Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

The challenge of reconciliation • 353Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, andAboriginal–Crown relations.Sports: Inspiring lives, healthy communitiesThe Commission heard from Survivors that the opportunity to play sports at residentialschool made their lives more bearable and gave them a sense of identity,accomplishment, and pride. At the Alberta National Event, Survivor Theodore (Ted)Fontaine placed a bundle of mementoes into the Bentwood Box as expressions of reconciliation.It included a pair of baseball pants that he had worn at residential school.He said,These woollen baseball pants carry a story of their own … these are the baseballpants that I wore in 1957–58, as a fifteen-year-old incarcerated boy at the FortAlexander residential school.… Little did I know that my mom would treasureand keep them as a memento of her youngest boy. When I leave this land, theywon’t have anywhere else to go, so I hope the Bentwood Box keeps them well.…When we were little boys at Fort Alexander residential school, our only chance toplay hockey literally did save our lives. A lot of people here will attest to that. Asa young man, playing hockey saved me.… And later, playing with the SagkeengOld-Timers saved me again.… I came back twenty years later, fifteen yearslater and started playing with an old-timers hockey team in Fort Alexander.…In 1983, we ended up winning the first World Cup by an Indigenous team, inMunich, Germany.… So I’m including in this bundle, a story of the old-timers, abattalion of Anishinaabe hockey players who saved themselves and their friendsby winning, not only winning in Munich, Germany, but in three or four otherhockey tournaments in Europe.… People ask me, “Why don’t you just enjoy lifenow instead of working so hard on reconciliation and talking about residentialschools? What do you expect to achieve?” The answer is “freedom.” I am free. 257Later that same day, journalist Laura Robinson’s expression of reconciliation wasa copy of the documentary FrontRunners, which she produced for aptn, about someresidential school athletes who had made history. She said,In 1967, ten teenage First Nations boys, all good students and great runners,ran with the 1967 Pan Am Games torch, from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Winnipeg,a distance of 800 kilometres, which they did successfully.… But the young menwho delivered that torch to the stadium were turned away at the door. They werenot allowed in to watch those games. They were not allowed to run that last 400metres. One of them told me that he remembered being turned around, [and]put back on the bus to residential school.… In 1999, Winnipeg hosted the PanAm Games again and the organizers realized what had happened. They tracked