Cpl Joseph Benjamin Keeper, MM

Joseph Benjamin Keeper, is a world-class athlete and war hero of the Norway House Cree Nation. He was born in 1886 in Walker Lake, Manitoba, the youngest of ten children of Matilda and Walker Keeper. At the age of 12, young Joe was sent to the Brandon Residential School, operated by the Mission Board of the Methodist Church. The school was located far from his Aboriginal Treaty Lands making it difficult, if not impossible for him and other First Nations students to stay connected to their families and culture. However, this did not prevent him from excelling in track and field where he demonstrated the discipline and endurance for long-distance running. Little did he know that this would launch the start of his career.

In 1912, Joe competed at the 1912 Stockholm Summer Olympics in the 5,000- and 10,000-metre track events. Although he came fourth in the 10000-metre race, his time remains the greatest result of any Canadian in that event at the Olympic Games to this day. He lost the chance to compete in another Olympic Games when the First World War intervened and cancelled the 1916 Berlin Summer Olympic Games.

That was the year Joe enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, volunteering to serve in France. Keeper enrolled in the 203^rd (Winnipeg Rifles) Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force on 1 May 1916 at Norway House, Manitoba, volunteering to serve in France. Shortly afterwards, on 8 June, he was appointed acting corporal. In October, the unit sailed on the SS Grampian and started training in Bramshott in southern England, a major camp for Canadians during the war.

In January 1917, Joe along with other Indigenous soldiers was transferred to the 107^th (Timber Wolf) Battalion at nearby Witley Camp. The 107^th Battalion had been largely recruited in western Canada and over half were from Blackfoot, Cree, Ojibwe, Haudenosaunee, Dakota, Delaware and Mi’kmaq. After a successful effort to prevent the unit from being broken up to provide reinforcements to other units, the battalion was converted and renamed the 107^th Pioneer Battalion. Pioneer units were trained to fight as infantry, as well as to perform limited military engineering tasks. They were responsible for building accommodations, fortifications and communications. Private Keeper was a dispatch rider, a notoriously insecure, dangerous and vital role. Runners often had to cross over open battlefields carrying messages back and forth between units and headquarters.

In the late summer of 1917, Canadian troops were taken out of the front lines for two months’ rest. At a divisional sports meet in France on 19 September, Keeper placed first in the one- and three-mile races (approximately the 1500- and 5000-metre races of today). Ten days later, he repeated his performance for the same distance at the Canadian Corps sports meet. Coincidentally, famous Onondaga distance runner, Sapper Tom Longboat, finished second in both of these races at the Corps meet.

In late May 1918, the Pioneer battalions were disbanded. Its soldiers dispersed among a number of newly formed engineer units in preparation for the final Allied push, beginning in August 1918. Joe was transferred to the 1^st Canadian Engineers Battalion as a runner.  Later during the Battle of Cambrai, Joe was awarded a Military Medal during the battle for outstanding bravery; a medal that may have made up for the one he narrowly lost five years earlier at the Olympic Games. The battle was among the Canadian Corps' most impressive tactical victories of the war, particularly because of the Canadians' skillful use of military engineers. It was one of the last of a series of battles during the Hundred Days Campaign that would soon lead to the defeat of Germany and the end of the war. Captain Norman Mitchell Coulson, MC, won a Victoria Cross during the same battle.

The war ended on 11 November 1918 and the Canadians soon returned to England to start the long wait for transport back to Canada. In June 1919, in his last international competition, Joe Keeper represented Canada in the 10,000-metre cross-country run in June 1919 at the Inter-Allied Games in Paris, France. He returned to Canada from Britain and was released from the military in Winnipeg on 27 August 1919. He ran in a few events in that city but was overshadowed by younger runners. In 1921, he left Winnipeg and returned to Norway House . He worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company post as a carpenter for 30 years and raised a family before he retired in 1951.

By 1969, Keeper was a patient at Winnipeg’s Deer Lodge Hospital, a facility for veterans. He died in the hospital in Winnipeg 1971 when he was 85 and was buried in the Field of Honour at Winnipeg’s Brookside Cemetery.

Joseph Keeper left an impressive legacy. He was inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 1977, the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame in 1984, the Manitoba Runners’ Association Hall of Fame in 2006 and Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2015. The Manitoba Runners’ Association holds an annual Joe Keeper–Angela Chalmers Celebration Run (previously known as the Joe Keeper Memorial Run) and the Norway House Cree Nation holds memorial races in Keeper’s honour. One of Joseph Benjamin Keeper’s sons, Joseph Irvine, a Korean War veteran, was a founding member of the National Indian Council, now the Assembly of First Nations. He was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1992. He died in Winnipeg in 2013. Keeper’s granddaughter, Tina Keeper, is an actress and recipient of many awards, including the Order of Manitoba in 2002. She also served as the Liberal Member of Parliament for Churchill from 2006 to 2008.