Just listening to the commentators’ voices grow hysterical in the last few seconds of the race is enough to make me tear up. When Billy Mills won the 10,000-m at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, he became the first, and still only, American to win the event. The Lakota Sioux Indian from South Dakota also demonstrated to the world what it is to “live life like a warrior.” Orphaned at age 12. Growing up in a climate of pervasive racism. Mills often ran barefoot or in cheap tennis shoes and just managed to get a pair of real track shoes the night before the Olympics.

There could hardly be a more inspiring model for athletes anywhere, but particularly for the young, native athletes of the North American Indigenous Games. The last Games, hosted in August 2008 by the Cowichan Tribes on Vancouver Island, BC, brought together 7,000 participants from across Canada and the US. The athletes competed in 16 sports, ranging from basketball and baseball to canoeing and archery. Mills, now 70, was the keynote speaker.

Gibby Jacob, chief of the Squamish First Nation, was among those presented with a leadership award. Jacob had been instrumental in securing Aboriginal participation in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games bid process. When Mills was inducted into the US Olympic Hall of Fame 32 years ago, he’d said to one reporter: “The first thing I think of when I think Olympics is that it shows how there can be unity through diversity.”

Next up: Milwaukee, Wisc. (USA) hosts the 2011 North Americans Indigenous Games.

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