By Jeff D'Andrea

Hockey Day in Beardy’s drums up great hockey memories for Sasakamoose

Jan 22, 2018 | 11:00 AM

Fred Sasakamoose sat in the top row of the Willow Cree Memorial Sports Centre on Saturday, taking in the Hockey Day in Beardy’s celebration. He watched the young initiation and atoms practice with the Beardy’s Midget AAA Blackhawks, and the bantams battle in a friendly game against Meadow Lake.

“I think it’s one of the key things today, to start a program where minor hockey is one of the biggest parts of our communities to develop—especially in Beardy’s,” the 84-year-old Sasakamoose said. “They have a minor hockey system which is great from AAA, AA and A. I was just watching the bantams play and the little ones also, the atoms.

“It’s wonderful to see that. I wish some of the communities in my areas would have a program like this. It helps a lot of people, younger people with the issues of drugs and gangs and what not. This is the key place to help the healing situation. It needs a lot of attention.”

Sasakamoose had much more humble beginnings to the game of hockey than the organized minor hockey program structure put in place like in places like Beardy’s or Prince Albert.

He grew up in the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation during the depression. No electricity, no running water.

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His first pair of skates were his moccasins with a bob skate blade strapped on underneath, and five pairs of socks to keep his feet from freezing. His first rink was a frozen slough his grandfather Alexander would take him to by toboggan. His first stick was whittled out of wood by grandpa’s pocket knife. His first puck was a piece of frozen horse droppings.

“Grandpa would be sitting there; he could never talk. But when I fell down, he would come and put me back on my feet very gently,” Sasakamoose said of his deaf and mute grandfather. “I think that was one of the greatest things. That’s when the hockey started.”

Little did anyone know at that time that little Fred Sasakamoose would grow up to be the man who blazed the trail as being the first Indigenous-born player to play in the National Hockey League. Or that he would be granted the Order of Canada on Dec. 30, 2017.

When he was first told about receiving the Order of Canada, Sasakamoose was unfamiliar with the award, or the significance behind it.

“I never knew what the Order of Canada was all about, I didn’t,” Sasakamoose said. “And all of a sudden this lady called me up and said ‘Freddy, an hour ago you were elected for the Order of Canada’ and ‘I said ‘what, what is that?’”

After the weekend had passed, Sasakamoose phoned back and learned that it’s “the highest award you can get in Canada.”

“I said ‘the highest?’ And he said ‘yes.’ My gosh, I said ‘do I deserve it? To get that award?’ But I understood then at that time the award itself, only a few people get it and I’m one of the few people that got it this year,” Sasakamoose said. “I’m very so grateful to receive an honour like that, especially in Canada, but yet, I couldn’t do it alone. My surroundings have always been so great around me. I think, you have to look at other people.”

Saturday at the Beardy’s and Okemasis Cree Nation was a reunion of sorts for Sasakamoose.

When he was six years old in 1940, Sasakamoose was taken to St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake. In the past, Sasakamoose has publically discussed the abuse he received at the school. But on Saturday, he kept the conversations hockey-related.

Father Georges Roussel came from Montreal and taught the hockey program. Sasakamoose credits him to shaping him into a competitor.

“They created a hockey player out of me,” Sasakamoose said. “It was rough and tough, oh yeah, when you go to residential school.

“I think for the beginning of the life in hockey, I think we had the right teacher. [Roussel taught me] behaviour and discipline. He said ‘I’ll make a champion out of you Freddy.’ He did.”

Sasakamoose won the 1948 Northern Saskatchewan Midget Hockey Championships with the St. Michael’s Mallards. During Saturday’s Hockey Day in Beardy’s, Sasakamoose included his old Mallards’ jersey in his large display of relics from his playing days to celebrate the victory.

“That’s when we realized that there was a place for us, that we could compete in this world at the same level as the white kids,” Sasakamoose said. “To love the game, to play the game. I think the priest was always our guideline to a better life.”

Another big influence in Sasakamoose’s hockey career was George Vogan, Sasakamoose’s billet and the general manager of the Moose Jaw Canucks in the Western Canada Junior Hockey League where he played four years of junior hockey.

Back in the old Moose Jaw Arena, Vogan would pull Sasakamoose aside and point at the lights that were 40 feet off the ground.

“He said ‘it’s not impossible to touch that,’” Sasakamoose recalls. “White man sometimes, you don’t understand the language when speaks. I said ‘40 feet, this guy’s crazy.’”

It took Sasakamoose a while to understand what Vogan was trying to say. But he found out after he became the first ever Indigenous player in the National Hockey League in 1954. He reported to the Chicago Blackhawks after his final year with the Canucks was over.

Sasakamoose went to take his first skate at Chicago Stadium, the original ‘Madhouse on Madison.’ He looked around the three-level stadium and the 18,000 seats it had. Then he looked a little higher.

“I looked a little further—the lights… that’s what George was talking about,” Sasakamoose said. “The ceiling, you touched it. Your dream, [now] the reality. That’s what George was talking about. I touched the ceiling and the lights, he said it wasn’t impossible and it’s true.

“That’s what hockey means to me.”

Hockey Day in Beardy’s

Hockey Day in Beardy’s featured two games on Saturday. The Bantam Blackhawks fell 9-1 to the Meadow Lake Stampeders.

The Legends Native Great Hawks beat Mixed Blood 8-2 in the senior game.

Jeff.dandrea@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @jeff_paNOW