His surname was not always a point of pride.
 
As a teenager growing up at a time when — by his own words — it "was a lot easier to not remind people you're Indigenous," Kevin Chief (Class of 1998) felt the weight of the last name that identified him. Instead of it lifting his head up, a name that preceded his arrival in a room invariably coerced him to shy away.
 
It is a theme that is woven through Chief's forthcoming autobiography With a Name Like Chief: Reflections on Recovery and Identity Through the Seven Sacred Teachings, which will officially be launched by Portage and Main Press at an event at the Duckworth Centre, Sept. 24.
 
When poring over Chief's recollections of his youth growing up in the North End, it is not surprising that the UWinnipeg Wesmen men's basketball alumni chose the title he did for the book that serves as part memoir, part guidance and part motivation.
 
It took him time, he said, to fully accept and claim his identity, convinced that the world around him would judge his worth based on his family name. Moving beyond that and authentically embracing who he is was driven in part by the urges of the community that surrounded him.
 
"With a name like Chief, I use the word to remind people," Chief said. "But my name was also associated with the struggles that me and my dad were having. It was associated with alcoholism, and it was associated with poverty. Anyone who's grown up in a situation just with poverty alone struggles with a sense of embarrassment and shame at times in their life. So that's how I associated my name was through those kinds of lived experiences."
 
Chief pulls no punches in laying bare his reality of growing up with an alcoholic dad, a mom who left an abusive home when he was a young boy and, eventually, his own battle with addiction.
 
What Chief makes clear is his journey to a successful community leader, politician and speaker taps into the adage that it takes a village. When he couldn't and wouldn't use his last name on schoolwork, he found his first ally in a teacher and basketball coach.
 
"You have a great last name. Use it."
 
"Ozzy Filippin wasn't just my teacher, he was also my basketball coach, and so I really looked up to him," Chief recalls of the junior high teacher who first urged him to be proud of his name.
 
"It was him saying the right thing at the right time, at the right moment that stayed with me because I knew that I had this talent. … So, when he said to me at that moment, 'You have a great last name. Be proud of it,' I realized, I think in that moment, that there were a lot of things about me and my name that I could be proud of. And from that moment on, I always used my last name. I always wrote my last name." 
 
The stories Chief weaves throughout the book are ones he had test-driven on his circuit in public speaking. It was recently that he started to give strong consideration to putting pen to pad after having listeners approach him after speeches asking if he had a book they could reference.
 
"I'd say probably the last four or five years, that's come up a bit more consistently, and I think that's really one of the things that kind of got me thinking about it, was people just asking me if I had a book or if I was going to end up doing a book.
 
"And I also think that over the last number of years there's been a lot more interest in Indigenous literature, getting an Indigenous perspective, particularly coming off the (Truth and Reconciliation Commission)."
 
Chief unapologetically puts his life on display with a vulnerability that serves as storytelling but also as a sort of self-help apparatus for the reader. And that's why he thinks With a Name Like Chief is not as much a memoir as it is a chance to provide guidance and teachings just as others did for him over the years.
 
"Because so much of my work has been on working with young people, and so much of my work has been in building relationships and partnerships, I wanted to try to write a book that was going to, I guess, thank people or highlight people that made a difference in my life and how they made a difference.
 
"I think it's me thanking (people) for the guidance on how to live a good life through the actions of how people treated me and then using my story as a way to do that."
 
Chief found basketball at a young age and quickly realized he was good at it, too. It would be his vehicle to leave the stresses and pains of life for a few hours, to be free and proud and joyful.
 
"The difference with basketball for me was, when I was playing, everything else stopped. Nothing else mattered.
 
"It was such a good feeling because at the time there was chaos going on, and there was lots of hard things going on in my life. But when I played basketball, I didn't have to worry about any of those things. … That's what the game gave me. It just gave me an escape. It gave me a healthy escape, and I owe the game of basketball everything."
 
Chief chronicles the pain and confusion of his mother leaving for good after he witnessed an abusive moment from his father when he was a youth. He is plainspoken and in-depth about his father's alcohol abuse and the path he also took to ease his pains through drinking as he got older.
 
Chief's father Norman — for whom Chief's Metis-inspired dance group the Norman Chief Memorial Dancers is named after — is understandably a prevailing figure throughout the book. Norman Chief struggled with alcohol addiction and booze was a reoccurring presence in the Chief household as Kevin watched his father struggle daily until his passing in 1993. 

 
Kevin was still a senior in high school when his dad passed, but he had watched his health decline for years. Still, he was faced with a stark new reality that left him without either parent present only a few months from graduation.
 
"All I can say is during that time I felt really lost," he said.
 
"And then when he passed away, it's kinda like, now what? Now what do I do? And the one thing that I think I needed at that point in my life is I needed something to be hopeful for. I needed some optimism. I needed to look and find something in my life that was going to give me a direction in a moment of loss and being lost."
 
Chief had his time at UWinnipeg on the horizon. Then-head coach Bill Wedlake had recruited him to play for the Wesmen, a prospect that Chief called "a guiding light."
 
"Those were tough, tough months and tough years. Those early years were really tough … but, you know, that's why I even say in the book, thank God for the University of Winnipeg. It was so critical that I had that in my life at that time."
 
Chief tabbed co-author Stu Slayen to put the final product together, Chief the narrator and Slayen the scribe who picked and chose the words to put on page. Chief said he noticed Slayen pulling stories about the former's struggle with alcohol, a note Slayen hadn't recognized at first.
 
"We would just talk through those conversations and then he would technically pick the stories and narratives that he found the most interesting and I would trust him to do that.
 
"… I think the reason that those stories were resonating is because he was asking me questions in a way that was pulling things from me that I had suppressed."
 
And there was one particular story in which Chief found therapy. 
 
"I can tell you the story I shared with him that was very therapeutic and very healing," Chief said, "was when I told him the last time my mom and dad were together."
 
The relationship between Kevin, Norman and Shirley is complex, to say the least. Chief describes a moment where he saw his father hit his mom, and that turned out to be the day Shirley said enough.
 
"There was drinking involved, and my dad ended up hitting my mom," he said. "There was lots of domestic abuse between my dad and mom, and that was the last time I saw them together." 
 
Amidst its many anecdotes and experiences, With a Name Like Chief documents how a family torn apart can ultimately still come together.
 
Shirley came home. She told Kevin her name should lay in rest next to the man she left years before. When Shirley – the matriarch of the Chief family with nine grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren – passed on in November 2025, it was in mourning that the Chief family reunited.
 
And it was Kevin who was left to tell the story. 

 
"Me going to my mom was really an important time for me because it allowed me to have a conversation about not just whether she wanted to be with my dad, but to understand where she was with the relationship with my father at that time in her life.
 
"But it also gave us the opportunity to talk about her having to leave. We just spent so much time after my father passed away rebuilding that relationship, and we never really talked about the past and that part of our life." 
 
With her presence, Shirley gave another lesson to her son: one of forgiveness and healing.
 
"One of the things she said there that I remember was 'Your dad was the love of my life.' And I remember how important that was because my dad obviously was super important to me. He raised me.
 
"But…," Chief pauses.
 
"The love of a mother never fades."
 
The once-reticent boy with the name Chief now carries that name forward with pride and purpose. After a life lived of service to his community, his culture and Creator, Kevin Chief has made it so the rest of the world knows it, too.