“THEY DIDN’T DEFEAT MY SPIRIT”
A s far as Alex Nelson can remember, there was always a soccer field in Kingcome Inlet. He was born in the village, part of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation, on the west coast of British Columbia in 1946. When he was a boy, the field was in front of the chief’s home.
“He would go out so many times, cutting the lawn, cutting the [grass on the field] and he took pride in riding his lawnmower,” says Alex, whose Kwakwaka’wakw name, Ok’wilagame, means “the spirit that shows itself in the clouds, mountains, forests and the ocean.”
Soccer was an integral part of village life. On Sundays, the church bells tolled at 11 o’clock to signal the end of the weekly service. At two, another sound rang out: the whistle blown to let everyone know the soccer game was starting soon. The village coaches told their players the community’s involvement in the games was part of their success. Whether by playing or cheering from the sidelines, soccer brought everyone together. “The gathering starts to happen,” Alex recalls, of the moments after the whistle, “that whole field will be just packed with people.”
When Alex was nine years old, in 1954, he was sent away to St. Michael’s Residential School in Alert Bay, just off the coast of Vancouver Island. Even today, it’s a trip that can only really be made by boat. For Alex, the sense of separation included more than the physical distance from his family and community. He felt emotionally and spiritually disconnected, as well, apart from everything he knew and loved — soccer included.
While St. Michael’s had a soccer team, it only played on special occasions. Alex still remembers the first big game at the school. It was a Sunday, Victoria Day, and kickoff was at six o’clock. But, as a junior boy, Alex wasn’t allowed to watch.
“We had to be in bed by 6:30 p.m., seven o’clock at night, and outside, the soccer field was there and they had these big important games that I thought I needed to watch,” he says. “I remember how many times I would go use the washroom — not because I wanted to use the washroom, but because I wanted to stare outside and see what was going on, because all that yelling and all that cheering was going on outside.”
How we understand the role sports played within residential schools and the continuing impact of that history on Indigenous athletes begins with the stories of survivors like Alex. These schools — known collectively as Canada’s Indian residential school system — tried to take away Indigenous children’s languages, cultures, and identities in what has widely been recognized as “cultural genocide.” Sports played a part in that process of erasure, as a tool of propaganda, assimilation, and abuse, but they also provided students with a means of experiencing rare moments of freedom and community in the brutal and isolating environment of the schools.
It is only through the stories and testimonies shared by survivors that we’re able to see these complicated truths. These stories are as unique and intricate as the individuals who tell them, and they are essential to the history of Indigenous sport in Canada and the place Indigenous athletes occupy in this country today. These are the stories of Alex Nelson, Ada Red Crow and Wilton Littlechild.
T he last residential school closed in 1996. Over the course of the more than 150 years the system existed in Canada, in excess of 150,000 Indigenous children were forced away from their families and into boarding and day schools run by various Christian churches and the federal government. As of today, nearly 4,000 of the children who attended these institutions are reported to have died from abuse, maltreatment, or disease — and communities and experts say that number could be thousands higher. In 2007, the federal government settled a class action lawsuit brought by 90,000 survivors against the government and churches for the abuse they faced in residential schools — only half of those survivors are estimated to be alive today.
Long before residential schools, Indigenous peoples enjoyed their own sports and games, which reflected their particular lives and values. Some of these games have become more recognized in the mainstream, such as lacrosse amongst the Haudenosaunee, or the hand games popular amongst many First Nations, particularly in the plains, and the high kick amongst the Inuit.
But after the Indian Act came into effect in 1876, the federal government began to police Indigenous people’s everyday lives, including banning cultural practices and gatherings. In the earlier decades of the residential school system, physical activity programs, including things like daily calisthenics and military drills, were introduced in response to government reports that revealed the unhealthy and undernourished state of the children, who were subjected to higher levels of disease and death than the rest of the population. The creation of “sports days” on reservations was an attempt by the government to introduce European sports and their values, which later carried on into residential schools. They were usually held once a year, often doubling as means of public propaganda.
Though the popularity of individual sports in the schools varied region-to-region, hockey was invariably one of the more popular, widely recognized at the time as Canada’s national sport.
“It was a sport that can teach boys and the girls who were there what a proper national sport was,” says Janice Forsyth, a professor in Indigenous land-based physical culture and wellness at the University of British Columbia. “If you’re going to be a good Canadian citizen — because this is why you’re going to school, because we’re going to teach you how to be a good Canadian citizen — then you need to know how to play hockey.”
