After this essay was published online, a reader named Marcel Lang advised that the 19th century Eton writer meant – in saying that hockey was an old and ‘indigenous’ game – that hockey was indigenous to Britain, not Canada. This is surely the correct interpretation, yet it changes none of the wider passage’s main implications.
It still makes no sense to assume that stick migration only occurred in one direction across the Atlantic, from Britain to colonial Canada. When we think in both directions, it’s very plausible that Mi’kmaq sticks could have influenced the evolution of the English bandy stick.
The Four Stars of Early Ice Hockey 