Shé:kon. Good morning.
My name is Waneek Karakwinionta Onakarakete Sunshine Horn-Miller. I'm a Bear Clan woman from the Mohawk communities of Kahnawake and Ohsweken. I am a mother.
I'm very honoured to be here. I want to thank the parliamentary committee for inviting me to come and testify.
Before I testify, I would like to acknowledge I'm on the unceded territory of the Algonquin people. I'm a visitor, and I would acknowledge that this land holds power, and this power contributes to what we're trying to do today, which is provide a safe space for women and girls in sport. I'm happy to contribute to that.
I'm a 47-year-old woman. I'm a retired Olympian. I began my quest for sport when I was just six years old. My mother, who was a native rights activist—and still is a native rights activist—put me in sport. I chose the sports of swimming and running. In particular for me and for my sister, she was a single indigenous mom and didn't want us to do anything that would be judged, even a team sport, because she knew that our indigeneity, our difference, would come into play when we would come up for any kind of selection process.
I first discovered the Olympics when I watched Alwyn Morris win gold in 1984. That was the first time I had ever seen someone like me become the best in the world. It would become the goal; it would become a destination. For a young Mohawk woman, it would become really important.
My mother chose sports for us because she knew as we entered the world that we would face a lot of discrimination and a lot of issues. She wanted to give us a place where we could at least find some space to put our stress, to perhaps prove people wrong and, as much as possible, to have control in our hands.
Following the Oka crisis, sport had a much more important role in my life. It would become my suicide prevention and my stress reliever. It became much more important to me. As my life spun out of control in the political sense, I became more focused on my Olympic dreams. I became more laser-focused. I wanted to prove the world wrong. I knew what Canadians and the world thought of indigenous people—in particular, indigenous women—and I wanted to prove them all wrong.
I made the national team when I was 18 years old—the junior national team first—and I came from a very different world. I made the senior team when I was 19. I was going into a world of elite sport where the abuse that took place was well known and the coaches held the power. The rumours that existed were about sexual abuse and verbal abuse—abusive power all the time—and this was coming from the former captain of the team. She told me, “Get ready.” I said, “What do you mean ‘get ready’? I'm going to change this.” She was like, “No, you're not. This is what it is. Just prepare. If you want to play water polo, this is what you'll have to do.”
I really struggled, but as I had experienced a bit of adversity in my life and a bit of conflict, I was not afraid of conflict and was able to challenge that and work my way to the Olympics. However, as we moved towards the Olympics, there was a hyper-focus on the result. As you would know, with results, stress and pressure, the abuse also increased. I remember that when I got chosen as the assistant captain or co-captain of the Olympic team, I was witnessing this for players, and I didn't know what to do. I went home to my mother and said, “What do I do? I don't know what to do.” She said, “Well, you come from a long line of war chiefs. You need to stand up for your sisters. These are your sisters.”
Really, when you're training at that level, you have to live and breathe in each other's spirits to get to the Olympics, so when they hurt, I hurt. I remember trying to do something and speak up. Veterans told me, coaches told me and officials from our sport organization told me, “Just worry about yourself.”
I didn't know what to do. There was this attitude within my sport that the ends would justify the means and that we would win a medal. We were a medal hopeful in 2000 in the inaugural Olympic women's water polo tournament, so if we got a medal, it would be okay after that. Well, we didn't win a medal, and there was no aftercare. There was depression among everybody, the coaches included. There was a lot of blame laid out too; I remember being blamed.
I was also used quite a bit during that Olympic year. I was on the cover of Time magazine. I was the Roots girl. I was all these things. Water Polo Canada felt it was okay to use my trauma to promote their sport. I didn't know what I was doing. I was 24. I wanted to help my sport thrive and I loved water polo.
Afterwards I was the focal point of everybody's anger—“You didn't perform”, “You didn't get us the medal” and all of that. I didn't know what to do. I was a kid. I know 24 is not a kid, but I'm 47 now and I know that's a kid.
As that increased post-Olympics, nobody was doing anything. We tried to go through the sports centre. They told us we had to go through the hierarchy of sports, through our coaches. Well, the coaches were the problem. Nobody in Sport Canada was going to do anything.
We went to the media, and then we were crucified within the media. Then we went to York University's Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, and we got them to do an investigation. The report that was released stated there was abuse and that if Water Polo Canada didn't fire the coaches, they would be held criminally liable for our well-being. They told the coaches, “We don't want to, but we have to fire you.”
My career lasted six months after that. I was blackballed. I pushed it. I even went through alternative dispute resolution within Sport Canada, but that also ended my career, because I realized there was no desire within Water Polo Canada to resolve our conflict or our issues. There was no resolution, and there was no reconciliation afterwards.
Water Polo Canada was required to do cultural sensitivity training. My state of mind was that if I'm getting kicked off a national team because of team cohesion problems, that tells me, as a native person, that I no longer fit with what they think is an appropriate native person. I'm now the problem native person, and they didn't want my difference on their team.
When I asked them to outline that so that I wouldn't carry this behaviour into the rest of my life, they couldn't do it. Part of my resolution was that there had to be cultural sensitivity training for the organization, and it was never done.
So I left. Now we're seeing a $5-million lawsuit. The women who have launched this lawsuit came right after me. This coach was rehired and I lost my career trying to stop it. I was depressed and suicidal. If I wasn't native and my community hadn't said to me, “We love you, we honour you and we care for you”, I don't know what I would have done.
I'm so angry that Sport Canada continued to fund an organization that rehired one of these coaches, who continued to function without oversight and ruin the lives of another generation of women. How can that happen?
There may be high-performance athletes in here. As a high-performance athlete in the sports system in Canada, you have a dream of becoming an Olympian, and you are extraordinarily vulnerable. The power is held within the coach's hands. You will do anything to get your Olympic dream. It is an obsession, and that makes you very vulnerable to all kinds of abuse.
I can't tell you how heartbroken I am. I'm now a coach for a water polo club in Ottawa, and I have a 12-year-old daughter who loves water polo and wants to go to the Olympics. I get asked by people all over the country, “What do you think?”
My husband is also an Olympian, in judo, which also had sexual assault cases within its sport organization. We look at each other and I say, “I don't know what sport the kids are going to be able to succeed in.” We have to understand that as long as we have a sports system in this country where the ends will justify the means, we will continue to have abuse.
Sport Canada is seen as an accounting organization, not as an organization that's protecting the human rights of its athletes. I believe that elite athletes are basically employees of the federal government. You get a cheque, you give up everything, you postpone your academic career and you postpone your work career to go after the Olympics.
Some people compete for 20 years. That is 20 years of not being able to work and do everything else. You have no job security. You have no human rights protection. You basically have no workplace security.
I'm an indigenous athlete. Just like when I watched Alwyn Morris win gold, I fear that young indigenous athletes, especially the women who watched me go through that, will say, “If the strongest women I ever met, an Olympic athlete, was treated that way, how am I going to be treated?”
We have to ask ourselves those kinds of questions. We cannot rely on currently competing athletes to fight within their sports. We can't, because that means the end of their career. That is why I have been so vocal as a retired athlete to do something about it.
I would like an inquiry, but we can't have another inquiry that has no teeth. We have do something. We need to make a system where high-performance athletes, when they leave, are valued, no matter what they win and no matter where they finish, and where they are empowered and have a future. Many athletes leave with the drastic opposite of that.
I'm going to end it there. I could go on forever. I know you're wrapping up.
Thank you very much.