‘You’re Black Hawks property.’ Hope, pain and fear on the road to the NHL

Excerpt from Call Me Indian: From the Trauma of Residential School to Becoming the NHL’s First Treaty Indigenous Player. Hockey trailblazer Fred Sasakamoose, a centre who played 11 games for the Chicago Black Hawks in the 1953-54 season, died in November at age 86 from complications related to COVID-19:

My moosum made me feel special. It was as if he saw something in me, and without words he let me know that he believed in this vision. So I was not surprised when, one cold winter’s day, he put me in a sled, took me down to the frozen slough, and produced a pair of bobskates. Before we left the cabin, he had dressed me with five pairs of socks under my moccasins. Now, at the lake, he strapped the double blades onto my feet, picked me up, and set me down on the ice. When I fell, he gently raised me and set me on my feet once more. He did that again and again and again.

I would later discover there was a little French community in Debden, not far from the reserve, that had an outdoor rink where some of the men played hockey. From time to time, Grandpa would make the trip into town to watch the games. And I guess, for some reason, as he looked at the players, he thought of me.

Day after winter day, Moosum and I would head down to the lake in the early afternoon. Sometimes Frank would come with us, but there was only one pair of skates, and they were too small for Frank’s feet. Frank would slide around the ice as I shuffled forwards on my blades, but he soon became bored of this and left Grandpa and me to our new afternoon routine.

As soon as we got to the slough, Grandpa would shovel off the snow and tie my blades on. Once I had started to skate, he’d cut a hole in the ice. He’d settle himself on an overturned bucket and drop a fishing line into the water, while I skated around and around and around. Sometimes, if it was really cold, he’d go to the shore after an hour or so and build a little fire so I could warm myself before heading back onto the ice.

One afternoon, just before we headed home for the day, Grandpa disappeared into a stand of willows on the shore of the slough. He came out with a long willow branch. That evening, sitting in the dim light of the oil lamp, he began to whittle, stripping the bark and smoothing the surface. Then he bent one end and placed the branch on the stove to dry. The next afternoon, when we got to the slough, he handed me my new hockey stick and showed me how to push a frozen cow patty across the ice with it. I didn’t know it at the time, but Grandpa had just turned me into a hockey player. I played with the stick and “puck” for hours, until it was time for Grandpa and me to return to the cabin and our chores before the sun dropped from the sky.

This was my world. A nehiyaw world. A nehiyaw life.

It was not easy. Underlying everything we did were the rules and regulations laid out by the Indian Act, enforced by our local Indian agent. He was the one who issued our treaty cards and the passes so my father could leave the reserve to work and to trade. He was the one who doled out the coupons we had to use to get our ration of sugar or tea from the reservation store. He was the one who determined who would receive farm equipment or building supplies. This white man was the one who made all the rules on our reserve. As Indians, we didn’t have the rights of Canadian citizens. We couldn’t even own property or vote. And we were poor, that’s the truth. But I didn’t know that.

What I knew was that home was full of song, dance, and tradition. It was full of wonder and mystery. It was full of family, love, and community.

And then one day, in 1941, when I was just seven, all of that was taken away.

Frank and I were separated. We were marched into a room where nuns set about cutting off our beautiful braids with huge pairs of scissors and shaving off the rest of our hair with clippers. Then we were forced to take our clothes off and shuffle into a windowless brick-walled room.

There, coal oil, the stuff we used in our lamps at home, was poured over our bare heads. The foul-smelling liquid dripped into my ears, stung my eyes, burned down my back.

Hot steam began to billow out from a pipe near the ceiling of the small room. Water, soap, scrub brushes. After all those hours in the filthy truck, I guess some of the kids needed a good bath. But this wasn’t a bath. It felt like those nuns and priests were trying to scrub the colour right off our skin. As if they didn’t care that my mother made sure we were washed every day, our hair clean and brushed, carefully braided, neatly tied at the ends.

I have no idea how long we were kept in that steamy shower room, but it felt like hours. We came out half-blind, our eyes red and running, our skin raw. Finally, we were taken into another room and given stiff brown-striped canvas pants, coarse shirts, running shoes. Those beautiful wraparound moccasins my mother had made for me were gone. All my other clothes too. I have no idea what happened to them.

I don’t remember if we were ever given anything to eat that night. All I remember is the huge room filled with tiny cots and crowded with boys. I had never seen so many children in my life.

Each cot was stamped with a number. Mine was 437. I noticed this number on all my clothes, my shoes, my bedding too. I would come to realize that it even replaced my name. As the priests and nuns got to know us, they’d use our “Christian” names. But mostly we were numbers.

The truth was I had been homesick my whole damn life. I had been willing to put up with that if I was going to play pro. But to be in the same position I was in last year? To be all alone, away from home, with my dream no closer than it was a year ago?

I thought about that nickname, Chief. The silence that sometimes greeted me in the dressing rooms or on the train trips. Was part of this because I was Indian? Were they telling me I would have to be twice as good as any white rookie if I was going to get a spot?

I was so frustrated. And I couldn’t help thinking of that first meeting I’d had with Bill Tobin, two years before, at my first training camp in Pembroke. Signing that C Form. I now wondered about how quickly I had agreed, how few questions I had asked. We Indians trusted in the word of a man — we had never fared well when môniyâwak insisted we sign papers with them.

I’d never considered money when I thought about the possibility of playing hockey. None of the young players did. We just wanted to play. And we followed Tobin’s instructions. We never talked about how much we’d been given or how much we’d been promised. I had no idea if other players were being paid more or less than me. I was beginning to see that all that secrecy probably didn’t do us any good.

Yet now, sitting there with a half-packed suitcase, I knew it wasn’t the money that was troubling me. It was that word Tobin had used.

“You’re Black Hawks property.”

St. Michael’s had considered me property too. They told me what to do, where to go, when I could leave them. When I had to come back. They thought I was theirs, that I no longer belonged to my parents, my family, my community. And now I apparently belonged to the Hawks. I’d traded in number 437 for number 21. The Hawks were moving me about like some residential school kid.