Congratulations to Brandon and his wife Stephanie on welcoming babe boy today…
Congratulations to Brandon and his wife Stephanie on welcoming babe boy today…
their third child, a baby girl, into the world today. She has already been surrounding by lots of love!!!
There’s a rail bridge that sits atop a pillar of stone in Garden River First Nation, a band of black and brown metal that emerges from lush trees on one side of the water and escapes back into them on the other. On the side of the bridge facing the nearby highway, scrawled in towering, six-foot-tall letters in white spray-paint that still appears frozen in mid-drip all these years later, are four words: “This is Indian land.”
Rick Nolan wrote that declaration decades ago. In 2012, when Rick’s nephew Jordan returned home with the Stanley Cup, bringing a day of celebration to Garden River, it was on that bridge that the most triumphant moment of the celebration came. Draped in his black Los Angeles Kings jersey, a grey ballcap pulled over his head, Jordan strolled out onto the bridge with the trophy and took up a spot above the centre of the third word. Family, friends and neighbours gathered to take in the sight from the highway, lining the railing. Some sat on shoulders or perched on concrete barriers to get a better look; others watched from the banks below or from small boats bobbing in the water.
A grin spreading wide across his face, Jordan took the Cup in both hands and raised it to the sky. The crowd across the water erupted, voices and applause jostling to ring out loudest. They grew even louder still a minute later, when Jordan’s brother, Brandon, and father, Ted, joined him, the three Nolans together lifting hockey’s biggest prize high above those four words.
