July 3, 2021 • 35 mins
This 2017 episode covers the Fort Shaw Indian School , part of a boarding school system designed to make Native American students conform to white culture. In a surprising twist, it also boasted a champion women's basketball team.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello and Happy Saturday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. On June twenty, U S Secretary of the
Interior deb Holland announced that the Department of the Interior
is starting an investigation into the system of boarding schools
for Indigenous students that was run by the US government
and religious institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
(00:22):
the words of a bill titled Truth and Healing Commission
on Indian Boarding School Policy Act, which Holland introduced in
the House in quote. The Indian Boarding School Policy was
adopted by the United States government to strip American, Indian
and Alaska Native children of their indigenous identities, beliefs, and
traditional languages to assimilate them into white American culture through
(00:44):
federally funded Christian runs schools, which had the effect of
cultural genocide. This announcement came not long after the announcement
of a mass grave discovered at the site of the
former cum Loops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada.
Canada's sist of residential schools was extremely similar to the
one in the United States. That discovery was announced in May,
(01:06):
and the grave is believed to contain the remains of
at least two hundred fifteen children. Another discovery of more
than seven hundred fifty unmarked graves at the site of
a former school in Saskatchewan was announced on June, and
a third discovery of a hundred and eighty two human
remains and unmarked graves and British Columbia was announced on June.
(01:27):
We've talked about these systems of schools in both the
US and in Canada on a number of episodes of
the show, most recently in our three part on Jim Thorpe.
And given all of this recent news, we're re releasing
another episode that's related over the next two Saturdays. It
is our two part on the Fort Shot Indian School
(01:47):
girls basketball team, which originally came out November. And one
correction here when talking about the origins of basketball in
this episode, we say that Springfield College, where the it
was developed, was in Connecticut. Who was in Massachusetts. I
have no explanation for this mistake I made it. I
typed a totally wrong word rather than typing the name
(02:11):
of the Commonwealth where I live. Well, you know, we
only type ten words a week, so they all are
perfect every time. Sure, so keep that correction in mind.
And here you go. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
History Class. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
(02:36):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. From time to time we get requests from
listeners for an episode about some kind of sports history,
and we do. I mean, we have episodes that are
related to the Olympic Games and some that are on
swimming and weightlifting, and several different types of racing, including
(02:59):
horses and speedboats and automobiles. We have not really talked
a lot about team sports, which I think is what
people are asking for when they ask for sports. Today's
subjects the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team. They
became world champions in nineteen o four, which is pretty
early in the entire history of that sport. But the
(03:22):
story also plays out right in the intersection of two
other pretty big stories. There's the American Indian boarding school
program in the United States and also the nineteen o
four St. Louis World's Fair. So we're going to tackle
the story in two parts. In today's part one, we
have the background on this boarding school system that the
Fort Shaw School was part of as well as how
(03:43):
basketball came to and flourished at the school. And then
in part two we will talk about how the team
became World champions while they were there. And as a
note at the beginning, we are going to be talking
about a lot of intentional efforts to quote American eyes
Indigenous children. And this is a weird word because the
(04:05):
word American can encompass the whole diversity of races and
ethnicities and cultures and religions. But these efforts to americanized
Native children, that was really only about one type of American,
one that was white, Christian and English speaking. So we're
we know that American means a lot of things besides that,
(04:25):
but in this context, that's what it was really about.
And also, if it's not obvious at this point, we're
gonna be talking about some pretty abhorrent views in this
episode the next one. Yeah, So when we use the
word American eyes in this context, no that we're referring
to that usage at the time someone else's very specific,
(04:46):
very narrow view of that. Fort Shaw, Montana began its
life in June of eighteen sixty seven as an outpost
which was called Camp Reynolds, and that was on land
that the United States had acquired from France through the
Louisi in a purchase, which of course took place in
eighteen o three. The following month it was renamed Fort
Shaw Military Reservation. It remained in operation as a fort
(05:09):
until eighteen The fort served to protect white travelers and
traders and the troops garrison. There were an active fighting
force in the United States ongoing wars against the region's
Native nations and tribes. Yeah, those wars had really gone
on for centuries, and this is playing out towards the
end of those centuries of active warfare. Also after the
(05:33):
major removals of indigenous tribes from their home territories, like
the bulk of that had happened, but it was still ongoing.
