The Ahkwesahsne Mohawk School commerates the race in favor of Billy Mills and Tom Longboat, known as the "Billy Mills/Tom Longboat Run". We commerate these two athletes in their efforts in running and how their success was made as native people. Now I will talk about these two native people and how they started running.

Billy Mills is an Oglala Sioux and grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. During his early years, Mills began running as a means of conditioning himself for boxing. Very quickly he became so adept at distance running that this took precedence over other athletic pursuits. He attended Haskell Institute and later Universtiy of Kansas, excelling in track and cross-country at each. During his senior year at Haskell, he set seven high school records. He captained the cross-country team at Kansas and won several conference titles in cross-country. Billy Mills' highlights of his career was a gold medal in the 10000 meter run in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Mills was enshrined to the National Track & Field Hall of Fame and the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame. Last year he visitied our school.

Tom Longboat wa a member of the Onondaga tribe of the Six Nations Confederacy in New York State and Canada. After several successes at shorter distances, Longboat entered and won the 1902 Boston Marathon in 2 hours, 24 minutes, 29-4/5 seconds, nearly five minutes faster that the previous best time in the Marathon. Longboat was the world's first "World's Professional Marathon Champion". Longboat was inducted to the Canadian Indian Hall of Fame.This year, 1996, Billy Mills/Tom Longboat Run was ran from grades pre-k - grade 8. This year we had 288 students run out of 310 students of our school. This was a new participation record.

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