Forsyth, who has extensively researched sports within residential schools, estimates that less than half of all the students who attended residential school played sports. “Just like today, sport was a privilege for the few, in a way” she says.
Still, despite that participation rate, residential schools changed Indigenous peoples’ experiences with exercise. Instead of physical activity centred around and incorporated within cultural life, now exercise was regimented to control Indigenous bodies.
In 1951, the Indian Act was amended, and the federal government began to take more control of the schools from religious organizations. Schools and instructors were encouraged to place more emphasis on sports and physical activity. As Forsyth writes in her book, Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination in Canadian Sport, sport was used to control students, encouraging discipline and assimilation. At Spanish Indian Residential School in northern Ontario, for example, “Interscholastic competition served a more dubious purpose … since it was meant to exhaust the students, thus ensuring that any remaining energy would be spent on the playing fields rather than in an attempt to run away.”
These sports programs were underfunded, and many schools did not have proper facilities. “If you look at the old drawings, like the architectural drawings, they have graveyards, but they don’t have gyms,” Forsyth says. Basements with unfinished floors were used as playrooms and “a lot of the time they would convert their lunchroom into a gymnasium.
“These schools were not intended ever to be healthy places.”
W hen he was finally allowed to play, soccer was freedom for Alex at St. Michael’s Residential School. His most positive memories of the place are the times the school staff let the children outside to play, sometimes giving them soccer balls. It was also at the school where Alex got his first opportunity to play on an official soccer team — the St. Michael’s Dalton Braves — when he was 12 years old.
In 1958, Alert Bay held its first ever “June Sports Day” on Father’s Day, with the school competing in a tournament with other local First Nations’ teams. Alex still remembers the black-and-gold uniforms of Alert Bay’s two local teams and the green-and-white of the team from Cape Mudge.
Along with soccer, there was food and a lot of friendly competitions, like net mending and a challenge that saw people try to climb a greased pole to win $50 placed on its top. But the memory that sticks out most is the image of his dad sitting on a stump watching his soccer game.
Alex had heard great things about his dad’s skill as a soccer player when he was growing up, although he never saw it for himself. His dad was short and able to move the ball well, and Alex has since heard community members compare him to Pelé, the Brazilian soccer legend.
Alex’s father, a gillnet fisherman, was on his way to Rivers Inlet the next day, more than 120 kilometres north up the coast. So, when he saw his dad at the game, Alex ran up to him during halftime to say hi. “I asked Dad, ‘Oh, what do you think I need to do to help me with my game?’ He looked at me and he said, ‘Don’t chew gum.’”
It was a confusing moment, Alex recalls with a touch of laughter, one that, like many of his memories from his time at school, mixed competing and even conflicting emotions together in a jumble — joy and disappointment and pride and sorrow — that Alex calls “happiness-sadness.”
In 1961, when he was around 15 years old, Alex was sent to the Fraser Valley to attend Mission Senior Secondary School, as a boarding student at the mostly white school. In Mission, Alex was more formerly introduced to basketball and volleyball — sports he briefly encountered at June sports days — even becoming part of the Mission school’s B.C. high school championship-winning volleyball team in 1964. He also played in Fraser Valley’s local soccer league, where he encountered other Indigenous youth from local nations and also played a few games against the students at Mission Residential School.
While Alex had played with and against other Indigenous students before moving to Mission, it was in those games as a teenager that he began to find a deeper connection to other Indigenous residential school athletes. “I started to understand, we are made out of the same cloth, as it were,” he explains.
He has kept in touch with some of these student players to this day.
Alex graduated from Mission Secondary School in 1965 and went on to study at the University of British Columbia.
While in Vancouver, he met his wife, Nella — also at a soccer game. It was 1972, and while out on the field during a game, he saw a cheerleader on the sidelines in green-and-white —his team’s colours.
“I would look at this lady and say, ‘Holy, HOLY!’” he remembers, laughing.
The two were married that same year.
Deciding Vancouver was too big for them, the pair moved to Victoria soon after to be closer to family. Alex decided to finish his bachelor’s degree at the University of Victoria, studying sport administration, and made the varsity soccer team, where he got the opportunity to compete internationally.