So this is toward the end of that phase of history,
but still things related to it were going on. So
about a year after the Fort ceased military operations, the
Office of Indian Affairs converted it into a government boarding
(05:54):
school for Native American children. The Fort Shot Indian School
became part of the nation's network of federal off reservation
boarding schools that were meant to americanize the Indigenous population.
The flagship of this system was Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian School,
which was established in eighteen seventy nine. Its founder, Lieutenant
(06:16):
Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, believed that Native Americans would become
extinct if they didn't immediately conform to white culture. By
forcing them to do so, he thought he would save
the indigenous population. This is often summed up as quote,
kill the Indian and save the man. He's obviously not
the only person who thought this. There are other policymakers
(06:38):
who were of the same mindset. Pratt spoke at length
about this whole idea a little later on in his
career at the nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction,
and he gave an address that began quote, a great
general has said that the only good Indian is a
dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has
been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense,
(07:02):
I agree with the sentiment, but only in this that
all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.
Killed the Indian in him, and save the man. Although
Carlisle was the most well known of these off reservation
boarding schools, it wasn't the first or only such effort.
Mission schools and other religious efforts go back almost at
(07:24):
the beginning of European colonization in North America, and we've
talked about some of these in past podcasts, including the
Harvard Indian School in Massachusetts and the Foreign Mission School
in Connecticut, and we'll link to both of those episodes
in the show notes church efforts to educate the indigenous population.
These earlier schools a lot of the time were at
(07:45):
least at first, more about spreading Christianity than about straight
out cultural assimilation, but that started to shift in the
early nineteenth century. In eighteen nineteen, Congress past the Civilization
Fund Act, and this act set aside funding for missionary
societies to run quote civilizing schools for Native Americans. Into
(08:06):
the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of boarding and
day schools were built near and on reservation land, and
they had the dual mission of educating and so called
civilizing the native students. The government run off reservation boarding
schools like the ones at Carlisle and Fort Shaw, joined
this extensive network of boarding and day schools. Between eighteen
(08:30):
eighty and nineteen o two, the federal government built about
twenty five boarding schools that were physically removed from their
students reservations, sometimes by hundreds of miles, and collectively, all
these boarding and day schools, both on and off reservations,
had the same goal to remove all traces of Indigenous
culture from the Native population and replace it which with
(08:54):
that which was considered appropriately quote American. To do this,
the off reservation boarding schools removed Native children from their homes, families, tribes,
and cultures for periods of months or years. It was
just too far away a lot of the time for
people to go home, even for breaks. Students were held
to really strict scheduling and military style discipline. Classes were
(09:17):
taught only in English, and children who didn't already have
an English name were given one and called by that instead.
Indigenous languages and religious practices were all forbidden, and punishments
for breaking those rules were harsh and even abusive. The uniforms, meals, lessons,
and recreation were all meant to americanize the student's dress, speech, demeanor,
(09:41):
and beliefs, and many of the schools teachers and administrators
told the students that their native beliefs in ways of
life were wrong. And backward and evil and even savage.
This was such an explicit effort, Like at Carlisle they
even took before and after pictures after students arrived at school.
(10:02):
They would take before pictures of people in their own
traditional dress that they had come to the school in,
and then like give them haircuts and dressed them in
other clothes and take pictures afterwards. Most schools divided their
class time between academic and vocational instruction, under the idea
that students would graduate knowing some kind of productive trade.
