For 20 years, wrestler, teacher, and new mother Justina Di Stasio believed she had to earn the right to call herself Indigenous. Now, she is determined to ensure the next generation never feels that way.
Five weeks into motherhood, Justina Di Stasio is not sleeping much. She laughs about the feeding, the fussing, and how time seems to fold in on itself in those early weeks. But in the quiet moments, her mind lingers on a single thought: her son will never hold Indian status. “The way the government works, it’s not going to pass down to him,” she said, “because my husband is not Indigenous.”
She finds this policy quietly devastating. To her, it is not just a leftover from the past, but something that still affects people today. “Residential schools ended, but they still get rid of Indigenous people through this now in a completely new way,” she said. “I feel like people don’t know that that’s a thing.”
Di Stasio understands how heavy that question can feel: who gets to claim what, when and how much you need to know before you can say it out loud. She avoided it for most of her athletic career. Only now, at 33, is she learning to answer it for herself.
She came to wrestling almost by accident. Growing up in Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada, she would walk past Banting Middle School and peer through a window at kids tumbling and doing cartwheels. She wanted to join in. It turned out to be a wrestling practice. That window marked the beginning of a nearly 20-year journey that would lead her to five world championship appearances, a gold medal at the 2018 World Championships, the 2022 Commonwealth Games title, and, finally, the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
But before any of that came the comments. “You’re good for a girl.” She heard it often in those early years, from coaches, teammates and even people who supported her and helped her get better. And when they found out she was Indigenous, she could see the surprise. That made it confusing.
“They’re helping you, they’re believing in you, and then they put you back in this poor girl box,” she said. “Like, we’re in the same room doing practice together. Are we not just all good wrestlers?”
She tried not to dwell on it. Her father always told her to let things that bother you go in one ear and out the other, and hold on to what’s good. She learned to clear her mind at practice and focus on what was in front of her, instead of letting careless words stick. “That takes practice,” she said. “It doesn’t happen right away.”
The harder question, the one that stayed with her much longer, was not about gender. It was about her name.
Di Stasio is Italian on her father’s side and Cree on her mother’s, a member of Norway House Cree Nation in northern Manitoba. She grew up outside Vancouver with her Italian family, away from her mother’s land. She does not speak Cree and was not immersed in the culture or teachings. For years, the distance between what she felt and what she thought she should know seemed impossible to bridge. She embraced what was available, accepted her band’s funding quietly, visited Norway House when she could, and eventually discovered that her path back to her Cree identity was not through knowledge she lacked, but through the faces of students who reminded her of herself.
“As soon as you say you’re Indigenous, sometimes people expect you to be an expert about all things Indigenous,” she said. “I wasn’t that. I’ll probably never be that.”
Her fear was clear and constant: someone might ask her something she could not answer, her Italian name might make her claim seem less real, or she had not done enough to deserve saying it. “I never wanted to give off the impression that I’d had that Indigenous experience,” she said.
So she waited until she won a world medal at the senior level before she told people she was an Indigenous athlete. She thought that if she did not know enough about her culture or said the wrong thing, at least she could point to her success. If all people noticed was that she was one of the best wrestlers in the world, that would be enough.
Then she thought about Italy. She does not speak Italian, cannot cook Italian food, and has never lived in Italy. But she feels Italian and always has. No one has ever asked her to prove it or show knowledge before claiming that part of herself.
She realized the standard had never been equal. She had been holding herself to a rule that did not exist for either part of her identity. “I never had to be that good ever to say I was Indigenous,” she said. “Because the habits I was doing every day, working hard, being proud of yourself, going to school and being consistent, that transcends every culture.”
For years, she had not said publicly that Norway House Cree Nation had quietly made her career possible. In 2009, her band started funding her with a full-ride scholarship. This took financial pressure off her family and allowed her to train full time, an opportunity most of her teammates did not have. She accepted this help quietly. “I quietly just took advantage of everything they had to offer,” she said.
It was only once she had qualified for the Paris 2024 Olympics that she felt ready to say it plainly: she was going to the Games and could afford to do it in large part because Norway House Cree Nation had been backing her for 15 years. “Eventually I gave them the shout-outs they deserve,” she said.
Her reach extends beyond the mat. Her success contributed to wrestling being added to the Manitoba Indigenous Summer Games programme for the first time.
Two weeks after the Paris Games ended, Di Stasio started her first full-time job as an Indigenous Support Teacher. Wrestling and her cultural identity came together as she moved out of sport and into a new chapter. Her work is open to everyone: status, non-status, Métis and self-identifying Indigenous students, no matter who they are. “I don’t judge these kids for whatever part of the culture they know, or they don’t know,” she said.
This year, teaching high school on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, she had a conversation that brought her straight back to herself at 17. One of her students, with status and strong grades, told her they did not think they deserved their band funding. They had never been to their nation. They did not know enough about their culture. They were not sure they had the right to claim it. Di Stasio recognized every word.
She told them what she had learned: you do not have to grow up on the land to give back. Working with Indigenous Peoples every day and speaking up for them in places where they might not be heard are also ways to contribute. For Di Stasio, giving back looked like being the person in the room who noticed. It meant sitting with a student after class and helping them work through their band funding application. It meant speaking up when an educator said something that was not right, even when speaking up did not come easily to her. Taking and giving can happen at different times in your life.
“Having that exact conversation with a kid who’s graduating high school, who had the same feelings, I was like, this is very surreal,” she said.
She went on maternity leave before the school year ended and never found out if they secured the funding. She is fairly certain they did.
She often thinks about that student now, during the blurry early weeks with her son. He is Cree. She wants him to know that and be proud of it, but she does not want to push him. She does not want him to feel he has to earn the right to say who he is, as she once did over two decades and a world championship.
“I don’t want him to be shy and scared about saying that’s who he is,” she said. “Like I was.” What she does want, for her son, for her students and for anyone who might be listening, she offers simply and without ceremony.
“You try your best every day, and you might fail six out of seven days, but on that seventh day, something clicks,” she said. “It did not work every single day, but you just show up every day, you try your best, you’re consistent, and eventually something good will happen.” Part of that, she added, means letting go of comparison. From the outside, people made it look like they had it all figured out from the start, like it worked every single day. It did not. She knows that better than most.
She is not really talking about the Olympics. She means something quieter and more lasting than medals. Those were the daily habits that shaped her, whether or not anyone was watching. Now she knows those habits were enough, long before she thought she had to prove it.
