Hockey was never a big deal to Keilani Elizabeth Rose when she was growing up Prince George.
It wasn’t until she took on the role in the Crave comedy series Shores, as Miiguan (Miig), one of the three female managers for the Sudbury Bulldogs senior team, that hockey became Rose’s business.
Not only that, it made her a TV star.
“This job was my first introduction to the hockey world,” said Rose, from her home in Hawaii. “I’ve learned a lot about the sport itself.”
Shoresy is a spin-off of the Letterkenny series, both created by Jared Keeso, who stars as the Bulldogs’ foul-mouthed captain, “Shoresy” Shore. Shoresy takes over a perennial loser in the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization and hires a new coach and a bunch of veteran players to try to make the team competitive. Miig, her sister Ziig (Blair Lamora) and Nat (Tasya Teles), the three team managers, are there to promote the underdog Bulldogs and get more fans in the seats and save the team from financial ruin.
Shoresy ratings went through the roof as the most popular series on Crave and it’s been renewed for a fifth season, with another six episodes to be filmed in Sudbury, Ont., starting in March.
“I had no clue what to expect when I received the job offer," said Rose. "It was my first time in the comedy world, my first big gig, and I wasn’t familiar with Letterkenny, the big-brother show, so it was a beautiful surprise and it’s definitely gone past my wildest dreams.”
While some kids grow up wanting to be hockey players, Rose was an aspiring dancer, and in one episode in Season 4, Shoresy’s producers gave her free reign to put her dance background to work, choreographing a scene in which one of the Bulldog players tries to learn how to dance to impress a woman he’s wooing.
The Duchess Park Secondary School graduate sees parallels between sports and the arts and why they are so vital to the community, driving youth to focus their attentions, channel aggression and learn life skills. Her character on Shoresy makes that point perfectly clear.
“Kids in sports stay off the streets,” said Rose.
“I got to feel the positive effects of that through the dance studio when I was growing up because I know having that outlet through the arts really helped me get to where I am today.”
Rose is coming home to Prince George as one of the featured guests at the 11th annual Northern FanCon, May 2-4 at CN Centre. She’s never attended the event and is looking forward to connecting with a hometown crowd.
“I’m so super-stoked that I got the invitation and it’s so cool that it’s going to be in Lheidli territory,” said Rose.
“I’ve known friends who have done it before and they talked about how much fun it is. It’s really meaningful to be invited back to my home territory to explore a role at this part of my career.
“I got some messenging from my cousins after the announcement and it means so much to the Indigenous community to have this kind of contemporary representation in the character I get to play. It’s not a stereotype, it’s not dehumanized as a lazy Indian or dirty Indian or sexualized native woman. We’ve seen how harmful these stereotypes that have been perpetuated in the past can be.”
Rose says Shoresy set designers and costume makers collaborate with actors to include clothing, art pieces or signs that represent their Indigenous backgrounds. She got permission from the Lheidli T’enneh band council to display the nation’s logo on the show and has received positive feedback, especially from her younger cousins, one of whom happened to say:
“’She’s like us, she’s Lheidli.’ That’s something I never saw when I was growing up,” said Rose. “I never thought that being an actor in the entertainment world in film and television in this capacity was possible because I never saw anybody like me on TV. Now we’ve opened up this whole perspective of what’s possible for our people.”
Rose connected through social media to Toronto artist Jori Brennon, whose Indigenous beadwork costume was featured in a Shoresy episode. In a heartfelt message to Rose he talked about the time he spent learning his craft during the pandemic and how that helped him stay mentally healthy and carried him through times of isolation and how good it made him feel to see her character wearing his handiwork on national television.
“It just got me because there’s people in my life that struggle with mental health and what we can do as creators has ripple effects that are so much wider than we know when we connect with other creators in our human journeys and what good medicine it is to be an artist,” said Rose.
Rose lives in Hawaii on the big island Kona, where she’s studying the native Polynesian language and Hawaiian cultural life ways as part of her traveling knowledges undergraduate program at UNBC. She has a mixed family ethnicity - part Indigenous Canadian (Lheidli T’enneh), part Native Hawaiian (Kānaka Maoli), with bit of Irish, Chinese and Afro-American ancestry as well.