(10:23):
So for the boys that might be things like blacksmith
ng and farming. For girls, the trade was often sewing
or domestic work. Some schools even hired out their students
labor while they were attending school. But even so, the
graduation rates were actually really low, and there were a
lot of limits to the so called assimilation that the
(10:44):
schools were enforcing. Even though the students were expected to talk, dress,
act and work like white people, once they graduated or
otherwise left the school, they were still considered to be
Native American. They were still subject to the same segregation
and discriminate as the rest of the indigenous population. In
addition to all of that, conditions at many of these
(11:06):
schools were very poor, and hundreds of students died of
disease and malnutrition, as well as of injury or exposure
after running away from the school. There have also been
numerous reports of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse taking place
at the schools over the decades. Sometimes Native parents really
had no other choice as to whether to send their
(11:28):
children to these boarding schools. In some cases, there just
wasn't another option available for getting an education, or life
was so difficult on the reservation that it seemed like
the choice was between boarding school and starvation. It is
obviously not really a choice. Some government Indian agents took
children by force or strongly pressured parents to send their
(11:50):
children to board boarding school. This was especially true when
it came to the leaders of tribes that had recently
been at war with the United States. Their children were
aggressively recruited, sometimes taken without their consent, and sent to
far off boarding schools, almost as hostages. Simultaneously, though, there
were families who sent their children voluntarily, hoping that if
(12:14):
they received an education at a government school, learning English
in the ways of white society, they might return home
to better advocate for their own people, and this was
especially true when it came to schools that had better
reputations in terms of how the students were treated or
weren't so far away from the rest of the community.
Somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand children went to
(12:36):
federal off reservation boarding schools from the late eighteen hundreds
into the early nineteen hundreds. But at the same time,
roughly a hundred thousand Native Americans went to school through
similar Americanization efforts at on reservation boarding schools and day schools.
So during these decades, the Native children who were receiving
some kind of formal education were overwhelmingly doing so at
(13:00):
program that was meant to Christianize and quote americanize them.
The United States, we should mention, was not the only
nation to have schools and other programs like this. Canada,
for example, had a very similar system of residential schools
that began operating in about eighteen eighty and the last
of those actually closed in nineteen In Australia, so many
(13:22):
Indigenous children and children of Aboriginal descent were forcibly removed
from their families that they became known as the Stolen generations.
There's actually a pretty old podcast about that back in
the archive, and we've gotten a number of requests related
to this in some way. Over the years, we have
gotten approximately an equal number of requests for the residential
(13:46):
school program in Canada and about specifically Carlisle School in
the United States. But like Carlisle, as we've just said,
was part of a much, much bigger system. So after
the break, we're going to talk more about Fort Indian
School specifically and how it wound up starting a basketball program.
(14:11):
Fort Shaw Indian School was centrally located among eleven different
reservations that were scattered across four states. This included Colville,
Spokane and kurt Elaine in eastern Washington, Fort Hall in Idaho,
Wind River in Wyoming, and Blackfeet Flathead, Fort Bell, nap
for Peck Crow and Northern Cheyenne in Montana. Even though
(14:34):
Fort Shaw was roughly central to all of these different reservations,
the closest ones were still more than a hundred miles away.
Fort Shaw was actually a replacement for another school, a
government run day school on Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which
burned down in the federal government looked too recently vacated
(14:55):
Fort Shaw because it would be easy and inexpensive to
turn it into a school. The officers quarters became housing
for faculty and staff. The barracks were student housing, and
since it had been a military base, had already had
other necessities like a mess hall, a chapel, a laundry,
and a hospital. Another bonus, from the government's point of
(15:16):
view was that long hundred plus mile journey home, and
some of them were from much farther away than a
hundred miles. The school was far enough away from all
of the reservations that its students came from that, in theory,
it would discourage students to visit home. It would discourage
family to come and visit students, both of which the
administrators thought might slow down the student's assimilation or cause
(15:40):
students to quote relapse into their native ways. They also
believed that this distance would deter students from trying to
run away. This was not entirely true. Children definitely tried
to and did run away from Fort Shaw After its
conversion into a school. For Shaw reopened on December two
(16:02):
for students ages five to eighteen. It's students included members
of numerous tribes and nations, including the Blackfeet, Chippewa, cree Crow,
Northern Cheyenne, Shoshonee, grovan A, Sinnaboine, and Sue. Many were
of multi tribal descent, and many had one white parents.
