Beverly Beaver with the Oshweken Mohawks in 1976-77.Hockey Hall of Fame
Bev Beaver competed at the highest level of women’s hockey and softball for more than three decades. She was also a notable five-pin bowler.
“I was born a sportsperson,” she once said.
Ms. Beaver, a Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve, won countless awards and championships on the ice and on the diamond. In 1980, she was named winner of the Tom Longboat Award as the best aboriginal athlete in Canada.
She was nicknamed Golden Arm for her pitching ability and was once called the “Babe Ruth of the Mohawks.”
Ms. Beaver, who has died at 77, played in an era when opportunities for girls and women in sports were limited. Softball only became an Olympic sport in 1996, while women’s hockey was first contested at the Winter Olympics in 1998.
A quiet athlete who preferred to lead by example, she was reticent in talking about her successes, a duty which more often fell to her husband, a teacher and school principal, as well as manager of her softball team.
She first won acclaim as a 13-year-old skating on a boys’ bantam team, though she was only allowed to play in exhibition games. Girls were barred from league and championship play.
She learned the game at a young age by joining boys playing shinny on the reserve’s frozen Mill Pond.
“Nobody else that I knew liked to play hockey,” she once told academic researcher Janice Forsyth, now a professor at the University of British Columbia. “I used to put my hair up under my hat and I used to go down there and they would think I was a boy. They asked me what my name was and I said, Billy. So that’s how I would get to play because they’d think I was a boy.”
After puberty began, she taped down her breasts so she could maintain her charade and continue playing.
Her softball career began at about the same young age when her sister-in-law suggested she attend a tryout. She did not hang up her cleats until she was in her 40s, by which time she had won a championship on the same team as her daughter.
Beverly Henhawk was born on the Six Nations Reserve on Oct. 22, 1947. She was one of eight children (two boys, six girls) born to the former Norma Charlotte Loft and Reginald James Henhawk, a farmer’s son who worked as a labourer.
She played soccer as well as hockey, but after her parents purchased the family’s first television set in 1955 she became determined to play the sport, learning how to skate and stickhandle while avoiding the bodychecks thrown by older boys.
Her first organized women’s team was the Six Nations Maidens, playing out of a nearby arena in Hagersville, Ont. The novelty of women’s hockey lured hundreds of paying spectators to the small rink.
Playing centre and wearing glasses on the ice, Ms. Beaver was an unstoppable scoring machine.
In the inaugural Ontario Ladies Hockey Association tournament in 1966, Six Nations defeated the Forest Lakettes 11-2 and the Ajax Shellettes by 4-1 before crushing the Petrolia Peppers by 12-1 to claim the title. Ms. Beaver was named the tournament’s most valuable player.
In 1967, she led her league in scoring with 35 points in 12 games. After the five-team league folded, Ms. Beaver joined Burlington in the Central Ontario Ladies Hockey Association, where she emerged as the star player, leading the Burlingtonettes to a league championship in 1968. Many more championships were to come with the Burlington Gazettes and Burlington Golden Hawks, where one of her young teammates was a teenaged Angela James, who went on to become a superstar of women’s hockey.
By 1992, Ms. Beaver, 44, was playing on a line with her 25-year-old daughter for the Brantford Lady Blues.
“She never calls me ‘Mom’ on the ice,” Ms. Beaver said, “but all the other girls do.”
Her prowess on skates was matched by her power on the mound and at bat for softball teams, most notably the Ohsweken Mohawks. It was a sport she learned as a young girl in the stands.
“We’d go to softball games in Ohsweken when I was little,” Ms. Beaver once said. “My mother would load a carload of us kids in the car and go watch softball games.”
Among the highlights of her softball career were outstanding performances in all-Indigenous tournaments.
In 1979, she led the Thomas Corner team from Hagersville to the Canadian native women’s fastball championship at Kelowna, B.C. The Ontario team went undefeated in five games in the 15-team tourney, winning the title when Ms. Beaver tossed a three-hitter against Saanich, B.C., in the final. Thomas Corner won 9-2 with her catcher, Helen Lickers, hitting a grand slam in the fifth inning.
Ms. Beaver led all hitters in the tournament with a .562 batting average. She was named the best pitcher and most valuable player.
The Ohsweken Mohawks then went on to claim the continental title in a 32-team tournament in Saskatoon.
Three years later, she threw a four-hit shutout as the Ohsweken Mohawks defeated the Mistawasis Blue Jays of Saskatchewan by 10-0 in the championship final at Saanich. Earlier in the tournament, she threw a one-hitter in a 10-1 defeat of the North Battleford (Sask.) Stingers. She was named a tournament all-star.
Her athletic career earned her a spot on the Olympic torch relay in 2009 on its way to Vancouver and Whistler for the Winter Olympics in the new year. When protesters threatened to block the route through the reserve, organizers had runners carry the torch around a bingo hall‘s parking lot.
“We’re athletes,” Ms. Beaver said. “We’re not here to be political.”
Ms. Beaver died on April 19. She leaves her daughter, Pamela Beaver; three grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and three sisters. She was predeceased by her husband, George Beaver, who died in 2013 at the age of 82. She was also predeceased by two brothers, two sisters and her son, George Warren Beaver, who died in 2011 at 47.
In 1995, she was inducted into the Brantford and Area Sports Hall of Recognition. As well as the national Tom Longboat Award, she won a regional Tom Longboat medal as Southern Ontario’s outstanding Indigenous athlete in 1967.
The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto displayed some of her hockey sweaters and other memorabilia seven years ago in an exhibition honouring diversity in sports.
But for all her success in competition and her trailblazing role as an Indigenous woman, she did not receive acknowledgment from the broader sporting world.
“These women have been overlooked because they were aboriginal and because they didn’t have the opportunities others did,” said Ann Hall, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta who interviewed Ms. Beaver.
Ms. Beaver’s contemporary and friend, Phyllis (Yogi) Bomberry, a softball catcher who was also from the Six Nations, was inducted into Canada‘s Sports Hall of Fame in 2023, an honour which eluded Ms. Beaver during her lifetime.
“Bev should be there, too,” Ms. Hall said.
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