According to the announcer:The all time player in Hamilton tigers cats has decide to…
For the majority of his life and work, people believed John Macdonald’s Indigeneity deserved nothing more. A passing mention. A footnote. He recalls his draft biography on the old CFL website from 2002, with the short blurb sandwiched between his honors and combine measurables. His entire identity summed up in one words. “John, a North American native, is a member of the Upper Mohawk nation.” When Macdonald entered the league as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ first-round pick that summer, conventional media outlets wrote little about the No. 7 overall pick’s biography.
The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network ran a thorough profile on him. Turtle Island News was in Ticats camp virtually every day, delivering the story to a devoted Six Nations fan base, while the major newspapers and broadcasters all shrugged. “One thing that upset me when I first got into the CFL was that mainstream media didn’t celebrate my Indigeneity,” Macdonald says. “It was only sort of allocated to the Indigenous media outlets.”
