A former Edmonton lawyer, boxing champion, football player and city councillor, David C. Ward, also known as Kiviaq, has died at the age of 80 after a long bout with cancer.

Bob Coe was a childhood friend and fellow classmate of Kiviaq at Queen Alexandra School. He said Kiviaq died April 24. He was first diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and had surgery in 2009 to remove most of his cancer-riddled liver.

“I got a phone call from his granddaughter the day after he passed away,” Coe said.

Born in Chesterfield Inlet, N.W.T., in 1936, Kiviaq and his family moved to Edmonton when he was four. Raised by his Inuit mother and his stepfather, an RCMP officer, Kiviaq was renamed David Ward and given a new birth certificate.

Coe, 81, said he and Kiviaq were longtime playmates as kids. As a small, undersized Inuit child in Alberta, Coe said Kiviaq was bullied often in school.

“He was bullied a fair bit. In fact, a few times he had been picked on by a couple of guys and beaten up, so he learned boxing for self-protection.”

But his love for boxing went far beyond self defence.

As a prize fighter in the 1950s, Kiviaq won 102 of 108 fights, capturing a string of provincial and Golden Glove championships.

He would then go on to use his athleticism in the boxing ring and become a running back for the Edmonton Huskies junior football team. He played a couple of exhibition games with the Eskimos in 1955. However, before the regular season started, Kiviaq slipped on a wet field and was hit by three opposing players simultaneously. He suffered a broken neck that left him paralyzed.

It was months before he could even wiggle his little finger, but he made a full recovery.

Kiviaq eventually went on to tackle politics. He served two terms on city council between 1968 and 1974. In 1976, he ran unsuccessfully for the mayor’s chair alongside political veterans Cec Purves and Bill Hawrelak.

The City of Edmonton honoured the former alderman in 2003 by declaring March 14 Kiviaq Day.

In 1983, he became the first Inuit called to the bar and worked out of a small office in the Birks Building just off Jasper Avenue. For 20 years, he lobbied to have David Kootook awarded a posthumous Governor General’s Award for his part in saving the life of bush pilot Martin Hartwell, whose plane crashed in the Arctic in November 1972.

He ran his own open-line radio show at CJCA. Both Kiviaq and Coe are members of the Edmonton Broadcasters Club.

In 2001, he successfully fought Alberta’s name laws — which require a person to have both a first name and a last name — to restore his original Inuktitut name. His life and his battle for equality for Inuit people is the subject of a 2006 documentary film, Kiviaq vs. Canada.

“He was a great guy to chum around with and go biking with,” Coe said. “He lived a lot of life packed into a relatively short life — he did a lot of living.”

trobb@postmedia.com

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