NHL's first Indigenous player dies due to COVID
Fred Sasakamoose, a Saskatchewan-raised residential school survivor who went on to play in the National Hockey League, died Tuesday at age 86 after being hospitalized with COVID-19.
Sasakamoose, born on the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation near Shell Lake, was the first Indigenous player in the NHL.
“Fred passed away at 3 o'clock Saskatchewan time,” his son Neil said in a video posted to Facebook. “I just want to thank everyone for everything you've done.”
Sasakamoose suited up for 11 games with the Chicago Blackhawks in 1953-54 — he later recalled famed broadcaster Foster Hewitt calling down the penalty box at Maple Leaf Gardens, asking “How the hell do you pronounce your name?” — and spent several more years in minor pro and senior hockey.
He later served as band chief, and spent time speaking to and working with kids and teens, imparting lessons he learned.
He helped build a sports framework in his community following his playing days, and worked with the NHL's Diversity Task Force and the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
Sasakamoose spent much of his childhood at St. Michael's Indian Residential School in Duck Lake. He publicly acknowledged in 2012, during a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in Prince Albert, that he had been sexually abused by other children at the school when he was nine years old.
A couple years before that, a truck collected him at his home and sent him to Duck Lake.
“They changed our clothes, cut our hair,” Sasakamoose — an Order of Canada recipient and an inductee into the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame — said in 2007. “I had braids; they cut all that off. I was to become a white man. They told us not to speak our language.”
When he was inducted into the Saskatchewan Hockey Hall of Fame in 2012, he professed both pride and humility.
“It was only for 11 games, but those 11 games meant so much,” he said.