Recasting the History of Pro Hockey’s Indigenous Players (Published 2018) (2024)

At some point during Fred Sasakamoose’s first visit to New York in the fall of 1953, he found himself in a radio station studio. At 19, Sasakamoose was a junior hockey star from Saskatchewan. Speedy and ambidextrous, he was about to make his N.H.L. debut at center for the Chicago Black Hawks. He was also a novelty: one of the first Indigenous players in the league.

He remembers the gifts he was given at the studio, cigars and a transistor radio. And he remembers being asked to say something in Cree.

“They wanted me to talk Indian,” he said.

He obliged, thanking the interviewer and saying he had never been to New York.

It was just a few simple sentences, but Sasakamoose struggled to summon his own language. Home, then and now, was Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation, in Saskatchewan, but in 1953 it had been years since he had lived there.

Hockey had planted him in Moose Jaw, and before that he had spent a decade 60 miles from home at St. Michael’s in Duck Lake, one of Canada’s notorious residential schools where the mandate was to erase Indigenous languages and culture.

“They don’t allow you to talk your language,” Sasakamoose, now 84, recalled recently from Ahtahkakoop. “Either you talk French or English — and then you go to church, and you’ve got to talk Latin.”

Last month Governor General Julie Payette invested Sasakamoose as a member of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Revered as a hockey trailblazer, he has worked tirelessly over the years with youth in his community and across the country. Sasakamoose said he was humbled by the honor.

“There’s so much pride,” he added. “It’s just marvelous.”

Yet it is impossible to consider Sasakamoose’s life and career without reflecting on the historical scarcity of Indigenous players at the top levels of the game that Canadians so fervently claim as their own. First Nations peoples, Métis and Inuit make up 4.9 percent of Canada’s population. But of the more than 7,600 players, some 5,100 from Canada, to have skated in the N.H.L. in the 100 years of its history, only about 80 have been of Indigenous heritage.

Canada’s reckoning with its history with Indigenous peoples has been underway for years, with notable emphasis recently on reforming the justice system. Within hockey, this has been both a season for celebrating the achievements of Indigenous players and one filled with reminders of the ongoing struggles they face.

Recent N.H.L. success stories include Ethan Bear, 20, from Saskatchewan’s Ochapowace Cree Nation, who made his debut with the Edmonton Oilers in March. At the Winter Olympics in February in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Canada’s women’s hockey team featured two Indigenous players, Jocelyne Larocque, who is Métis from Manitoba, and Brigette Lacquette, a member of the Cote First Nation in Saskatchewan.

Hockey is thriving in Indigenous communities across the country, at the pond and pickup level and through organized events like the annual National Aboriginal Hockey Championships for elite teenage players. In March, about 3,000 Indigenous youth players took part in the Little Native Hockey League tournament in Mississauga, Ontario.

“I think we as First Nations people are probably some of the biggest supporters of hockey across Canada,” said Reggie Leach, the N.H.L.’s first Indigenous superstar who continues to work with young players on hockey and life skills. Leach, who is Ojibwe, spent 13 seasons in the N.H.L., mostly with the Philadelphia Flyers, winning a Stanley Cup in 1975.

Still, the story of Indigenous hockey players in Canada has been shaped by familiar themes of geographical isolation and social marginalization. It also continues to be poisoned by racism. In May, a team of 13- and 14-year-old First Nations boys faced racial slurs at a tournament in Quebec City.

“Reading this story made me sad,” Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada’s Minister of Justice and a member of the We Wai Kai Nation in British Columbia, wrote on Twitter. “Be proud of who you are and always remember where you come from!”

Residential schools are knotted into the history, too. For more than a century through to 1996, the Canadian government made a policy of separating some 150,000 children from their families with the express purpose of indoctrinating them into a culture not their own — taking “the Indian out of the child,” in one early formulation of what the schools were all about.

Indigenous players were scarce in the early annals of hockey, but it’s also true that history has neglected or overlooked some of those who did make it.

While Sasakamoose is often described as having been the N.H.L.’s first Indigenous player — including by the league itself and in his Order of Canada citation — the evidence seems to increasingly contradict that distinction.

Hockey teams in Canada started vying for the Stanley Cup in 1893, well before the N.H.L. began in 1917. In 1901 and again in 1902, the Winnipeg Victorias won the Cup with a roster featuring three Métis stars, Tony Gingras and the brothers Rod and Magnus Flett.

Toronto’s lineup in 1918-19 may have included a Mohawk defenseman, Paul Jacobs. While league records show him playing a game, it’s unclear whether Jacobs actually made it onto the ice. Taffy Abel, who had Chippewa background, was a member of the 1924 United States Olympic team and one of the earliest Americans to flourish in the N.H.L. Could he be counted as the league’s first Indigenous player?

While the N.H.L. seems strangely loath to acknowledge him, Henry Maracle is slowly gaining wider recognition as the first Indigenous player in the league.

Midway through the 1930-31 season, the Rangers summoned Maracle, a 27-year-old Mohawk left winger, from their affiliate in Springfield, Mass. That the team there was nicknamed the Indians was not lost on headline writers and reporters narrating the scoring exploits of the “Springfield Injun” and “Redskin Icer.”

Maracle, who went by Buddy, was often, inevitably, called “Chief.” His N.H.L. career lasted 15 games, yielding a goal and three assists. While he thrived as a minor leaguer for years to come, that was all for Maracle in the N.H.L. Maracle, who died in 1958, was honored this month at a community ceremony in Ayr, Ontario, the small town where he was born.

In 1944, the Rangers called up an Indigenous defenseman, Jim Jamieson, whose background was Cayuga, from Six Nations First Nation in southwestern Ontario. He played a single game.

Maracle and Jamieson were already forgotten when Sasakamoose made his N.H.L. debut in 1953. “Chief Running Deer,” the papers called him; when he first skated out at Chicago Stadium, organist Al Melgard broke into “Indian Love Call.” Sasakamoose played 11 games that season and looked like he was in the league to stay. Until he decided he wasn’t.

“For me,” Sasakamoose said, “I wanted to come home all the time.

“Because, 10 years of residential school,” he said. “Ten years when you’re small. And you live in that place, in that big huge building, and you don’t see mom and dad. You don’t know them anymore.”

Sasakamoose has spoken over the years about the physical abuse he suffered at Duck Lake, and he testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Of his school years, the commission report noted, “He left as soon as he could.”

At the same time, Sasakamoose’s memory of those distant school years in the 1940s can still brighten as he describes learning to stickhandle, or recalls the team with which he won a provincial championship.

On Saturday nights in wintertime, one of the priests at St. Michael’s would rig up a speaker for the weekly broadcast of “Hockey Night in Canada” from Toronto, 1,300 miles away.

“We’d sit there, about 30 or 40 of us, and we’d listen to the Foster Hewitt,” Sasakamoose said.

For many Canadians, Hewitt — the broadcaster whose signature phrase was a strident “He shoots, he scores!” — remains the original and eternal voice of hockey.

In 1954, when Sasakamoose played his first game at Toronto’s Maple Leafs Gardens, Hewitt descended from his broadcast booth: he wanted to meet the Chicago rookie — and to find out how to pronounce his name.

“I said, ‘Foster, my name is Sa-SA-ka-moose.’”

He laughs now. When the time came to call the action, Hewitt never quite got it right.

“That was O.K.,” Sasakamoose said. “I was there. I wanted to get there and I did get there.”