Although only some of the students spoke English upon arrival
(16:24):
at the school, nearly all of them spoke more than
one indigenous language as we sat at the top of
the show. A core element of Fort Shaw Indian School's
purpose was to remove students from their own cultural beliefs
and practices and instead assimilate them into white society. So
this included English and cultural instruction, along with some academic
(16:45):
and vocational classes, plus music, theater, and physical education. A
lot of the youngest students spent their first couple of
years learning English and white cultural norms before focusing on
any academic or vocational study vocate final classes weren't just
about teaching the children useful skills that could help them
earn a living once they graduated. They were also about
(17:07):
actually keeping the school running. The children's labor at Fort
Shaw included raising the vegetables and livestock that provided food
and milk for the school, sewing all of the school uniforms,
and laundering and mending them. They also made items that
were sold to earn money for the school. Girls learned
embroidery and lace making, while boys learned things like blacksmithing,
(17:29):
furniture making, and general carpentry. Their pe courses were also
separated by gender. The boys got to play team sports
along with doing track and field. The girls mainly had
what was called physical culture. This is sort of a
cross between a health class calisthenics and European style gymnastics
that was popular at the time. Josephine Langley, known as Josie,
(17:51):
was hired as an quote Indian assistant along with two
other young women from the Blackfeet reservation in Josie wanted
to be a teacher and she hoped that by taking
this job as an assistant, she would be able to
work her way up the ladder. She had probably learned
to play basketball while studying at Carlisle Indian School, and
(18:11):
she introduced the sport at Fort Shaw around eight, at
first playing with a soccer ball and makeshift baskets until
the school eventually approved the purchase of regulation equipment. Games
were played in the Army bases old dance hall, which
had a packed dirt floor and was easily big enough
to accommodate the court and the players. Basketball, which was
(18:33):
actually two words this point, was not just new to
Fort Shaw Indian School. James Naismith had developed the sport
only about five years before its introduction there. He developed
it at Springfield College in Connecticut, which was also known
as the International Y m C. A training school. He
had been looking for a team sport that could be
(18:54):
played indoors, particularly during the winter months, when the college's
football teams regiment of calisthenics, marching and weight training was
just not sufficient to keep up their physique. Around the
turn of the twentieth century, football was extremely violent. Teams
basically faced off against each other in a wedge formation,
(19:14):
and they kind of threw themselves at each other full force.
It was not at all something that could be played
in a confined space on an indoor surface without risking
even more injuries than were already happening during regular play.
So in creating basketball, nay Smith was trying to invent
a team sport that was fast paced and vigorous, but
did not involve large young men hurling themselves into one
(19:37):
another as hard as possible. That's kind of a side
note here. The football that Nate Smith was trying to
replace was also really new. The first college football game
is generally marked as happening between Princeton and Rutgers on
November six of eighteen sixty nine, although that initial game
was closer to soccer than to American football as we
(19:58):
know it today. This rugby soccer hybrid of American football
grew up over the next decade or so, and the
Carlysle Indian school football team, which was founded in eight
played a big role in the evolution of that sport.
On average, the car Lysle football players were much smaller
than the players on the teams that they played against,
(20:19):
and they came up with a ton of strategic tricks
to get around this disadvantage. If there wasn't a specific
rule against it, they would try it. There are still
American football rules today that came about as the Intercollegiate
Football Rules Committee outlawed Carlyle strategies in between seasons. I'm
just going to continue with this digression for a moment
(20:39):
to say that I do not care about football as
a sport. There are a lot of you know, social
and economic and medical and political issues around football that
I care a lot about but like it's, it would
take a lot to make me sit down and watch
a football game all the way through uh eve. And
(21:00):
so this whole story of the Carlisle, Indian School football
team is fascinating and I want to do an episode
about it one day. Um Jim Thorpe, who's name in
the Fox language translated to bright Path, was the first
Native American to win a gold medal at the Olympics
for the United States. He was one of the players
and their strategies and the ways that they bent every
(21:23):
rule if it wasn't specifically outlawed, their coach Pop Warner
would would try it. So like that's the whole story
is just fascinating and bizarre and has stuff in it
like the Carlisle team sewing these leather football shaped patches
on their uniforms to trick Harvard into thinking they all
had the ball, and then Harvard retaliating by painting all
(21:46):
of the ball's maroon. It's it is a great story
and it's one of the few other things about team sports.