While at UVic, Alex also joined local soccer leagues, including First Nations community leagues, where he was called up to play from time to time. He joined one of these teams, the Oak Bay first-division team, to play with friends who were already on the roster. Fifty years later, the “Oak Bay Alumni” still play together in tournaments.
“I’m 77 years old right now and most of these guys are in their 70s and 80s,” he says. “You just have a way of sticking together and staying together and being together.”
O ne thing Alex remembers about sports at residential school is the girls didn’t play. “The women became sort of secondary. They came [to play soccer at the school], I guess, maybe 10 years after the men started,” he says.
Into the 1960s, participation in sport was largely a male privilege at residential schools, Forsyth says. Even when they were an option, sports weren’t played in the same way. “Girls rules” for sports like volleyball and basketball were a way for residential school instructors to have girls play sports while reinforcing ideas about femininity. “There were still very much deep ideas about gender and who should have access to sports, and if they’re limited in resources and time, they’re going to focus their energy on boys,” Forsyth says.
This is seen in the Tom Longboat Awards from the residential school era. The awards, named after the Onondaga Olympic distance runner from the early 1900s, recognize outstanding athletic achievement. “You’ll hardly see any girls in the residential schools winning the awards, it’s all boys,” Forsyth explains. “So even if they were participating in sports, their contributions weren’t valued the same way.”
The devaluing of women and girls in sports in residential schools is one reason why we don’t hear about women’s experiences as often as we do men’s, Forsyth says. And it is one reason why Ada’s story is so special.
Ada Red Crow, Niitsi takii or “Lone Woman” in Blackfoot, was only seven years old when she was sent away to St. Mary’s Residential School, near Cardston, Alta., in 1947.
St. Mary’s was located on the Kainai Blood Reservation, a 1920s replacement for the Immaculate Conception Boarding School, which had opened on the reserve in 1898. The school, run by the Catholic Church until the late 1960s, operated for more than 90 years total under both names. It closed in 1988.
Over those nine decades, most children from Kainai Nation and other local Blackfoot communities were sent to the school, including many of my own family, who attended before, during, and after the time Ada was there.
I had only met Ada when I was a young child and didn’t know about her history as a basketball player, but in talking to my mom one day while working on this article she told me I had to speak to Ada, who is now 82 years old.
Born in Cardston, Ada was raised in Fort McLeod with her siblings and cousins by her grandmother, Mary Black Water. The day the Catholic priests and superintendent came, they took Ada along with two cousins (Isabelle and Ray, my aunt and uncle) and three siblings (Mary Ann, Tony, and Johnny) away to St. Mary’s.
“I remember, when I first went to school, they put me in [a washtub] with two other girls and they had these kind of like steel brushes. They were using that on us,” Ada says. “It was bad. Some of the girls would just cry, but I learned how to take care of myself, to protect myself.”
It wasn’t until 1952, when she was 13 years old, that she was asked to play on the school’s basketball team. Before that, learning to cook, clean, and sew made up most of Ada’s education at the school. She also played volleyball, captaining the squad, and softball, and competed in skating and track-and-field. At 15, she was even sent to Red Deer to take gymnastics, which she did for two summers.
But basketball was Ada’s main sport, and she played until she left St. Mary’s in 1958, when she was 18. The girls’ basketball team was coached by a woman named Mrs. Doucett. “At first, we were called ‘Chicklets’ because we had these uniforms with green-and-yellow, this was for about six months,” Ada says. “Then Morris Little Bear gave us the name ‘Marions.’”
One of the girls’ first games came in nearby Del Bonita in October, but they were too overdressed for the temperature inside the gym, sweating in insulated jeans, long sleeves and vests. “Mrs. Doucet made us take off what we don’t need. We had stockings too. It was really awful,” Ada says.
From then on, the team had uniforms, made by the nuns with elastic bands around the legs of the shorts. There’s a photo of Ada and her teammates in them. “They look so dreadful,” she says of the uniforms. They did have a version later on in green-and-yellow, which were made of a thinner material and were more comfortable, but the boys, Ada says, always had nicer uniforms. She couldn’t say why; she was never given a reason for the disparity.
Ada remembers the boys coach, Mr. Dawson, as “really strict.” Sometimes he would come to the girls’ practices and make them work out. “Oh my god. We got to run back and forth, back and forth for about a good half hour,” she says.
Ada says being on sports teams could be a reason she was treated better than other girls she knew, who experienced abuse. But this wasn’t the case for all the girls on her team. “The ones that I played with, they had it rough. Some of them, they got abused, but I’m just lucky I never got abused,” she says.
