Olympic wrestler and former CFL player are 2025 hall of fame inductees

A wrestler who represented Canada at the 2024 Paris Olympics and a former professional football player are among the latest individuals to be inducted into the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame.

Justina Di Stasio, a member of Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba, and John Macdonald, a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, are included in the 2025 induction class.

Induction ceremonies will be held on June 7 in the Wisconsin city of Green Bay.

The hall of fame, founded in 2022, is online at https://www.naiahf.org/

Those inducted enter the hall by way of the Athletes, Coaches, Builders, Teams, Media, Officials or Trainers categories.

Both Di Stasio and Macdonald are entering the hall through the Athletes category.

A total of 48 individuals will enter the hall this year. Four teams will also be inducted, bringing the number of inductees up to 71.

Di Stasio, who competed at the Paris Olympics in the women’s 76-kilogram weight class, placed 12th in her category.

The 32-year-old has won numerous medals at other prestigious competitions, including the gold medal captured while competing in her 72-kilogram division at the 2018 world championships in Budapest.

She also won a bronze medal at the 2017 world championships held in Paris.

“I’m very grateful to be inducted into this hall of fame,” said Di Stasio, who lives in East Vancouver. “It means a lot to me as an Indigenous athlete to be included in something like this.”

Di Stasio is a member of Norway House Cree Nation through her mother Fiona. Her father Tony has Italian ancestry.

“This is an awesome highlight to come at this point in my career,” she said. “Anything that pushes me to dive deeper into the Indigenous side of who I am makes me very excited. And I feel like being inducted into a Hall of Fame like this does just that.”

Besides her two medals at world championships, Di Stasio captured some hardware at other high-level competitions.

She was a gold medalist at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, England. And she brought home a gold medal from the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, Peru and a silver from the same Games held four years earlier in Toronto.

Di Stasio also earned four medals (two gold and two bronze) at Pan American championships from 2017 through 2023.

As for Macdonald, he grew up in the Ontario community of Simcoe. During his high school days, he not only played football but also competed on hockey, rugby, soccer and track and field teams.

He went on to play five years of football at Montreal’s McGill University. From there, the defensive lineman was selected in the first round, seventh over-all, by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the 2002 Canadian Football League draft.

He played three seasons before retiring from the sport to focus on a teaching career.

Macdonald, who is 46, is a teacher at Pauline Johnson Collegiate and Vocational School in Brantford, Ont. He lives in the nearby community of Ancaster.

“To be a hall of famer, it’s a wonderful honour,” Macdonald said of his latest accolade. “Really humbling. My sports career has kind of transitioned into coaching and doing a lot of Indigenous advocacy, so to be honoured by this hall, to be the first CFL player and Hamilton Tiger-Cat inducted, is really special and very humbling.”

Macdonald helps coach both the junior and senior football teams at his high school. He also leads an elite athlete program at the school which helps prepare students to compete at the college or university levels in Canada and the United States.

Macdonald also runs off-season training programs for Six Nations lacrosse players.

“We’re getting sponsorships from the community so the kids don’t have to pay anything,” he said. “They’re getting top-level training basically for nothing, so it’s really neat.”

Macdonald added he’s looking forward to attending June’s hall of fame induction ceremony with his wife.

“It’s going to be a nice weekend for her and I to get away for a little bit,” he said. “I’ve never been to Green Bay so that’s going to be fun.”

Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada.