On March 11, the WolfPack hosted its second annual Back the ‘Pack event featuring a keynote speech from special guest speaker Waneek Horn-Miller.
Horn-Miller is a former member of the Canadian women’s water polo team and won gold for Canada at the 1999 Pan American Games in Winnipeg. A year later, at the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, she would make history twice, as the first Mohawk woman to compete at the games and as co-captain of the first Canadian women’s water polo team.
Horn-Miller’s presentation, titled Turning Trauma into Motivation: Building Strength, Confidence and Community, offered an intimate look into her life while she journeyed towards athletic stardom. Speaking about some of her greatest inspirations, she mentioned her mother Kahn-Tineta Horn and told the audience one of the rules that she grew up with.
“My mom made two important decisions in my life,” Horn-Miller said. “One, no drugs and alcohol were allowed in my home, not even cigarettes. This was the 1970s; chain smoking was an Olympic sport. I remember asking her many years later why it was so important to her. She said that she understood that she couldn’t control the world outside, but she could control what happened in her home. She knew that children, not always consciously, know what’s happening, and they have this survival mechanism: if they sense danger, they can fixate on it. She wanted to take care of anything out of [the] world that made us feel unsafe. So when we put our heads down on the pillow at night, we could feel safe and dream as big as possible.”
Horn-Miller mentioned her biggest dream right now.
“I have a child with special needs. My biggest dream is for her to fulfill her greatest potential in sports and life,” Horn-Miller said. “So, it’s becoming a big focus as a mother. I always think about a saying I heard once: ‘You can judge the society by how the most vulnerable population is treated.’ I believe that the [disabled] community and their families are the most vulnerable. I became part of the Indigenous Disability Canada movement. So that’s my dream right now.”
The second decision that Horn-Miller’s mother made was to put her children into sports. Using supplemental income she received from renting out a room, her mother purchased a full membership to the YMCA.
“She specifically put us into sports that no one judged,” Horn-Miller said. “She wanted to make sure that our nativeness didn’t come into play. So, she put us into swimming and running.”
As a teenager, Horn-Miller suffered from PTSD after being bayoneted by a Canadian soldier during the 1990 Oka Crisis in Quebec.
“[After the incident] I locked myself in my room [and] covered the windows. I was very afraid,” Horn-Miller said. “My mother came in after six days. She took my hand and asked, ‘Sweetheart, what do you wanna do?’ I told her I wanted to stay [in my room]. [That] I felt safe [there]. She said that everybody will understand, but ‘you had this dream of going to the Olympics, if you quit right now, you’ll hand in your dream over to that soldier and for the rest of your life be his victim.’ [As] she was leaving my room, she turned around and said, ‘I did not raise you to be anybody’s victim. ’ Then she left the room. It was something I needed to hear. So, I left my room and went back to practice.”
Horn-Miller mentioned the legacy she wants to leave.
“I hope that my legacy is going to be the one that people will look to when they need strength,” Horn-Miller said. “I went through really hard times, but I never lost my ability to laugh, have fun and be wild. Life is about joy and it is the absolute defiance of hurt. It’s how you battle it. You are battling it; you are beating it.”
As March is International Women’s Month, Horn-Miller had a special message for all women and girls in Kamloops.
“Every single day is International Women’s Day,” Horn-Miller said. “I want to share a message with not just women, but also all those who identify as a woman and all allies. Now is a time [when] it’s more important than ever that we uphold human rights, not just women’s rights. We have to think about how we’re all interconnected. It can’t just be about marching and being angry, but it’s also about having fun and celebrating the power of who we are together.”
Back the ‘Pack night, formerly known as the Night of Champions, is an annual TRU WolfPack fundraising event supporting scholarships and awards for WolfPack athletes. Last year’s event, the first at TRU, featured Humboldt Broncos survivor Kaleb Dahlgren.