I might interest myself enough in doing podcast on it
sometime later. I like a little subverse and through sewing
that makes it super fun. Yeah, it's it's um, it's
it's fascinating anyway, So Nathanis original game of basketball to
(22:09):
get back to basketball had thirteen rules. We're not going
to read them all, but they included that the ball
could be thrown or batted with one or both hands,
but not with a fist, shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, and
striking opponents where all fouls as was hitting the ball
with a fist. The game was played in two fifteen
minute halves with a five minute rest, but otherwise the
(22:32):
clock did not stop during play, so it was a
very fast paced game, not a lot of stopping at
pretty low scoring compared to today, although it wasn't listed
in the thirteen original rules. The game started with a
jump ball or a tip off at center court, and
both teams returned to center court for another jump ball
after baskets were scored. Soon after Na Smith drafted the
(22:55):
first set of rules, women's colleges in the Northeast started
taking up basketball as well. Senda Baronson of Smith College
released an adapted rule set for women in eighteen ninety two.
In eighteen six she headed up a committee to create
an even further modified set of rules for girls, which
made the game so much easier and less intense that
(23:15):
a lot of programs, especially west of the Mississippi, just
ignored them and had the girls play by what we're
called the quote boys rules, especially for girls teams that
had already been playing by the same rules as everyone else. Uh,
they were like, no, I'm not doing that. So the
(23:36):
basketball program at Fort Shaw was actually the first basketball
program organized in the state of Montana. It immediately became
immensely popular among the girls at the school. Physical games
played in teams were already a really important element of
pretty much all of their indigenous cultures. Basketball also had
some similarities to a number of Native girls games. These
(23:59):
include a double ball, which used a pair of balls
tethered together and then tossed from a stick, which was
exclusively a women's sport among most of the Planes tribes.
There was another game called shinny, which was a lot
like field hockey and used curved sticks, which was generally
a women's rule or a women's game as well. Uh.
Some tribes also had versions of lacrosse that were played
(24:21):
by women. Basically, there were a lot of team sports
with balls specifically played by women. Among a lot of
different indigenous cultures. Basketball was also a lot more fun
and physically active than physical culture class, and it was
the one time of day when students could really shed
some of the school's cultural expectations. They could participate in
(24:41):
unladylike behavior like running and jumping with abandon. Although the
boys at the school had shown an initial interest in
basketball as well, soon the girls were outperforming them on
the court and their interest waned. They also had plenty
of other team sports to choose from, whereas the girls
did not because was no other basketball program in Montana
(25:02):
at the time. For the first few years of basketball
at Fort Shaw Indian School, all of the games for
intramural scrimmage matches. Even so, they were as popular with
the local community as they were with the girls at
the school. At an end of year ceremony game in
eighteen seven, they did an intramural demonstration that brought in
three hundred spectators to watch. In eight Fred C. Campbell
(25:27):
became superintendent of Fort Shaw, and he seemed to have
had a genuine interest in making things better for the school,
improving the school's image and that of his students, and
he also wanted the community to begin seeing those students
in a different light. Racism against Native Americans was endemic
and severe, and Campbell recognized that all this work they
(25:48):
were doing to quote assimilate the students was not really
going to be effective if once those students graduated from
the school they were still shunned from white society. So
he started in vi people from the community to the
school and taking students out into the community to try
to basically get everyone used to each other hopefully change
(26:09):
the hearts and minds within the community. So a natural
way to do this was by hosting basketball games. And
we're gonna talk a little bit more about that, but
first we are going to pause and have a word
from one of our fantastic sponsors. In addition to being
(26:30):
the superintendent of the school, Fred Campbell had been an
athlete himself. Some sources actually credit him with being the
one who introduced basketball at Fort Shaw, but it was
definitely played there for a couple of years before he
became superintendent. From his own firsthand experience, he thought athletics
were a good way to build a person's self esteem
and sense of worth, on top of helping to develop
(26:52):
a strong and healthy body, So he focused on improving
and building up all the school's athletics teams, but it
was really the girl's bath ketball team that he saw
as having the most promise for bringing good publicity to
the school and its students. Basketball had barely made its
way into Montana at this point. There were so few
(27:12):
other teams to play against that the Fort Shaw girls
team's first game against another school was actually against a
boys team, and that team was from Great Falls. Then
Campbell organized another girls team in sun River, which was
not far away, so the Fort Shaw team would have
someone else to play. When it was time for games,
he would bring the sun River team in by wagon.
