Tuckwin’s impact permeates North American Indigenous Athletic Hall of Fame ceremony
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Jerry Tuckwin served in the Haskell Indian Nations University athletic department in various capacities as a coach and administrator for more than 30 years, and had just as many students earn All-American honors in cross-country, track and field and marathon running during that time.
The awards, though, were never the focus. As he put it, “We’re kind of a humble people, and that’s how I was trying to approach that.”
“I tried to make sure that they came out of Haskell with good self-esteem,” said Tuckwin, of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation. “They had self-confidence and self-reliance, but the thing that I was most proud of was that they had a good feeling about who they are.”
But reflecting on his coaching career, Tuckwin said he wished he and Haskell had made more of what his young athletes accomplished.
“We’ve had some really good athletes go through Haskell, and we don’t show the honor that we probably should,” Tuckwin said.
That’s where the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame comes in.
The organization, founded in 2022 and holding its first banquet Saturday in Shakopee, Minnesota, isn’t the first of its kind — indeed, Tuckwin is a member since 2009 of the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame, which was founded at Haskell.
The NAIAHF, though, encompasses a broad swath of Indigenous athletes who have achieved national or statewide prominence in the United States or Canada, and including members of team inductees, will bring in 230 honorees as part of its first two classes: “Even besides being Indigenous, they’re the elite of the elite,” said Dan Ninham, a longtime teacher, coach and writer who runs the organization with his wife Susan, a fellow educator and principal.
“It’s not ‘We’re still here,'” Ninham added. “Sometimes you see that slogan out there with Indigenous people. They say ‘We’re still here.’ No, we’re here, you know. We’ve been here, and we’re here, we’re continuing to be here, and we’re excelling and we’re acknowledged. It’s just another initiative to acknowledge and recognize.”
Plenty of that recognition Saturday will center on Tuckwin, as not only the coach himself but his former runners like Alvin Begay Jr., Donny Belcourt, Edison Eskeets and James Nells are part of the inaugural class. All but Nells are expected to attend the ceremony. (Ninham said 60 inductees and 300 people overall should be present.)
“There are so many worthy inductees under his tutelage, former athletes, as we know,” Ninham said, “and again we’re looking at All-American level, national-champion level, and he’s got a number of them that are being recognized and are coming.”
Ernie Stevens Jr., who is getting inducted for his role as chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, played basketball at Haskell, another sport Tuckwin coached. And Haskell’s broader impact goes beyond Tuckwin; Ninham’s great-grandfather Martin Wheelock, a Hall of Famer himself and the inspiration for the NAIAHF in the first place, “is reported to have played football for one season at Haskell Institute in Kansas after leaving Carlisle,” according to his page on the NAIAHF website.
Tuckwin saw Haskell evolve from a high school — the form in which he attended it — into a junior college and then a university. He said he relished coaching runners and shaping young men throughout that time, even when it meant having to wake up them for a 6 a.m. run.
“I greatly enjoyed what I was doing and I did for right at 30 years, and it was always a pleasure just to go to school,” he said.
Tuckwin said it was a “godsend” for him to attend Haskell and “the same way with these young men.” He previously told the Journal-World when he received another honor — the Lamar Hunt Legacy Seat from the Kansas City Chiefs in 2019 — that Haskell was the first place he found stability after being orphaned at a young age.
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Tuckwin said that back when he was inducted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame, he wouldn’t go in until one of his own high school coaches, Tony Coffin, got the honor. And just as Tuckwin patterned aspects of his own coaching after Coffin and Lew Llewellyn, he has seen his former athletes follow in his footsteps. Nells, an All-American at Haskell who later ran at Central State in Oklahoma, has taught and coached at Riverside Indian School in that same state. Another athlete of Tuckwin’s at Haskell and a candidate for future NAIAHF induction is Rick Baker, who has presided over a cross-country dynasty at Hopi High in Arizona.
“They honor me for helping them get started and bringing coaching ideas to their programs,” Tuckwin said. “I think that they, in many ways, they kind of surpass what I did with them. They’re high school coaches, and it means an awful lot to me to see them have success. They’ll say — I’ve shown up when I was recruiting — ‘Coach, we did the same workouts that you did when you coached us.'”
Eskeets, as well, coached and taught art in Arizona and New Mexico but came to increased prominence in 2018 when he undertook a 330-mile run in remembrance of the Long Walk, the 1864 deportation and forced march of the Navajo when the U.S. government forced them to leave their homes. He published a book about his run called “Send a Runner” in 2021.
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Begay, now a rancher, went on to success as a competitive runner post-Haskell; his NAIAHF page lists a victory at the Duke City Marathon in 1988 and five more at what is now the Narbona Pass Classic. His daughter Alvina also became an avid high-level runner. Belcourt, who earned a scholarship at Oklahoma State following his time at Haskell, qualified twice for the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 1990s. This summer he was named the honorary starter for the Chippewa Cree Tribe’s Walk for Sobriety in his native Montana.
Tuckwin and his runners have in recent years held steadily growing reunions, with the most recent installment taking place at Haskell this year, he said. Llewellyn has even attended. (“They say they did it to honor me,” Tuckwin said, “but then I told myself, ‘We got to find somebody else to honor.'”)
The NAIAHF induction provides another opportunity for a few of them to get together.
“The biggest thing is to see them go on in life and carry this self-confidence, this self-esteem,” Tuckwin said, “and their demeanor in life just makes me feel really good, to see them carry on a little bit that I might have some kind of input into their lives. It makes me feel very good and I’m very proud of them.”
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