Ada tried to stay away from trouble. If she saw the nuns scolding someone, she ran away. She only remembers being punished with a strap twice.
One time she and a friend decided to have some fun while being forced to peel potatoes all day on a Saturday. They put a bunch of the potatoes in a machine that spun them around in cold water and when she opened the lid, all the potatoes came flying out, breaking the kitchen windows and the head cook’s glasses. “We got strapped 10 each and [our hands] were just bleeding,” Ada says. “The nuns didn’t help us. They just told us ‘Oh, it’s your fault. They’ll heal by themselves.’”
Boys and girls were always kept separate from each other while at residential school, except for the occasional social event. “We couldn’t even look at the boys, even in school and in the chapel when we go to church, we can’t look at them. We had to look the other way,” she remembers. Games provided an opportunity for the boys and girls to see and interact with each other, especially when they had to travel on the bus.
“The boys would sit on one side and the girls on [the other], but we were able to talk,” she says. “We all got along, all of us, especially the girls and the boys there. Sometimes [the boys would] tease us about, you know, ‘Oh, you could have made a score,’ and stuff like that. We just ignored them.”
When they travelled for games, they ate sandwiches and oranges. Fruit was a treat, as they hardly got any at school.
Ada remembers one Saturday playing a shooting game in gym against her cousins, Lawrence and Patsy Panther Bone and Andy Black Water. “They told us to see who could score right around the key — you know how it goes around — and I beat them, the three of them. I went out of the key and I scored, and they couldn’t make a basket. So, I won,” Ada says. “I was so proud of myself.
“I always bring this up to Bones and Andy,” she adds, laughing.
Ada is still known in her community as a great basketball player. Left-handed, she says she had a great three-point shot. “I always make about 22 points to 26 in a game,” she remembers.
Both the boys and girls’ teams gained a lot of success during their time, travelling all over southern Alberta to play — mainly against white schools and communities
The one time Ada remembers losing a game was against Cardston in 1957, when she was 17 years old. “We almost beat Cardston for the finals one year. What they did was they broke into our locker [room] and they stole, they took, all our underclothes and, well, some of us didn’t have any on and that’s how we lost because of that,” she says.
Along with travelling for basketball, Ada remembers travelling to the Siksika Blackfoot Reservation to compete in track-and-field against Old Sun Boarding School.
After she left St. Mary’s, she went to Cluny, Alta., to play basketball for about a year, teaching the sport, as well as gymnastics, in her spare time. But Ada got lonely being so far away from home, unable to visit her family. She soon decided that playing basketball didn’t outweigh her desire to return home, so one day, she got on a bus heading back to Fort Macleod.
The last time Ada played a basketball game was in 1981. More than 20 years after they’d last played together, the Marions took on the “New Marions” at Gladstone Hall on the Kainai Blood Reserve.
“It was really funny, all out of shape and everything, we got beat,” Ada says, laughing at the reunion of her old school teammates.
Today, Ada says, all the girls she played with have passed on, making her the last living original Marion.
“I have memories of the times when I played and I miss it,” she says. “I miss all the sports.”
Sitting in her home in Lethbridge, Alta., looking at photos of Ada and her friends at school, I had to ask one last important question.
“Can you still shoot a three-point shot?”
She gave me a knowing look then laughed.
“Oh yeah!”
S ports days like the one that allowed Alex’s father to finally watch him play soccer weren’t the only avenue through which sports were used as tools of propaganda by those who ran the school institutions. Stories and photographs of students and teams were widely circulated in newsletters and pamphlets, such as the Indian School Bulletin, which ran from 1946 until 1957, boasting of the schools’ successes.
Actual competition, especially any involving travel, was dependent on the resources of each individual school, with larger schools often able to put more money towards sports. Tours and tournaments involving residential school teams were more of an anomaly.
“They’re lucky if they get to a nearby town. They’re lucky if they get to have a league with other residential schools, and they’re incredibly lucky if they get to go away for the night and go somewhere else to compete,” Forsyth says. “I mean, these were rare opportunities.”
Like the ability to travel and compete, the overall experiences children had while playing sports at residential schools also varied dramatically. Many of the stories shared — but not all — showcase sports as a positive, often as a means of escape in a world where violence and misery were the norm.
