Fred Sasakamoose started skating on blades his grandfather had tied to his moccasins. His hockey stick was a willow department. A disk of cow manure served because the puck. The rink was a frozen lake.
It was a far cry from the Nationwide Hockey League. However that’s the place he landed.
Sasakamoose performed solely 11 video games within the N.H.L. as a member of the Chicago Blackhawks within the 1953-54 season. However his impression was outsized: Sasakamoose was one of the first Indigenous athletes to play Canada’s national pastime at the highest level.
That turned him right into a hero for First Nations folks in a rustic that always marginalized them. He later spent a long time mentoring and inspiring younger Indigenous gamers throughout the nation; in 2018 he was made a member of the Order of Canada, one of many nation’s highest civilian honors.
“There’ve been many Indigenous gamers since I began, nevertheless it’s good to assume I impressed Indian children means again then,” Sasakamoose wrote in a memoir, “Name Me Indian,” to be printed in April. “Confirmed them, confirmed everybody, that we might make it within the white world. That’s extra vital than any award.”
Sasakamoose died on Nov. 26 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He was 86. The N.H.L., which introduced the demise, said he had been hospitalized with problems of Covid-19.
Reggie Leach, the N.H.L.’s first Indigenous celebrity, was amongst those that paid tribute. “Lots of people say he solely performed 11 video games,” Leach told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “However these 11 video games had been every little thing to our First Nations folks.”
Frederick Sasakamoose was born on Christmas Day 1933 within the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation, in central Saskatchewan. He was one in all 11 youngsters, six of whom didn’t survive childhood.
When he was 6, brokers from the Canadian authorities got here to the reservation and threw him and his brother Frank right into a truck. They had been among the many many Native youngsters in Canada who had been forcibly faraway from their households for education.
“We didn’t know what the heck was happening,” he told the journalist Aaron Lakoff for a 2018 episode of the Boston public radio station WBUR’s podcast “Solely a Recreation.” “We had been too small.”
Sasakamoose would spend years at St. Michael’s, one in all Canada’s infamous residential colleges, in Duck Lake, about 60 miles from the Sasakamoose house. The faculties, financed by the federal government however run largely by church buildings, had been in operation from 1883 till 1998, when the final one closed. The federal government has apologized for the apply and compensated survivors, and a Reality and Reconciliation Fee report in 2015 called the system “cultural genocide.”
Life at St. Michael’s was grim. “I by no means heard phrases of encouragement,” Sasakamoose wrote in his memoir. “Orders and corrections. That’s all we ever bought.” However he discovered pleasure there taking part in hockey.
A mentor from St. Michael’s, the Rev. Georges Roussel, a Roman Catholic priest, later took him to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, to play junior hockey — a feeder to the skilled leagues. After 4 seasons, Sasakamoose obtained phrase that he had been chosen by the Chicago Blackhawks of the N.H.L.
He made his league debut on Nov. 20, 1953, in opposition to the Boston Bruins. Over his 11 video games, he performed in opposition to legends like Gordie Howe and Maurice Richard.
At one recreation in Chicago, the organist performed the outdated Broadway present tune “Indian Love Name” after Sasakamoose’s title was introduced. He was later requested if that had offended him.
“The truth that the white viewers didn’t actually perceive who I used to be or the place I got here from, the truth that they didn’t perceive the importance of the symbols they had been utilizing, nicely, that didn’t diminish my satisfaction one rattling bit,” he later wrote.
“And oh, man, was I proud.”
Sasakamoose, a middle, was nimble on the ice, however he failed to attain within the N.H.L. and spent the remainder of his profession within the minor leagues.
Nonetheless, these 11 video games can be sufficient to feed the desires of a brand new era of Indigenous gamers. A handful now play within the N.H.L. and on the Canadian ladies’s Olympic hockey group.
In later years, Sasakamoose served a time period because the chief of the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation. He additionally developed sports activities applications for Indigenous youth, together with a match for First Nations groups, the Fred Sasakamoose “Chief Thunderstick” Championship.
Data on survivors was not instantly out there.
Final yr, greater than 300 folks turned up on the Roxy Theater in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to look at a video of one in all Sasakamoose’s N.H.L. video games. When he watched his youthful self — wavy black hair, No. 21 on his darkish jersey — take the ice, he leapt to his toes.
“I had gone again in time,” Sasakamoose wrote in his memoir. “I used to be younger once more for over 60 minutes. Younger and outdated on the similar second. Stuffed with ambition and power, but with the knowledge to know what a uncommon and fantastic expertise it was to have performed in any respect.”
