A lasting legacy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/05/2021 (1878 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call Me Indian is not only an excellent memoir about the first Indian hockey player with treaty status in the National Hockey League. Just as importantly, it is also the most moving and plain-spoken account to date, from the inside, of the Indigenous experience in the racist white world that constituted much of both the NHL and the Canada of Fred Sasakamoose’s day — which was not so very long ago.

Sasakamoose was with the Chicago Blackhawks for 11 games in the 1953 season before being sent down to the minors, never to return to the bigs. Sasakamoose gives us a vivid, ice-level depiction of playing with Blackhawks such as Billy Moisienko, Pete Conacher and Ken Wharram, and against greats such as Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe.

That story, while well told and interesting, is secondary. The hot heart of this story begins and ends within the wider Indian experience.

Sasakamoose insists on the term “Indian” for a number of reasons, fully explained in his prefatory author’s note, and the narration keeps faith with his intention: to trace his roots and tell his story from the inside. Thus each chapter’s title is given first in Cree, then in English; similarly, dialogue with his immediate family is often written first in Cree and then in English translation.

In the two opening chapters, the warmest parts of the memoir, Sasakamoose takes us through a lovingly depicted childhood on the Sandy Lake reserve in Saskatchewan, tracing his family’s distinguished background and giving us his heritage, his Indigenous and English names and those of his parents, grandparents and great grandparents. From here to the end of his story he makes it pungently clear how, throughout his life, the vital nexus of family and place have formed his identity. Sasakamoose traces the profound and enduring influence of his origins, looking back to his deaf-mute grandfather — his moosum, Alexan — who teaches him how to hunt and fish, and who first ties skates to his feet.

That is why the horrific third and fourth chapters, about his deeply scarring experience at St. Michael’s residential school, inflect all of the subsequent chapters and, in sharp contrast to his childhood at Sandy Lake, frame a significant part of his adult experience of the wider white world. Sasakamoose’s graphic recollection of every imaginable form of abuse at St. Michael’s will stand for decades to come as one of the most damning indictments of the residential school system.

At the age of seven, Sasakamoose remembers a grain truck that suddenly pulls up outside of his cabin on the reserve. Three men get out: the reserve’s Indian agent, an RCMP officer and “a pale white man with a hard face… wearing a long black robe that billows slightly behind him as he walks” who says something to his family. Then his mother, father and grandfather are elbowed aside or pushed to the ground, and Sasakamoose and his brother Frank are thrown into the back of the truck, joining a group of crying children for an hours-long jolting ride to the residential school, where they would remain for two years without returning home.

The only redeeming feature of St. Michael’s for Sasakamoose saves his life — a priest who sees his talent as a hockey player and drives him to succeed in the sport at every level. The scars of his residential school experience persist, but Sasakamoose goes on to become an award-winning player and a celebrated storyteller, an inspiration to Indigenous communities across the country.

Fred Sasakamoose died in 2020 of COVID-related symptoms. His legacy is not ancient history; thanks to this memoir, his continuing presence will become all the more widely and deeply felt.

Neil Besner taught Canadian literature at the University of Winnipeg for 30 years, and has avidly watched hockey for twice as long.