Sage Morin
Sage Morin sometimes said without Massive Damage, there would be no Matriarch. It was true in two ways. Without the devastating things she’d suffered, she wouldn’t have become who she is. And in a more literal sense, she never thought about wrestling until a man named Massive Damage (a.k.a. the Tattooed Terminator, a.k.a. Sean Dunster) came into her life.
That was in the summer of 2013, not long after Morin’s son, Geo, had been killed, when it seemed like the whole city of Edmonton knew what happened and had been touched by the tragedy of it.
Massive Damage was an accomplished indie wrestler and the coach behind Monster Pro Wrestling. He put on a wrestling show every month in north Edmonton, and he asked Morin if he could do an event in support of the “Justice for Geo” campaign she launched days after her son’s death. There, he brought Morin and her family into the ring and gave them a tiny championship wrestling belt engraved for Geo, while the crowd chanted Geo’s name.
Sean Dunster, or Massive Damage, invited Morin to be part of his indie promotion, Monster Pro Wrestling.
Nearly a decade later, Massive got in touch with her again. She’d struggled for a long time, but at some point he saw that she was coming back to the world.
Everyone in wrestling had their own past, their own battles to fight, and he thought the close-knit community at his wrestling promotion might be good for her. There were a lot of Indigenous kids who came out to their shows, and he thought Morin might be good for them, too.
He floated the idea of her being a referee, maybe an announcer. But Morin had grown up sparring hard with her unruly pile of brothers at their home near the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, first one to cry loses. She’d known the pain of real violence in her life, too. She told him she wanted to wrestle.
The Matriarch came to her almost fully formed. She would be a proudly Indigenous character, inspired by the strongest women in her Cree culture, the personification of strength, resilience and love. Or, as Morin put it on her Instagram profile, “Your Fave Auntie – Kinda rezzed, Kinda boujee.”
“The heart and soul of wrestling is all storytelling. There’s always that good versus evil,” Morin said. We were standing in a makeshift gym in an industrial area of north Edmonton, as she and the other wrestlers practiced on a frigid winter night. “As Indigenous people, all of our greatest lessons and all of our greatest teachings are done through storytelling.”
Morin was a single mother then, barely scraping by. She didn’t have money for wrestling gear, so she put one together from what she had. A sports bra, a pair of moccasins, a piece of her son Quentin’s powwow regalia. She styled her hair in long, loose waves as though it had just been taken out of braids, and filled in a broad band of crimson makeup across her eyes. War paint.
“I’d say most, if not all, of us have some kind of story,” Morin said, as we stood in the gym that day. Inside the ring, a group of men practised throwing themselves headlong at the ground. The sharp bang of their bodies hitting the mat reverberated through the space. “Our wrestling personas allow us to be who we want to be.”
Three days before the match, Sage Morin and Dianna Doige train in an industrial space Monster Pro Wrestling uses as a gym. The outcome of a wrestling match is carefully scripted, but the danger is real for competitors who take on physically demanding feats. Morin’s son, Quentin, likes to go to practices and watch his mother and the other wrestlers.
The tragedy
They’d been sitting on a patio in the sun. Geo was two then, and they were celebrating a breakthrough in his potty training. The baby, Quentin, had turned five months old that day, and they were celebrating that, too. He was still strapped snugly into his car seat, napping after the ride to the restaurant.
Looking back, Morin would remember it as a moment of pure happiness, when she had everything she’d ever wanted. She and the boys’ father, George Mounsef, laughed and toasted with glasses of water while they waited for Geo’s Shirley Temple to arrive. “To life,” they said.
Then Morin saw a blue SUV hurtling toward the patio. There was sound and screaming and broken glass. Morin and Mounsef were thrown from their chairs. The baby Quentin was tossed across the patio, hitting a wall and bouncing along the pavement in his car seat, landing upside down, a miracle he was not killed.
There was no miracle for little Geo. He suffered injuries he could not survive. As Morin would later ask in court, “How do I even explain this magnitude of darkness?” She couldn’t.
There were years of court, of fighting, of that darkness beyond explanation. The man who drove into the patio pleaded guilty to refusing a breathalyzer, and ultimately served 10½ months in jail. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was excruciating, infuriating, exhausting. But as Morin told a reporter when the court process was finally over, “At the end of the day, no matter what happens, the end result is the same. Which is that Geo is gone.”
She spent her 27th birthday in the same hospital where Geo died. She tried to kill herself three times, but three times she survived. It was her Cree culture that brought her back, the place where she found the strength to keep going. And then there was wrestling.
Before a match, Morin crimps her hair to make it look like she’s just unwoven braids. She designed the Matriarch’s style and character inspired by the strongest women in her Cree culture.
The fight
Sage Morin shows up at the community centre on Alberta Avenue a good three hours before showtime, hauling her bags of makeup and wardrobe in through the snow, then finding a spot at a folding table in the improvised change room that had been set up in a gym. She likes to give herself plenty of time to get settled and run through the flow of the match a few last times, to carefully do her hair and makeup, to fully transform herself into The Matriarch.
At 38, Morin is a professional wrestler, supporting herself and her son doing shows with Monster Pro Wrestling and travelling to do other indie shows around the country. She’s done 150 matches as The Matriarch, and has played both hero and villain or, in wrestling terms, babyface and heel. But she only wants to play the righteous role now. There have been enough negative depictions of Indigenous people, she doesn’t want to add any more.