“Not everybody experienced abuse as an athlete at school,” Forsyth says. “So, you get all of these different stories coming from residential school survivors, and that creates tension — the way it’s talked about in public — because people want to pit one type of abuse against another.”
From the historical research she has done, Forsyth is not able to estimate how many girls experienced abuse in sports while at residential schools, and “colleagues who work in the same area haven’t brought anything forward like that as well.” But she stresses the importance of remembering that the residential school system was set up to eradicate Indigenous identities, cultures, and attachment to lands. “That in itself, is violent.
“If you take a step back from that,” Forsyth continues, “what they’re all talking about, in a way, is that deep, genocidal violence of the school. That’s why they talk about it as an escape. Because they all, at some level, recognize the violence that is being done to them.”
To look at sport as only good or only bad is to see the conversations around sport and residential schools as one-dimensional, Forsyth explains. In reality, understanding these experiences is a complex process, one that still sees many survivors today struggling to unpack their relationships with sport and the schools.
“It’s not to say that sport in itself is bad,” Forsyth insists. Instead, the goal is to see and acknowledge the ways sports were used as a tool for colonization. “It’s not a disavowal of sport, it’s a disavowal of the conversation that we’re having around it.”
W ilton Littlechild is known by many names.
He’s Mahihgan Pimoteyw or “Walking Wolf” in Cree, and also Osauw Kihew, “Golden Eagle,” the name he received when he became chief of the Ermineskin Cree First Nation. But in his years as a student at the Catholic-run Ermineskin Indian Residential School, Willie was “No. 65.”
Willie was dropped off at the residential school, located in Maskwacîs, Atla., (formerly known as Hobbema) in 1951, when he was just six years old. Raised by his grandparents, he understood physical activity through the physical work he did at home and in the garden. He had never had any experience with sports before the school, except for riding a horse.
“That horse was my only friend and my only kind of exercise, I would say, but it also taught me about life in many ways,” Willie says. “How to take care of and respect an animal.”
He was in his early teens when a teacher and former residential school student with a coaching background first introduced sports to the school. It was from this coach that Willie learned how to play hockey, baseball, boxing, and gymnastics. The students were also put to work expanding the school’s facilities. “We began to build an outdoor ice rink,” Willie remembers. “We built a slide, some school swings were built, and a teeter-totter. That was probably the extent of the facilities, and later on towards high school there was a curling rink that was built for the school.”
Willie attended two versions of Ermineskin Residential School for 11 years. After that, he was sent to St. Anthony’s College in Edmonton for another three years to finish high school. There, Willie continued with hockey and baseball and was also introduced to football and judo. “So, in a sense, I grew from nothing into a lot of new facilities and a lot of new sports as I was growing up,” he says, “but the experience out of all of that has been both very good and very bad.”
The bad, Willie doesn’t like to dwell on.
The bad part of sport and physical education at residential school was abuse. The physical, mental, cultural, spiritual, and sexual abuse that has been well-documented in official records, survivors’ accounts and elsewhere.
And then there was “the fighting, just so you could protect yourself,” he says. “Those were, sort of, the negative aspects that I think most, if not everyone, went through in residence.”
In the evenings, before he had to be in his dorm for bed, Willie would go outside and run.
“I’d just run for miles, really, and I discovered later I was running away from the abuse that I was experiencing in school with no one to defend you,” he says. “So, I went running, sometimes really just to cry all by myself.”
But as time went on, Willie started to learn that he could feel good from exercising. From running and practicing and playing, and eventually through competition. The good side of sport, those good feelings, afforded Willie the earliest positive experiences of his teenage years.
“We haven’t quite gotten away from what I call ‘the ugly face of sport’ through racism and through the abuse,” he says. “But like I say, I like to prop up the good side of sport, the life teachings, life instructions, life learnings that you get from sport.
“I chose to choose life in a positive way with sport and try to lift up the good side of sport. I choose to support the rules of living [and] winning in life that you learn in sport.”
Despite the school’s objective to eliminate his Cree culture, the spiritual foundation laid by his grandparents before he was taken held strong. “It wasn’t beat out of me,” he says of the Cree teachings, ceremonies, and language. “They didn’t defeat my spirit.”
When Willie played hockey at school, the first thing both teams did before the start of the game, before they even went onto the ice, was form a little circle and say a prayer together.
“It’s kind of funny because I always thought, ‘I wonder who was God listening to?’ Both sides, both teams, praying before and only one wins — who was God listening to, and why?” Willie says.