Her mom, Nani Browne, has roots are in Maui, scene of the August 2023 wildfire that destroyed the town of Lahaina. Rose lived in Los Angeles in 2022 and her apartment near Hollywood was on the borderline of the evacuation zone during the fires that swept through the city this past January.
“When I think of the name of our reservation up in so-called Prince George in the Lheidli T’enneh territory the Canadian government called that Reservation Number 1, but the name that our ancestors gave that land was Khast’an Lhe Gulgh, which translates to ‘bundle of fireweed,’” said Rose.
“Thinking about all this devastation and loss (in Maui and L.A.), fireweed is actually one the native plants from our territory that’s really respected because it’s such a symbol of regrowth, the first plant that grows back after a fire.”
Rose had been living in Los Angeles for less than a year on July 4, 2022 when she was shot in the chest by man armed with pistol while sitting in the passenger seat of friend’s vehicle while being dropped off in front of her apartment.
“It was just a random act of gun violence, the cops said it matched the description of a robbery that night,” said Rose.
The bullet just missed her heart and broke through ribs as it punctured her lung breaking her ribs and splintered. Her friend started driving her to the hospital until he was able to flag down an ambulance.
“It was two months before my lung was back on line from the collapse,” she said. “My rib broke the bullet, so half of it went through the back and half of it went out from where it came."
After eight days in bed recovering in a Los Angeles hospital with her mom by her side, Rose came back by train to Prince George because she couldn't fly. For the next two years she lived with her godparents, Roger and Carol Vadnais, at their home near Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park while she attended school at UNBC.
“The two years I spent at Lheidli recovering at my godparents house, that was a whole hibernation period of healing of going back to the beginning of rebirth and it was really special,” she said. “Ii really did feel like a second chance.
“I didn’t get to grow up with a strong connection to community because of all the racial violence up there when I was growing up. So now to come home and walk in my home territory and utter my first words of rebirth to come from Dahelh language, it was so healing and continues to be so healing. It tracks back to that moment of a huge reset.”
Raised with her two sisters by her single mother in Prince George, Rose started dancing ballet and jazz at Judy Russell’s Enchainment Dance Centre in Prince George. As a direct descendant of Granny Seymour, the legendary Lheidli Matriarch of the North, Rose was taught cultural dances based on her family lineages and while she was still at Duchess Park she won the Governor-General’s Award for academic excellence which led to a full scholarship at UNBC.
The opportunity to dance on a Disney cruise ship catapulted Rose into the entertainment industry and that led to film opportunities as an actress. Her film debut was the 2020 short Within the Silence and Rose had a starring role as Pixie and did her own choreography. In 2021 it won Cannes Film Festival awards for Best Fantasy and Best Choreography.
That led to a contract on a Disney cruise ship and several other professional dance roles. Rose’s film credits include a role in the horror movie The Sinners and she also starred in Flimsy, which she produced and directed.
Rose is coming back to Canada in March and for the BC Assembly of Fort Nations Water Forum in Richmond, March 2-3. The two-day conference will focus on Indigenous water rights, governance and stewardship, the future of watersheds in the face of climate change, and the necessity of safe drinking water supplies and implementation of the federal First Nations Clean Water Act.
In September 2022, Rose launched her Lheidli Too awareness campaign to draw attention to the high levels of iron and manganese and the outdated drinking water system on the Lheidli reserve at Shelley, northeast of Prince George.
“I’m working with my nation to launch this awareness campaign because we’ve had so many boil water advisories at home and we need a new water treatment system and we’ve been waiting on the Canadian government to get this started and it’s been years,” said Rose.
Keeso found out about Rose’s activist role on her territory and was inspired in Season 3 to write into the Shoresy script Miig’s desire to spearhead a fundraising campaign to have the Bulldogs play host to the national senior A hockey championship.
Rose returns to UNBC on March 5, where she’ll speak at the Weaving Words Indigenous literature storytelling event, reflecting on her time spent learning the Dakelh language from the late Lheidli elder, Edie Frederick.
