Former soccer star and legendary Island sports builder Alex Nelson sees the newly-opened Indigenous Sport Gallery at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame as a sort of connective tissue stretching across the years.
“It’s our responsibility to spread the word and connect our young people to what the older people did in sports,” said Nelson.
“That’s so our young people can start to believe in themselves and think to themselves: ‘If they made it, I can make it, too.’ I see the gallery as a building block in that sense.”
The gallery features B.C. Indigenous sports-related legends such as Terry Fox, Carey Price, Gino Odjick and Jack Poole. The Islanders in the gallery include Nelson, Olympic and Commonwealth Games track-medallist Angela Chalmers of Victoria, Paralympics multi-medallist wheelchair basketball player Richard Peter of Duncan, softball great Reg Underwood of Victoria and former lacrosse star Naomi Walser of Cobble Hill.
The B.C. Indigenous Sport Gallery opened this month and is described by the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame as the largest known permanent gallery in the world dedicated to Indigenous sport and one of the most comprehensive digitization projects in sports history. It is audacious and cutting edge and features 1,500 square feet of permanent exhibit space, a 360-degree virtual tour and video displays on 14 of the athletes honoured.
Peter was four years old when run over by a school bus in Duncan. Nicknamed the Bear for his upper-body strength, the Cowichan Secondary graduate led Canada to Paralympics gold medals in wheelchair basketball at Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and London 2012 and silver at Beijing 2008. In his video display in the gallery, Peter says: “A Victoria demonstration team came up to Duncan and introduced me to Para sports. At first, I didn’t want to participate. But I’m glad I came out and gave it a try and the rest is history. I was happy to represent Canada, happy to represent my sport and happy to represent my family and my community back home in Cowichan Tribes.”
Not every athlete will reach his prominence, of course, and Peter adds in his video: “Whatever your abilities are, just go out there and have fun.”
Underwood was a standout on the Victoria Senior A men’s softball teams of the 1970s and 1980s that won national championships and also world championship and Pan Am Games gold medals representing Canada.
“Working as a team is what life is about. I think sports is the avenue to life. Sports is everything to me. I’m still doing it today at 72,” Underwood says, in his video display in the gallery.
Believed to be the world’s first virtual Indigenous sports gallery, it was funded by the federal government, Department of Canadian Heritage, province of B.C., the B.C. Arts Council and the 100 Ravens.
The B.C. Sports Hall of Fame is located inside B.C. Place Stadium in Vancouver. Information on the Indigenous Sport Gallery is at indigenoussportgallery.ca.