After high school, Willie attended the University of Alberta where he continued to play hockey and swim competitively. He also co-managed the university’s Canadian championship-winning football team and western championship-winning basketball team.
After graduating with a degree in physical education in 1967 — he earned his Master’s in the subject in 1975 — Willie started holding leadership, coaching, and officiating clinics to introduce more Indigenous people to those areas. He also coached the first all-Indigenous junior hockey team in Alberta for three years, with rules that they keep good grades to stay on the team. “I tried to give back that way through what I learned in the international arena and national arena, try to give back to others,” Willie says.
Hockey also led Willie to his career in law. While at National Hockey League’s professional hockey academy, Willie discovered that all but two of the 20 participants were lawyers. He was one of the two. “I thought, ‘Oh no, I have to go to law school to stay in hockey,’” he says.
When he applied to law school at the University of Alberta and got a scholarship to attend, Willie learned there were only three Indigenous lawyers in Canada, and only five Indigenous law students. “So, my desire to pursue law as a career so that I could be in hockey didn’t last a really long time. I realized, ‘Wait a minute, maybe there is an area of law that I should be working on with Indigenous law,’” he says.
Willie, who earned his law degree in 1976, used his knowledge and later experiences as a lawyer to help draft bylaws, constitutions, and guidelines for sports organizations and events, including the Alberta Indigenous Games, Artic Winter Games, Western Canada Native Winter Games, North American Indigenous Games, and the World Indigenous Nations Games — all of which he helped found.
Sport has taken Willie around the world, first as an athlete, where he competed in championships in three different sports — baseball, hockey, and triathlon — and then as an executive and administrator.
“Those are all really fond memories of getting to travel to different parts of the world and play against other teams that were not only your opponent, but could become your friends as well,” Willie says.
While at school, one of Willie’s coaches used to say, “quitters never win and winners never quit.” The expression has stuck with him for his entire life.
Willie played hockey for more than 50 years, up until recently, when he broke his hip and was forced to stop and recuperate. But that has not prevented him from continuing to participate in sport at the age of 80.
“I keep being so thankful that sport was my savior and taught me everything about life. I thought maybe I should stick with this, I’m going to stick with this. I stuck with hockey, I stuck with baseball,” he says. “I’m still sticking with swimming.”
I n a cruel stroke of irony, the end of the residential school era, which finally came with the closure of the Gordon Residential School in Saskatchewan in 1996, in many ways, also “decimated Indigenous involvement in sport,” Forsyth says.
Many children found themselves in the position of having to travel to different cities or towns to go to public schools — a reality that continues to this day. “The only difference now is that when they go to a public school, they’re not being invited to play on those teams [with white students]. They’re not welcome on those teams and if they do [make them], it’s probably very uncomfortable or they’re white-passing,” Forsyth says. “So, we see actually fewer kids on the sports teams because of the way in which racism works in the public school system.”
Meanwhile, Indigenous children living and going to school on reservations are faced with the disadvantage of under-resourced schools, which may not be able to afford sports equipment, teams, or coaches.
Ada tried to get her grandchildren to play basketball, and even bought one of her granddaughters a ball and offered to teach her how to play when she was nine or 10 years old. But school coaches didn’t pick her to play on the team, Ada says “because she was Native. That was really bad.” Racism ultimately discouraged her grandkids from sports entirely.
“I just wish that my grandkids would be in sports,” she says. “You know, I miss it.”
Alex, Ada and Willie have all considered future generations of Indigenous athletes in one way or another — whether in their own families or their larger communities.
Like Willie, Alex became involved in sport organizations, including what would later become the North American Indigenous Games (NAIG), where he served as the first chairperson and a three-time president of the organization.
In 1997, when the NAIG were held in Victoria, he served as an administrator to the Games, which hosted over 12,000 participants.
NAIG helped Alex build his self-esteem, travel the world, and expand his understanding of Indigenous peoples from other continents and countries, such as in South America, Australia, and New Zealand. “It became a real wonderful teaching tool for myself,” he says.
Sports also gave Alex a way to find value in himself, to use his cultural beliefs and contradict the “lazy, drunk Indian” stereotype. “We’re here because the creator sent us here. We’re here because we’re meant to be here. We’re here to help the world in seeing itself in a better light,” he says. “That all becomes part of our dances. Our songs are the messages that come through from our old people in that scenario, and I think sometimes that I strongly believe that that’s our purpose here in life, is to stabilize society and civilization.”
