Roberta Mamakwa uses forward thinking on the ice

A teen from Wunnumin Lake will be representing Aboriginal Team Ontario North at the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships in Ottawa.
Roberta Mamakwa, a forward, will be in Ottawa for the May 2-8 tournament.
“I’m excited but I’m also nervous,” Mamakwa, 17, said in an email interview.
Not knowing any of her teammates, the teen is excited to get to Ottawa and meet her team.
“I just know of them,” she said.
Mamakwa has been playing hockey for 12 years and this will be her first National Aboriginal Hockey Championships.
It’s a long road from 12 years ago when she first started to skate.
“I still remember that day ... when I first started skating,” she said. “My cousins always went public skating and one day one of them let me use his skates then I just loved it.”
Mamakwa tried out for the team in Thunder Bay alongside nearly two dozen other midget and bantam aged players March 20.
The Queen Elizabeth District High School Grade 11 student officially found out she’d made the team a few weeks later on her 17th birthday.
Mawakwa also played hockey for her high school team, on the Sioux Lookout Minor Hockey Association midget team and for the Couchiching Seven Generations Stars in the Manitoba Aboriginal Sport and Recreation Council (MASRC) Indigenous Minor Hockey Tournament April 2-4 where they were A-Side runner-ups.
Hockey, Mamakwa said, is the reason she left her community and moved to Sioux Lookout last fall to go to school.
For Mamakwa, hockey is life.
The best part of it, she said is “when I score sick goals.”