photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Shiloh LeBeau, holding her National Intercollegiate Boxing title from 2015, is pictured at her home on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2024. LeBeau is a Haskell Indian Nations University alumna and will soon be inducted into the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame.

Lawrence native Shiloh LeBeau is no stranger to turning adversity into success.

LeBeau, who is Navajo and Lakota, was born in Lawrence and has lived here for the vast majority of her life. She spent her youth in and out of juvenile detention before becoming a teen mother at 15.

But despite those challenges, LeBeau has stacked up wins — first in her personal life, and eventually as an amateur athlete. She graduated high school early, took up boxing initially as a way to get healthy and in just her first year of college at Haskell Indian Nations University in 2015 became the first full-time student from Kansas to win a National Intercollegiate Boxing title.

A few years later in 2018, she did it again, in both instances going up against athletes from much larger universities from across the country. She’s since racked up two Kansas City Regional Golden Gloves championships and has even taken a stab at qualifying for the United States Olympic team.

photo by: Contributed

Shiloh LeBeau, right, is named Kansas City Golden Gloves Champion.

“My other belts, I love them a lot; it’s not that I take anything away from them,” LeBeau told the Journal-World. “But that (first) one means the most to me because that belt is what made history for the state of Kansas and for Haskell Indian Nations University.”

Now she can add yet another accomplishment to the list: becoming a member of the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame. LeBeau is set to be inducted into the hall in March, off the strength of those collegiate and amateur championships and her ongoing advocacy work outside of the ring.

It’s a relatively new hall of fame, having honored its first inductees in 2022, so LeBeau gets to be part of one of the first few classes. She’ll join fellow honorees like St. Louis Blues coach Craig Berube, who is Cree, and fellow Lawrence connection Billy Mills, Oglala Lakota, a gold medalist in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

That’s good company for someone who’s just 34 and still has yet to embark on a professional boxing career.

“I do plan on going pro, just not right now,” LeBeau said. “But being able to go from a little run-down boxing gym to, in two months, I’m going to go and get put in the Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame, that’s incredible. It’s amazing to even just say.”

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LeBeau began boxing with the Haskell Boxing Club before she’d even enrolled at the university, which she attended from 2015 to 2018. But a successful amateur boxing career isn’t all there is to LeBeau’s story. After her first National Intercollegiate Boxing championship win, she was the subject of a short documentary following her as she balanced being a full-time student and working mother with training for a repeat title.

It was that film that opened the door for a platform beyond boxing, LeBeau said. She was later invited to speak to a group of incoming Haskell students after graduating, and the opportunities to tell her story only expanded from there.

“I was just lucky that I had the mindset of ‘I need to straighten up; I need to do better for myself, and I have to do better for my child,'” LeBeau said. “And anything I do with boxing, that’s what I think about is where I was before and where I don’t want to be again — and where I do not want to see my son.”

One of those opportunities was as a panelist at the 2019 Teen Vogue Awards in Los Angeles, where LeBeau spoke about women in sports and the balance of succeeding personally and professionally while building up the Native American community.

On top of all of that, LeBeau frequently travels to Native American reservations, schools, juvenile detention facilities, foster homes, military bases and other places to tell her story and provide mentoring services to people young and old.

photo by: Contributed

Shiloh LeBeau greets kids during a visit to the Navajo Nation reservation.

Part of that work goes beyond just speaking about her life and extends to encouraging the groups she visits to live a healthier lifestyle through sports and exercise. She’s helped with that goal through her partnership with Nike as an “N7” ambassador. LeBeau said the N7 initiative is based around honoring Native American culture and identity, and the money generated by its collections goes straight back into Native American communities.

It’s through that partnership that LeBeau is often able to bring along some merchandise to hand out when she travels to speak to kids about the importance of developing good, healthy habits.

“Especially with Native Americans, we deal with drugs and alcohol, but with our medical crisis, diabetes is the biggest killer among Native American communities,” LeBeau said. “So that’s what we really try to aim toward is having a fit, active, healthy lifestyle, especially at a young age.”

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There will be yet another honor coming up even sooner than her hall of fame induction; LeBeau said she’s set to fly out to Las Vegas in early February, coinciding with the week of the Super Bowl, to be honored as part of the United Natives Inspiration Awards. That event will be a collaboration between professional sports teams from the NFL, NBA and NHL, she said.

Beyond those two pending accomplishments, LeBeau said she’s got plenty of goals she still wants to accomplish before hanging up her gloves. One of them is to lead the way with efforts to put together a Native American Olympic team that may one day be recognized as its own sovereign competitor.

Another goal will be to reopen a Haskell Boxing Club somewhere in Lawrence. The university’s club has been closed for almost a decade, LeBeau said, but she wants to bring back a place that “saved” so many young people who were struggling. When she does reach that goal, LeBeau said she hopes to able to pay it forward by offering free classes to all.

“When I sit down and think about everything that I’ve done and everything that I still want to do, I still stop and think sometimes, ‘Dang, am I really 34?'” LeBeau said. “I still feel like I have so much more to go, and being able to have these different platforms and have a voice for not just myself but for my family, for Native America, for women, that’s a big thing for me.”

LeBeau said of all her victories so far, though, she’s most happy about one in particular: that her son is thriving. He’s by all accounts a hardworking kid, who will soon turn 18 and is preparing to graduate from high school. At 15, he was already finding his first part-time job, and LeBeau said he is often her first and greatest supporter.

“It’s an amazing feeling knowing that I wasn’t supposed to do anything, so to speak,” LeBeau said. “Especially being a teen mom — being dealt the hand that I was — I’m not supposed to be where I’m at, but I wanted better for myself, for my son, for my family, for my nieces and nephews.”