SADDLE LAKE, Alberta -- As a typical 15-year-old might, Nipin White looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but in a small office surrounded by adults, and not merely because it meant squandering hours under the summer sun in a place where it makes only inefficient cameos for long months. Polite but shy to the point that most of her answers stretched only a word or two and were barely audible over even the few feet between her and the person asking questions, she endured queries about school, family and aspirations.

But when talk turned to soccer, White's eyes broke contact with the ground.

Did she have a favorite player? She nodded and whispered Christine Sinclair's name.

What appealed to her about the star of the Canadian women's national team?

"The way she plays," White said. "She's fast and good with her feet."

Girls across Canada would come up with the same answer, just as their peers south of the border might name Alex Morgan. More than almost any other walk of life, an athlete has appeal that transcends backgrounds, whether in an immigrant community in Toronto, a suburb around Vancouver, a port in the Maritime provinces or where White sat, two hours east of Edmonton and nearly 400 miles north of the U.S. border, on land of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation. Eyes of all backgrounds look toward the stars of our games.

All throughout Canada, veteran Christine Sinclair, who has played for her nation's senior women's national team since 2000, is a fan favorite. Erich Schlegel/USA TODAY Sports

Sometimes it is worthwhile to try to understand what those eyes see the rest of the time.

Edmonton is home this week to a Women's World Cup semifinal game that lives up to the tournament's global name. Japan and England will compete Wednesday for a spot in the tournament final in Vancouver on July 5 against either Germany or the United States. In the weeks leading up to the semifinals, the city also hosted teams representing Africa and South America. Save Antarctica, soccer brought each of the planet's continents here.

But when those teams leave Canada in the days ahead, when the third-place game concludes in Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium on July 4 and the tournament itself departs this province for good, there will also be a community remaining here and elsewhere across Canada for which sports represent both an opportunity and a means by which to understand the challenges girls face. That the world has come to Edmonton is all the more reason to look more closely at who was already here.

During the portion of the Under-20 Women's World Cup held in Edmonton last summer, White and others in Saddle Lake and Edmonton provided a glimpse of it.

That there were people living in what is now Canada long before Europeans arrived, just as there were in what became the United States, is obvious on reflection but perhaps also easy for Americans to overlook. How many Americans, after all, ever studied Canadian history in school, let alone the histories of the peoples who lived there for hundreds and thousands of years previously? Yet the legacy of Aboriginal peoples in Canada is profound.

Canada's indigenous population, in fact, comprises a greater percentage of its overall population than is the case in the United States.

According to the 2010 United States Census, 1.7 percent of the population identified as American Indian and Alaskan Native. The 2011 National Household Survey in Canada found that 4.6 percent of that nation's population identified as Aboriginal, including 2.6 percent as First Nations, 1.4 as Métis and 0.2 as Inuit.

An empty soccer field -- with rusting metal goalposts sans nets at either end -- is tucked behind the high school in Saddle Lake. Courtesy of Graham Hays

Drive east from Edmonton and the sprawl of the oil and gas industry that at first dominates the landscape soon gives way to open space, the province of just more than 4 million people, nearly half of whom live in Calgary and Edmonton, spread over a quarter of a million square miles. Distinctive onion-shaped domes atop small Orthodox churches somewhat incongruously dot a landscape otherwise dominated by agriculture. Cross the North Saskatchewan River, turn right on Alberta provincial highway 652 and the two-lane road eventually comes to a lightly marked intersection in the heart of the Saddle Lake Indian Reserve. To the right, the road is paved as it passes the Saddle Lake administrative buildings, health center, school and the youth center, but then shortly gives way to rutted dirt.

Behind the school sits an empty soccer field, recently mowed though the grass is more yellow than green, with metal goalposts, rusting and sans nets, at either end.

The Aboriginal population in Canada, according to government statistics, is younger, poorer, less educated and incarcerated at higher rates than the non-Aboriginal population. The birth rate, infant mortality rate and life expectancy at birth for Status Indians, a legal term for those First Nations peoples registered under the nation's Indian Act (nearly two thirds of whom live on reserves), more closely parallel developing nations like Jamaica and Colombia than the rest of Canada.