Alex continues to be involved with Indigenous sports today, including coaching and organizing tournaments, like the June Sports Day in Alert Bay, which continued after St. Michael’s Residential School closed down in 1974.
The tournament that began in his youth now attracts Indigenous and non-Indigenous teams each year. As a fishing village, Alert Bay has also attracted travellers and naval officers from incoming navy boats, who have joined the tournament with their own teams.
Guiding Indigenous sport has ultimately defined much of Alex’s career. In 1989, he co-founded the Aboriginal Sports and Recreation Association of B.C., where he served as executive director until 2009. He also helped found the Aboriginal Sport Circle, Canada’s national body for Indigenous sport and physical activity, in 1995.
Alex has been honoured for his contributions, including being enshrined in Victoria’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2017 and the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2018. This year, he was selected as one of the 2024 members for Canada’s Order of Sport.
Alex still serves as an Elder and senior advisor for Aboriginal Sport Circle and British Columbia’s Indigenous Sport, Physical Activity & Recreation Council — although “Elder” is a title he is still getting used to.
“I can see and look back to those young days in Kingcome that helped me find a ladder and climb it, and from a sporting point of view, it helped me really understand the value of how sport and play itself helped,” he says.
Willie has also received countless accolades over the decades for his achievements in sport and his activism. Among these are Tom Longboat Awards, recognizing Canada’s top Indigenous athletes, in 1967 and again in 1974. He has been inducted into seven sports halls of fame, including Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2018. In 1999, he was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2014, the Alberta Order of Excellence. In 2010, Willie was named as the first Indigenous Torch Bearer and an ambassador for the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games.
He says he always attributes his success to sport.
“I owe everything to sport, literally my life.”
I n 2009, Willie was chosen as one of the three commissioners for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Over five years, the commission travelled across the country, hearing the testimonies of more than 7,000 residential school survivors. “We heard about the kinds of stories that are excruciating, because they were so much your story, but also stories of how all our people who went through trauma as a child and through resilience survived to be healthy,” he says. “They succeeded.”
In 2015, the TRC published an extensive final report and released its 94 “Calls to Action.” Five of these calls pertain to Indigenous people’s participation in sport. These range from the creation of an Indigenous sports hall of fame and greater public education about Indigenous athletes throughout history to reducing barriers to participation and promoting inclusivity and long-term funding for the North American Indigenous Games.
They even call upon international sporting events such as the Olympics and Commonwealth Games to respect Indigenous protocols and include Indigenous communities in all aspects of the games.
A few years ago, Willie was asked to film a land acknowledgement for the Edmonton Oilers to be shown in Rogers Place before every home game. In the video, Willie is wearing his traditional feathered headdress and an orange ribbon shirt.
Orange shirts have become synonymous with residential school survivors and the “Every Child Matters” movement in honour of Orange Shirt Day, which was begun by survivor Phyllis Webstad, who had an orange shirt bought by her grandmother for her to wear on her first day at residential school that was taken away.
In the video message, Willie, speaking both Cree and English, welcomes the crowd and “all people of Turtle Island” to Treaty 6 territory, home to the Métis People of Alberta and Inuit and ancestral homelands of the Cree, Dene, Blackfoot, Saulteaux, and Nakota Sioux peoples. “The recognition of history on this land is an act of reconciliation and we honour those who walk with us,” he says.
As the Edmonton Oilers chased the Stanley Cup this past season, the video played at the beginning of every home game. When the Oilers won Game 6 at Rogers Place, millions of households in Canada heard Willie’s message on the television broadcast.
“[I got] a lot of texts from different people in America, and then in Norway, Finland, Sweden – the hockey countries – and even in Asia,” Willie says. “That’s the power of sport, right? One of the powers it has is to make change.”
For Willie, sport remains one of the most important tools for promoting reconciliation. But on a personal level, one of his most important memories of sport remains the experience of having a good coach — like the one he had at Ermineskin Residential School — something that encouraged him to create more opportunities in sport for Indigenous youth.
“I think when I heard about positive experiences, including mine, it was because someone had given you a different perspective that you’re not a bad person,” Willie says.
“They uplifted the positive side of your life and when you had that experience through the residential schools, that was a really fond memory for me to be able to ever experience that and cherish it today, that I want to share and pass on to young people.”