when my meme told me she had relatives who told her our elders help invent the hockey stick I was like ut oh me me's brain is going, nope turns out she's just a fountain of neat facts! [h=4]Mic-Mac hockey sticks[
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Mi'kmaq making hockey sticks from
hornbeam trees (Carpinus caroliniana) in
Nova Scotia about 1890.
The Mi'kmaq practice of playing hockey appeared in recorded colonial histories from as early as the 18th century. Since the nineteenth century, the Mi'kmaq were credited with inventing the
ice hockey stick.[SUP]
[30][/SUP] The oldest known hockey stick was made between 1852 and 1856. Recently, it was appraised at $4 million US and sold for $2.2 million US. The stick was carved by Mi’kmaq from Nova Scotia, who made it from Hornbeam, also known as ironwood.[SUP]
[31][/SUP]
In the mid-nineteenth century, the
Starr Manufacturing Company began to sell the Mic-Mac hockey sticks nationally and internationally.[SUP]
[32][/SUP] Hockey became a popular sport in Canada in the 1890s.[SUP]
[33][/SUP] Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, the Mic-Mac Hockey Stick was the best-selling hockey stick in Canada. By 1903, apart from farming, the principal occupation of the Mi'kmaq on reserves throughout Nova Scotia, and particularly on the Shubenacadie, Indian Brook and Millbrook Reserves, was producing the Mic-Mac Hockey Stick.[SUP]
[32][/SUP] The department of Indian Affairs for Nova Scotia noted in 1927, that the Mi'kmaq remained the "experts" at making hockey sticks.[SUP]
[34][/SUP] The Mi'kmaq continued to make hockey sticks until the 1930s, when the product was industrialized.[SUP]
[35[/SUP]