Running to remember a friend, move on

Thomas Wesley found another way to honour Casey Noon after delivering the eulogy at his funeral 20 years ago.
Wesley coached Noon as a runner for four years before his untimely death, when he was still in his late teens.
A Sandy Lake band member, Noon competed in high school track meets and marathons in Manitoba as part of the Red Lake Native Youth Running Club.
“When we lost Casey, that changed my life,” Wesley said Nov. 30, a day after the 20th anniversary of Noon’s death. “It affected our whole youth group.”
Wesley still thinks of Noon. “He was a very good runner,” said Wesley, a Cat Lake member. “He was something special. I thought … ‘How can we honour the memory of (him)?’ ”
Wesley called an old running club friend, Johnny Mamakeesick of Keewaywin. Together they had participated in a Sacred Run across much of Canada in 1991. Now Wesley proposed a relay run of more than 300 kilometres, from Pelican Falls to Red Lake, in memory of Noon.
Mamakeesick agreed to co-ordinate the run and approached Casey’s mother, Tinia, with the idea. It would be the right thing to do, she agreed.
While remembering Noon “and all other youth we have lost through residential school, alcohol and drugs,” the run would at the same time represent breaking free of the past; “to put closure on the whole residential school issue and to move on with our lives for the benefit of future generations,” said the organizers.
“Most of us are intergenerational survivors of residential school,” explained Wesley, whose father David attended the former Pelican Falls Indian Residential School. “We’ve seen the cycle of abuses.
“The young people of today have to look beyond that,” he advised. “It’s all right to remember the past, to give us the strength to say we can overcome and still survive, but there’s a time when you can’t just survive any more.
“The last 20 yrs of my life I’ve been surviving. But this run, it’s about thriving.”
Henry Baker of Mishkeegogamang set out from Pelican Falls at dusk.
After a pipe ceremony, smudging and a hand drum song, Wesley had passed Baker a staff to carry as the first runner. The staff, bearing ribbons of the four sacred colours, would be passed from one runner to the next.
“There’s a lot of people praying for us out there right now,” Wesley told Baker and two other Mishkeegogamang youth present for the start of the journey, Allison and Donovan Mekanak. “So when you carry the staff, hold it with pride and respect. This is a sacred event.”
Indigenous people traditionally ran to carry messages over long distances, said Wesley.
“We’re born natural runners; running is in our blood. We’re strong.”
Wesley found it fitting to first pass the staff to Baker, a recent graduate of the ‘new’ Pelican Falls First Nations High School and a North American Indigenous Games medalist in track. Baker’s long stride covered the entire six-kilometre Pelican road, more than the planned two kilometres at a time.
Halfway to Dinorwic, Robert Sandberg of Wabaseemoong and Turry Wesley from Kenora joined the relay. The team of runners and its support vehicles reached Wabigoon the first night.
“I just didn’t want to run into any wildlife,” Baker said of running in the dark, when highway traffic is lightest.
Mamakeesick expressed relief just to survive that first night.
“I haven’t run for long time, probably over 15 years, because I was always drinking; I always got drunk,” he explained. “When I was running the first kilometre, I felt like I was going to die … I thought I was going to have a heart attack. But I thought in my mind ‘At least if you’re going to die from something, die from doing something really good, something that’s meaningful.’
“When I saw those young people running, it gave me the drive, the inspiration to keep on going.”
The group rested in Vermilion Bay the next night, welcomed Red Lake’s Shawn Mason to the running team in Ear Falls and overnighted again in Wabauskang.
Pressing on despite minor injuries, exhaustion, icy roads and blowing snow impressed people they met along the way, even those who thought they were “crazy” for running in those conditions.
“One family in Wabauskang invited us for supper and we didn’t really know them,” noted Wesley.
“One person said he lost his son not too long ago, and he was touched we were running to deliver (our) message.”
When it was time to leave Wabauskang the following morning, the runners found snow had piled up and the road wasn’t plowed. They were stuck for more than an hour.
Wesley had expected the group to cover the 317 kilometres to Red Lake in at most three days. Now it would take four.
“There’s something about the number four that’s sacred – the four directions, the four colours,” he said. “It had to be that way.
The run ended with a police escort into Red Lake and a supper and sharing circle at the local friendship centre, where the running club Casey Noon belonged to started.
“I encourage you not to use any drugs or alcohol because there’s a lot of that nowadays on every reserve and it’s killing our youth,” Baker said. “I lost two cousins in the past year due to that kind of stuff.
“Somebody has got to take leadership on the reserve,” he said. “Be that leader.”
It’s the reason he took up the challenge of the relay run when asked, and finished it with a sore knee.
“Coming back (into Red Lake), I remembered Casey and that hurt,” Wesley said.
Wesley said for him the run did bring closure to past hurts.
“It was probably the best experience in my life,” he said.
“The best thing is we rose up to the occasion, we completed the run and we delivered the message. I’m so proud of those young people.”
He recalled being on the road the last night of the run.
“We were running in a blizzard and the highway was closed. But the pavement was so soft, it was as if we were gliding; as if something was carrying us.”
–with files from Wawatay TV producer Victor Lyon