwork through to the coach in Fort Providence and I asked my parents about it. They said it was fine.
So that fall, at the beginning of grade nine, I moved to Spruce Grove, Alberta. My billets were another Aboriginal family—actually, there was another Aboriginal kid who had played in the tournament in Edmonton and then had moved to Spruce Grove to play for the same team. He lived with his single mother—just the two of them—and I moved in with them. It was a great situation. The mom was everything a kid coming down from the north could have asked for. She understood my whole background and situation. And it was a sober house. She didn’t drink at all. That was all new to me—a good kind of new. Honestly, without her, I wouldn’t be where I am today; I would have given everything up and said the hell with this. My other teammates’ parents also welcomed me to their homes. Seeing how happy these families were … it was something I had never experienced before. It was awesome.
But the rest of my life in Spruce Grove wasn’t so easy.
Needless to say, I made the team. Then, on my second shift in my first game of organized regular-season hockey, off the draw, a guy fucking slashed me. I thought, Fuck you, white boy, don’t fuck with me, and I dropped my gloves. I ended up fighting a couple of guys, and all of the parents got wound up. After the game, I got a call telling me I was suspended for five games. I thought, What the fuck is this? You guys want to play hockey? This isn’t hockey. Back home, if someone pissed you off, you just beat him up and then went back out and played. That’s how I thought it was supposed to work, not with all of these fucking rules and systems and shit like that. In Rankin, it was just a free-for-all.
I served my time and word got around that Jordin Tootoo was fucking crazy. It was just my instincts. That’s how I grew up. I was never the biggest guy out there, but I didn’t take shit from anyone.
In school in Spruce Grove, there were only a handful of Aboriginal kids from the reserves around town, and a few East Indians, but of course I was the only Inuk. The white kids there thought they knew what the Native lifestyle was: fucking drunks and idiots and whatever. Obviously, I was put into that category right off the bat. I felt a bond with the Native kids. We’re kind of the same people. We’re cousins, even though we have different traditions and different beliefs. But I don’t remember being particularly close to any of them at school.
What I do remember is the racism. A lot of racism. I wasn’t used to that. I hadn’t had a lot of expe
rience with it. Growing up in our community, it always felt like everybody was equal. And when we’d go to tournaments in the surrounding communities, of course it was never an issue. The first time I really knew that racism even existed was when I was chosen to play for a Native all-star team at a tournament in Saskatoon when I was thirteen years old. The other teams got upset with us because we were playing the game the way we played it back home. We were rough and tough. We had come down south and it turned out that the rules were a lot different there. We were bulldozing everyone and they didn’t like it—the players, the coaches, even the parents in the stands. On the ice, the kids started saying some pretty nasty stuff to us. You wonder how they came up with it. How did the adults teach these kids that it was okay to degrade someone of a different race? I can’t recall many of the specific slurs now, but I remember being more surprised than hurt. A kid would yell something like, “Hey, Eskimo, go back and live in your igloo where you belong!” I remember thinking, What’s wrong with an igloo? What’s wrong with being Inuit? I just didn’t get it.
But as I experienced more of those kinds of incidents over the years, I started to understand that I wasn’t in Rankin anymore, where everyone knew everyone and everyone accepted everyone. I started to understand why a lot of people who left there came home soon after. I still hear stuff sometimes during a game. There was an incident during my rookie year in the NHL that got a bit of press. I got into a scrum with Tyler Wright in Columbus and he told the media afterwards that I bit his finger. Then he added, “Well, I guess that’s what Eskimos do—they eat raw meat, don’t they?” That was a racial slur.
I didn’t hear about what Wright had said until it was in the papers and somebody contacted me to ask me what I thought. I told them that I didn’t give a fuck what he’d said. I wasn’t afraid of Wright, so I knew that one way or another he was going to get it. He was the type of player who was a chirper but who never really backed up his words. The next time we played Columbus, I knew something was going to happen—and he knew it, too. I already had the edge on him mentally. When he was getting ready in the dressing room that night, I know he was thinking, Fuck, I’ve got to watch my back because Toots is going to do something stupid. He was right. The game was in Nashville, and the whole crowd knew that something was going to happen. I went after Wright the minute we were both on the ice, and got three or four punches in. Then he turtled, as he usually did. It wasn’t like any of his teammates were there to back him up. You’re a man of your own words. If you say something, you’d better be there yourself to back it up.
That was the end of it. He never came around me again. He never said anything to me again. That was the end of that whole feud. And that’s how a problem like that should be settled. In today’s game, you’ve got all of these young punks roaming around the ice, saying shit and talking trash. As my father always says, “Talk is cheap, but money buys whisky.” If you’ve got something to say, be a man. This doesn’t apply just to hockey. In today’s society, you see a lot of young kids being spoon-fed and having everything handed to them. When times are tough or they’re faced with hardship, they’ll just crumble.
OF COURSE, in Spruce Grove I was also the new kid on the block, this new hockey stud, which didn’t help. I was built pretty much like I am now, maybe a little bit smaller. Obviously, everyone’s cliquey in high school. I had to really figure out who my friends were. And it turned out the only friends I had were my teammates. In class I would always hope that one of my teammates was there so I’d have someone to talk to. I wasn’t the guy who would approach people or try to push myself to be cool like everyone else. I would always wait for them to welcome me in, and that would never happen. Except that some of the girls really liked me. They were saying, “Who is this cute little Jordin kid?” They were all over me. Of course, the guys said, “Fuck this guy. Who does he think he is, trying to take our girls away from us?” I remember getting into fights, standing up for myself.