“You can’t help but feel like there’s something important happening … It feels important when they see this Indigenous woman come out, and I’m not a villain and I’m not a victim. I’m victorious,” she says. “We spend a lot of time telling our sad stories, and they are important stories. But I think our trauma leads to our resiliency, which is an even more important story to tell.”
It’s not an easy life, being an indie wrestler. On top of training and practice and performance, the wrestlers set up and tear down the ring themselves, sell tickets to shows, make and sell their own merchandise and nurse injuries, old and new. There’s lots of time on the road, touring and travelling in spartan conditions – including a notoriously gruelling circuit of northern communities known as the Death Tour, the subject of a recent documentary.
Is wrestling real? Sometimes it really hurts, there’s no doubt about that. Sometimes on the mat, a wrestler is really winded, really in pain. There are broken bones, concussions. Morin’s Instagram is full of her “potatoes,” or “receipts” from matches, a collection of black eyes and angry bruises. In one video, her face and head are drenched in blood. “Just finished my cage match,” she says, flashing a bright smile. “Made it out alive, baby.”
But she was truly happy. It feels different when you choose it.
Morin’s social feed is a catalogue of not just her successes over the years, but her injuries, a reminder of what can go wrong in the ring.
“Early on, it was really hard to hear people say, ‘You’re so strong,’ because people didn’t really see what was going on. I didn’t even want to be alive, and that fight was so intense for me, I didn’t feel strong at all,” Morin says. “And now I get to go out and be that strong person, and I feel the support and the love and accomplishment, which is something that I feel like was always missing in my life.”
Around her in the change room, the wrestlers greeted and hugged each other, talking about moves and outfits, rehashing past shows and getting ready for the night’s performances. The wrestlers are a close-knit group, a big – if somewhat unusual, mostly male, and particularly muscular – family.
Among them were “Buckshot” Bobby Brake (a.k.a. Cameron Brake), who had driven 4½ hours on winter roads from Fort McMurray, and would be driving right back as soon as the show was over. There was Max Mayhem (a.k.a. Ryan Kucy), who is legally blind and deaf, and communicates with the other wrestlers during matches with signals transmitted by touch. Prankster Pete (a.k.a. Pedro a.k.a. Polly a.k.a. William Baron), was busily figuring out a fix for a saggy rope on the ring.
The Matriarch’s opponent for the night, Mad Moxi (a.k.a. Dianna Doige) is a bodybuilder who only recently got into wrestling. She stood alone in a corner in deep concentration, repeatedly running through the outlines of their match to steady her nerves.
Nearby, Morin’s partner, Levi Night (a.k.a. Levi Day), cut tassels into a T-shirt. They met on the Death Tour, and they’ve been together ever since. Morin’s son, Quentin, came back to the dressing room for a hug from his mom, and to hang out with Levi and the other wrestlers. He’s 12 now. Loud noises have bothered him ever since the day his brother was killed, but even though wrestling is full of crashes and bangs, he loves it, and he goes to every practice and show he can. Morin thinks wrestling has been healing for him, too.
Quentin wrestles with Morin’s partner, Levi Night (whose real name is Levi Day), before the show.
Audiences love The Matriarch, but the response is particularly strong when they do shows in Indigenous communities. Sometimes during these shows kids throw pop cans at her opponents to protect her. Once a kid leaned into the ring and bit Massive Damage on the leg, cutting right through his boot and leaving a scar on his ankle.
“I see her as hope,” Massive Damage told me. “When she comes out, every one of those kids look at her as, ‘I can be that person.’ And if you just help one, just one, you know then you’ve done something with your life.”
After matches, the kids will mob her in a giant hug, so much emotion that sometimes she’s up half the night crying afterward, staggered by the force of all that love.
“It feels bigger than me, and it feels bigger than wrestling,” she says. “You don’t see Indigenous women being held up in this light. So to go to these communities and get to be a small part of that is just so overwhelming, and it feels like such a big, important job.”
Sometimes, it actually feels like too much, like she isn’t worthy of it. But when kids say, “You make me not want to give up on life,” or “You show me how to be strong,” she knows she has to become who they need her to be. She has to be what they see in her.
That’s the thing that brings tears brimming to the edge of the thick black eyelashes she’s glued on for the night’s show.
“You know, they look at me like I’m some superhero,” she says. “But really, they have been such a crucial part in saving me. It’s like they’re my heroes, and they don’t even know that.”
The Matriarch
The Matriarch lay on the hard red mat, listening to people chant her name.
Is wrestling real? Well, that all depends on how you look at it.
Once, Sage Morin had collapsed on the ground beside her son’s grave, paralyzed with grief and unable to move, wanting only to crawl into the darkness with him. On that day, her brothers and uncles sang and drummed a sacred song in Cree, telling her to get up and walk again. And she had.
In the ring, The Matriarch stirred. She pulled herself up from the floor until she was standing. Lime green tassels swayed from her cleavage and her belly, swinging from her knees and forearms.
It was the same place where the crowd had chanted Geo’s name almost 12 years ago, the first time she really felt the power of all that love and care from strangers. It was in these moments she felt closest to Geo, as if he was right there with her, like maybe the whole wrestling thing was a precious gift he’d given her.
She stomped one pink boot down hard on the mat in a steady rhythm, and drew her hands up to fight.
“Come on!” she called. She was strong now. Inviting it. “Come on!”
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