Re-packaged Cultural Imperialism

Though professional women’s hockey is certainly not new to the Canadian sports landscape, six teams in the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) hit the ice in January 2024 for the league’s inaugural season. A quick start to the year did not leave teams with enough time to solidify their branding ahead of their inaugural games, and players had to don generic PWHL jerseys throughout the 2024 season. Each team’s branding package was put together during the offseason by New York City-based marketing agency, Flower Shop (external link) , and the new names, logos, and jerseys were launched publicly on September 9, 2024 ahead of the 2024-25 season. To the dismay (and confusion) of some fans, PWHL Toronto’s new team name became official: the Toronto Sceptres.

            According to league officials (external link) , the team name ‘Sceptre’ is strong and powerful, embodying Toronto’s regal history and commanding presence. They cite the city’s nickname, Queen City, as a primary influence in shaping both the brand and the logo. While use of this nickname has seemingly fallen out of favour this century, remnants of Toronto’s colonial era are still reflected in the city’s prominent infrastructure; Queen Street or Queen’s Park are two prime examples of this. TorontoLife (external link)  attributes the Queen City moniker to the influence of Queen Victoria, the British monarch who reigned during Canadian confederation and whose legacy is inextricably linked to the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the harms of the Residential School system. Queen Victoria codified the settler-colonial nation of Canada as a dominion of the British Empire and extended the colonial and genocidal practices of the many monarchs who ruled before her.

Furthermore, in a now-deleted brand launch video released in September 2024, the Sceptres highlight three images of Queen Elizabeth I. Yet another figure of British colonial violence, Queen Elizabeth I reigned from 1558 to 1603 and financed her nation’s first voyage to Turtle Island. She empowered explorer Humphrey Gilbert to “possess any lands in North America then unsettled”, according to the Government of Canada (external link) . With this context in mind, it becomes clear that the Toronto Sceptres’ have cited two British monarchs as a primary source of inspiration for their brand–two monarchs whose colonial legacies are still being felt across the country to this day.

This invocation of royal imagery is not new and is in fact quite common among sports teams in both Canada and the United States. Countless recreational and professional sports organizations utilize team names such as ‘the Royals’ or ‘the Lords’. While these names may not be outwardly racist–especially when compared to names like the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Chicago Blackhawks or the National Football League’s (NFL) Kansas City Chiefs–they represent a veiled form of cultural imperialism that may not be immediately obvious to viewers or participants. Explicit anti-Indigenous racism has slowly fallen out of favour in sports branding, but these colonial interests have not simply vanished. Instead, they have been re-designed and sold back to sports fans as regal imagery or an ode to the British monarchy. These thinly-veiled colonial fantasies can only be used as a motif in contemporary sports branding because they are not overt and can be contested by team officials.

This new type of colonial violence is camouflaged and silent; it is anti-Indigenous racism that has been re-packaged to service the needs of today’s empire. This subtle form of cultural imperialism serves to reproduce and maintain a distinctly Canadian culture of hockey, whose roots cannot be separated from setter-colonial legacies of white supremacy. It is this very same technique of camouflage that makes sport the perfect vehicle to deliver the message of conformity and white nationalism to subjects of the Commonwealth.

I am a passionate fan of women’s hockey and consider myself to be a supporter of the Toronto Sceptres. However, I also feel it is vital to resist the re-packaged colonial narratives that are constantly sold to consumers through sport. Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I are contemporary symbols of empire and colonialism, and we cannot simply pick and choose to extract symbols of power and strength from their initial colonial contexts and glorify them as symbols of modern day sporting success. The semantic details of the Sceptres’ brand are not mine to debate; I am more interested in how this branding functions as yet another choice in a long line of decisions that have positioned sports teams and institutions as colonial enforcers.

About the Author: Jessica Pincente (she/they) is a first-year Master’s student whose interests lie at the intersection of sport, culture, and violence. She takes a critical approach in unpacking how misogyny, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism have shaped the professional and recreational sporting landscape in the Western world.

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