Call Me Indian, by Fred Sasakamoose

Call Me Indian (a book in which, very near the beginning, the writer explains why he calls himself “Indian,” why some First Nations people like to use that term and others don’t, and why white people shouldn’t use it) is the life story of Fred Sasakamoose, a Cree survivor of residential schools who was one of the first Indigenous players in the NHL. Though Saskamoose’s NHL career was short, his hockey career in the minor leagues and at many levels of the game was long, and his story is an interesting one. He died of Covid-19 in his 80s last year, and I’m glad he had a chance to tell his story while he could.

There are obvious echoes here of the novel Indian Horse, which is a favourite of mine — Sasakamoose did not know anything about Wagamese’s novel before it came out, but it turned out that his brother knew Richard Wagamese and that the author had been inspired by hearing about Sasakamoose’s career. While the story of Saul Indian Horse is not the same as the story of Fred Saskamoose, it’s easy to see the parallels, the ways in which the real-life Indigenous hockey player inspired the fictional one — as well as the ways in which a fiction writer would make changes to the true story to heighten plot and theme. This makes the two books interesting to read side by side, as a study in the differences between fiction and memoir — but also as two different ways of learning about what happened to some of the First Nations men who played our “national game.”