Cheer Story: The Indian Head Rockets Legacy Remembered

Seventy-five years after they made history on the ballfields of Saskatchewan, a legendary team that helped break racial barriers in Canadian baseball was honoured in Regina. On June 11, 2025, fans gathered for a special tribute game to celebrate the legacy of the Indian Head Rockets — an all-African American and Latino team that played throughout the province in the 1950s.

We spoke with Robyn Jensen, Home Runs & Dirt Roads to learn more about the Rockets' impact and the significance of this long-overdue recognition. Here's what she had to say.

The seed of this project was planted years ago, when my daughter, a summer student at the museum in 2018, was helping with a donation from local community historian Ken McCabe, who ran the Rural Sports Hall of Fame. She came home and told me that 26,000 to 30,000 people used to attend baseball games in Indian Head in the 1940s and 1950s. This felt so mythical; How was this possible in a town of only 1,500 people? Where did they all come from? She also said that an African descent team was hired to play for the community starting in 1950. I was stunned. I had lived in Indian Head for almost 15 years at that point and had never heard that our small prairie town, which was and still is predominantly white, once hosted a professional baseball team. That sense of omission sparked my curiosity as someone who has always been passionate about local and prairie history, and I began asking questions, eventually joining the museum board in 2019 to delve deeper.

The connection to Nat Bates and Willie Reed came later, through archival research and conversations with a fellow who was writing a chapter for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and historian Jay-Dell Mah at attheplate.com. Their names surfaced in a 2012 interview they conducted with their friend and fellow player, Pumpsie Green, for the Leader-Post.  All three played for the Rockets in 1952.  We found out that Pumpsie passed in 2019, but Nat and Willie were still with us. Eventually, we reached out to them with the simple hope of starting a conversation and learning more about their time playing in Canada.

My idea for the tribute game began with a thought: what better way to honour the Indian Head Rockets than by bringing their story back to the ball diamond, where it started, and into the hearts of a new generation of fans? I wanted to continue telling their story in a way that felt alive, immediate, and rooted in place. Baseball has always been about more than the game; it’s about memory, connection, and community. And for the Rockets, their story deserved to be told not just in museums or archives, but on the field, under the prairie sky.

The connection between Indian Head and Regina made the location even more fitting. For many years, teams from the Queen City competed in Indian Head tournaments. In 1953, Rockets player-manager Big Jim Williams brought the team to Regina to play for the Regina Capitals (Caps). That shared history formed a bridge across time, making Currie Field the perfect setting for the tribute game.

This game brought together many hands and hearts. The Regina Red Sox were generous collaborators. Executive Director Sharon Clarke and President Gary Brotzel from the Red Sox made space for the vision and helped with logistics. Kairo Holdness created the media materials. Additional collaborators included Erin Stankewich, Vickie Krauss, and Matthew Gourlie from the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame, Carol LaFayette-Boyd from the Saskatchewan African Canadian Heritage Museum, the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, and Halter Media, all of whom stepped up to support. City of Regina and Indian Head Mayors, U18 and U11 players and coaches from the Indian Head Minor Ball Association, our museum board members, community members, fans, and descendants of Rockets committee members all came together to make the day unforgettable. Our sponsors were the Sherwood CO-OP, whose donation allowed us to create special commemorative hats for the game, and 4Imprint, which sponsored the special baseballs.  And finally, our thanks to the Ogema Restoration Committee for their accommodation during filming at their Historic Grandstand.

For me, this project was never just about the stats and figures; it was about understanding cultural contact and memory in a deeper way. With an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and a particular interest in ethnography, I’ve always been drawn to the ways people create meaning in everyday life, how traditions, belonging, and identity are negotiated in community spaces. When I first encountered the story of the Indian Head Rockets, I felt like I had stumbled upon a hidden history, one that had somehow slipped beneath the surface of public memory. I was especially curious to learn how an all-African descent team was welcomed in small, predominantly white prairie towns during a time when segregation and racial exclusion were still the norm across much of North America.

This was ethnographic and research work in motion, gathering oral histories, tracing narratives through archives and photographs, and observing how memory is preserved or allowed to fade. I wouldn’t have described myself as passionate about baseball at the outset (though I did play in high school), but something about this story kept pulling me in. I also felt a growing sense of responsibility; if I didn’t pick up the torch to continue sharing it, the legacy of the Indian Head Rockets might be lost. This project became my way of honouring all of that: to bring a forgotten history back into the light and let it speak.

Through numerous interviews with a wide range of people connected to baseball, players, volunteers, fans, wives, coaches, I’ve developed a deep affection for the game and its many layers, both on and off the field. I also feel that I have been welcomed into this vibrant community of people who love the game on all levels and support one another, who share the same passion.  In fact, this work has inspired me to return to university to pursue a Master of Arts in Media and Artistic Research, with a focus on archival curation, and start my research branch of prairie baseball through a blog called Home Runs and Dirt Roads. https://homerunsdirtroads.ca/ 

 Article Credit: Robyn Jensen, Home Runs & Dirt Roads

Photo Credit: Indian Head Museum