Hockey a lifesaver for the ‘Grand Chief’
When Willie Littlechild gets off the plane from Toronto, he plans to go directly to see Clare Drake.
“I want to go visit him and thank him again for his influence on my life,” said the man named Grand Chief of the Confederacy of Treaty Six Nations in 2016, who was introduced as a member of the Class of 2018 into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame on Thursday.
“It starts out in residential school and here it’s ended up in Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame,” said the emotional Littlechild of surviving the national disgrace that inflicted so much suffering on Indigenous youth.
“Hockey saved my life coming out of residential school. I was going down the wrong path in terms of alcohol and drinking. I could have ended up on skid row somewhere, beaten to death or drunk, but hockey was always there,” he said in a telephone interview.
“One time I remember I was going to quit school at the University of Alberta. I’d had it. Clare Drake phoned me. I was at home on the reservation. I said ‘I quit.’ He said ‘We have a practice at 5 p.m. and you better be on the ice.’
“That was one of the biggest turns in my life. I was probably headed for places a lot of my friends and my people ended up,” he said of Drake who was recently inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“Hockey gave me all the breaks in my life, including a broken leg. And that was what got me into law school.
“Coach Drake had a rule that nobody could ski. My roommate was a downhill racer. After exams one year he said ‘Come on Chief, let’s go skiing.’ I said ‘No I can’t. Coach said no skiing.’ He said ‘Come on. Exams are done. It’s spring skiing.’ So I went. Sure enough, I broke my leg really badly.
“I couldn’t skate for six years, actually. But I ended up coaching hockey and going to NHL Management School, where everyone was a lawyer. So I figure ‘I have to be a lawyer to stay in hockey. So I became a lawyer.”
One of the things that tickled me about this is that Littlechild showed up for the event wearing his tribal headdress. A picture of him wearing it will accompany the text on his plaque in the Hall of Fame that’s now located at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary.
Thousands of school kids tour through there every year, and long after Littlechild has died, there will be a young Indigenous kid who will notice that there’s a guy pictured in a headdress and read the words about the “Pioneering role model, organizer and advocate for Indigenous sport in Canada that spans over five decades.
“Wilton Littlechild was born in 1944 and raised by his grandparents on the Ermineskin Cree reservation at Maskwacis, Alta. Guided by his grandfather’s traditional cultural knowledge from an early age, his grandmother also encouraged Wilton to appreciate the value of formal education.
“He attended residential schools from 1951 to 1964 and played a wide variety of sports, including hockey, football, baseball and swimming. Finding solace in sports helped Wilton to find the strength and resilience to endure an environment of institutional abuse and separation from his family,” it begins.
Littlechild didn’t get into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame because of his play with Drake’s Golden Bears of hockey, or as the student manager of Drake’s football Bears the year Clare became Super Coach on the cover of Time Magazine (Canada) for taking both football and hockey teams to national titles the same year.
Littlechild had the claim to fame of being with both teams.
Willie isn’t going into the Hall of Fame for making the Golden Bears swim team after he busted his leg skiing or for founding and coaching the first all-Indigenous junior hockey team in Alberta or for organizing referee and coaching clinics throughout the province.
He didn’t even make it into the Hall for winning the Tom Longboat award recognizing outstanding Aboriginal athletes and their contributions to sport in Canada.
He didn’t make it by earning a master’s degree in physical education, or by becoming the first Treaty Nation Person in Alberta to become a lawyer, or end up an MP, or for working with the United Nations to advocate for Indigenous sport and global Indigenous rights movement.
But put it all together and Willie Littlechild is definitely deserving of the honour.
When I suggested the best part of it might be that Indigenous kid on a tour of the Hall seeing the picture of the guy in the headdress above his credentials, I could hear Littlechild beaming on the other end of the phone.
“I really hope it does that. We need a lot of help. Our kids, our youth need that. Sport has the power to do that. If they can be motivated even by seeing my picture in there with the headdress, it would be amazing.”