The skater kids and the other cliques had their own little groups. I was an easy guy to pick on. I remember that guys would try to get into my locker, to burn my books and stuff. That happened. At first, I just took all of the heat. But then I stopped taking any more shit. I started calling guys out, guys who were trying to bully me. It got to the point where I lost it a couple of times. I remember walking home from school one day and hearing somebody behind me shouting, “Hey, fuck you!” I turned around and there were three kids walking up to me. I dropped my bag, started swinging for the fences, and beat the shit out of all three of them. I think, after that, no one really fucked with me. The message got out that it wasn’t a good idea to fuck around with Tootoo. Don’t even look at him, because he’ll fucking kill you.
But still I kept hearing that so-called gangs from other schools were out to get me. Even when I walked down to the gas station, I was always looking over my shoulder. I thought that one of these gang kids was going to come after me.
I admit that I had a short fuse. With all of that anger inside me, I had no remorse when it came to hurting someone. And so I became the bully. I used that to my advantage, being the man in junior high. No one fucked around with me. When I left home, I assumed that if anyone pissed you off, that’s what you did. Drop ’em. I was fighting in school. I got sent to the principal’s office every now and then. And then I’d put the blame on the other person because, in my mind, I was just sticking up for myself.
It wasn’t until midway through the school year that people started respecting me, because they knew what I could do on the ice. And I started arm wrestling these fucking tough guys in junior high, and I started killing them. Word started getting around. That’s when I started gaining respect.
While I was in Spruce Grove, my only communication with Terence was through a fax machine. He was living in The Pas, playing for the OCN Blizzard (OCN stands for Opaskwayak Cree Nation). The band owns the team, which plays in the Manitoba Junior Hockey League, the level just below major junior. The OCN team started in 1996, and Terence started with them in 1997 and played for four seasons. The last three seasons, they won the league title, and the last two seasons, he was the team captain and the leading scorer.
A reporter from Toronto did a story on the Blizzard during Terence’s last season there. He interviewed Terence about how hockey could be his ticket out of Rankin Inlet: “I have no respect for those kids who just give up,” Terence said. “I see those guys when I go home for the summer and they’re doing nothing. If you give up, you’ll be a nobody.” That was Terence.
Long-distance calls were expensive and the family I was living with in Spruce Grove couldn’t afford it. So we communicated by writing pages and pages of faxes to each other, every day. We were constantly going to Staples to get more paper. Every day, I came home from school or from practice and it was straight to the machine, hoping that Terence had sent me a fax. I’d fax him to say, “I fucking hate it here. This sucks.” And he’d say, “Jordin, just stick it out. This is going to be okay.” He was always encouraging me to stay strong.
I wish I would have saved some of those faxes.
DURING THE YEAR that Terence was playing in The Pas and I was playing in Spruce Grove, his coaches started asking him about me. They caught wind that I was playing Triple A, and then they heard that I was taken by the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League in the bantam draft. Looking back, that was a big step for me—being drafted by a team in one of the best junior leagues in the world, where all kinds of NHL players had started their careers. As a fifteen-year-old, I was invited to the Wheat Kings’ rookie camp, but there wasn’t much chance I’d stick with the team that year. Instead, my plan was to go to Thompson, Manitoba, and play Midget AAA there. Thompson was only a two-hour drive from The Pas and a lot closer to home, so I’d have an easier time keeping in touch with Terence there.
The day after I got cut by the Wheat Kings, my dad and my brother drove down from The Pas to Brandon to pick me up and take me to Thompson. They came by a
t five o’clock in the morning and we started out on the first leg of the trip, the six-hour drive to The Pas. Instead of going straight on from there, we ended up staying overnight and checking out the beginning of OCN’s training camp the next day. Terence was going to be in camp for a couple of days before I had to report to Thompson. The OCN coach, Gardiner MacDougall, asked Terence if I’d like to take a shot at making the team, and he told them I’d love to. So I suited up for a couple of exhibition games. Lit it up. Got in a few tilts. The next thing you know, the coaches were saying, “We want to keep you here.” It happened so fast. Before I knew it, I was enrolled in the local high school and playing for OCN.
In hockey terms, it was a big jump. If I had gone to Thompson to play Midget, I would have been playing against fifteen- and sixteen-year olds. The OCN team played in a league that was just one level below major junior. The players there were all older: nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. It was a really tight group. They were brought in from Ontario and Saskatchewan, as well as being from Manitoba. Only five or six of us were Aboriginal. These were guys who weren’t going to play in the Canadian Hockey League, but they could come up to The Pas and play for good money, better money than they would make in major junior. I was fifteen years old and making five hundred bucks a week, with all of my living expenses covered. Terence was making around $1200 a week because he was one of the top guys. And as a bonus, we could buy stuff on the reserve, like gas, tax-free.
As a hockey team, we were stacked. I think we lost only seven or eight games out of sixty-two that whole year. Gardiner MacDougall gave me an unbelievable opportunity to grow as a young player. At fifteen years old, I was playing with what were men to me and holding my own. That whole season, we were on fire. Our team was unbelievable. Visiting teams hated coming there because they knew they would get their asses kicked.
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