Tom Longboat Awards
annually honours outstanding First Nations athletes and sportsmen
The Tom Longboat Awards were established in 1951 to recognize Aboriginal athletes "for their outstanding contributions to sport in Canada" and continues "to honour Indigenous athletes across Canada" annually. As a program of the Aboriginal Sport Circle, the awards provide a forum for acknowledging top male and female athletes both at the regional and national levels.
The Aboriginal Sport Circle offers each provincial and territorial Aboriginal sport body (P/T/TASB) the opportunity to select one male and one female Aboriginal athlete within their region. The regional recipients will be considered as nominees for the national award that is presented to the top male and female athletes at the annual induction ceremony hosted by Canada's Sports Hall of Fame.
Each of the regional Tom Longboat Award recipients receives a Tom Longboat Award medallion. The two national Tom Longboat Award winners receive Tom Longboat Award rings, and have their names added to the Tom Longboat Award Trophy, which is displayed in Canada's Sports Hall of Fame.
Award history
"Of all the athletes in Canadian sport history, only a select few have a major award named in their honour." The Tom Longboat Awards are named in honour of Tom Longboat, a member of the Onondaga Nation from Six Nations of the Grand River who in the early 1900s made a name for himself as a long-distance runner, competing in races across North America and Europe. "In 1999, Maclean's magazine named him Canada's greatest sports legend of the 20th century. Befitting a hero, the Tom Longboat Award has been given since 1951 to the best aboriginal male and female amateur athletes in the country".
The Tom Longboat Awards were established in 1951 as a joint effort of the Department of Indian Affairs and the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada (AAUC).
The public source identifies “Tom Longboat Awards” as annually honours outstanding First Nations athletes and sportsmen. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Longboat, Awards and annually.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q45947229. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1951 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Longboat Awards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.