(27:34):
Fort Shaw defeated sun River easily every time. Of course,
more more schools, more other programs started having basketball teams,
but to play against those other teams, the Fort Shaw
team had to start traveling farther and farther away. In
late nineteen o two, they traveled to Butte, Montana by wagon,
(27:54):
and then trained where they where they defeated the Mute
High team fifteen to nine. The next day they traveled
to Helena again by train, and this time they were
defeated fifteen to six. Again, I will point out how
much lower these scores aren' than what we would normally
see in a basketball game today. There's only one of
(28:15):
one digit three. I think that original basketball sound is
a little more my taste maybe than current basketball, because
that is one of my things of like you could
just kind of watch the last bit because there's so
much scoring before that, which is not too in any way.
Throw shaded basketball if you love it, that's cool. That's
(28:35):
just always been my thing of like I could come
in for the last ten minutes, right um, that's when
it's really a nail biter. So after that loss though
at Helena, Campbell started refining the girls positions on the team.
He realized that Fort Shaw had lost the ball to
Helena in more than half of the jump balls at
center court, so he moved Nettie Worth, who wasn't the
tallest on the team but had a really incredible vertical jump,
(28:58):
to center. Nettie and her sister Lizzie were a Sinnaboine
and had been among Fort Shaw's first students when it opened.
This change was not quite enough to help Fort Shaw
defeat Beaute parochial school in the next game they played.
They lost that one fifteen to six, so Campbell made
another switch. He left Nettie Worth as center and he
(29:19):
made Many Burton and in a sense of her forwards.
Many was a member of the lem High Shoshony nation,
which was not actually in favor of sending children away
to government government boarding schools. But Many's father worked as
a translator and he thought that she could benefit from
getting an English education. Emma Sansor and her siblings were
(29:40):
actually Matee of French, Canadian and Chippewa Cree descent. They
were listed in their school records as Sue because their
particular people were essentially landless in the United States, they
were not part of a federally recognized tribe. Some of
the people at the mission school that they had attended
previously falsified the tribal affiliation to be able to get
(30:01):
them into the school, which, like we talked previously about
how there were all kinds of reasons for for children
to go to these schools, and this was a case
where Emma and her siblings were in dire financial straits
and so at the people who made this change to
their tribal affiliation, we're doing what they thought was best
for them. So this combination of girls and positions that
(30:25):
Campbell came up with became a winning one for Fort Shaw.
Their next game was against a college team, Montana State
University in Missoula, now known as the University of Montana.
Fort Shaw won nineteen to nine, and from there they
were undefeated for the rest of the season, playing at
least six more games, including against another college team, the
(30:46):
Montana Agricultural College Farmts, and resounding wins in rematches against
both Helena High School, which was ten victory, and Bute
Parochial which was an eighteen to eight score. These games
were not all on the road. The school. While it
had that large dance hall that was great for their
own scrimmages and practices, they didn't really have a large
(31:08):
enough space to accommodate the crowds who started wanting to
see the games, so they started using Luther Hall and
Great Falls, Montana as their home game court. Luther Hall
was a ballroom that was big enough for the playing
area and hundreds of spectators. Great Falls is also about
twenty five miles away from the school, and since travel
(31:30):
to and from there had to happen by wagon, the
team and their uh, their chaperones and coach wind up
staying at a hotel, which was a treat for most
of them. Over the course of a few games Great Falls,
Montana started to think of the Fort Shaw team as
their own home team. Although game coverage in the local
paper still drifted into casual racism, especially in descriptions of
(31:53):
the girls appearances and their quote savage winds, it started
to carry a little bit of a tone of local
pride and to focus more on the players other accomplishments
at school rather than the fact that they were quote Indian, yea,
they didn't. They didn't disguise the girls cultural heritage, but
it stopped being written about as though it were a
(32:15):
taboo or something to judge about them. In the end
of the three season, the Fort Shaw team had a
record of nine wins and two losses. The game of
basketball was still so new to the state of Montana
that there weren't official rankings or playoffs, but nevertheless, the
Fort Shaw team was regarded as the state champions. Many
(32:37):
Burton had become so popular, especially for her scoring ability,
that spectators chant whenever they were playing was shoot many shoots.
The basketball games also gave the school an opportunity to
show off some other talents. The band and the mandolin
orchestra provided the before game and halftime entertainment. Sometimes, after
(32:57):
the games, the court was turned back into a dance floor,
or the girls showed off their skills in ballroom dancing.
All of this also brought in lots of coverage from
the local press. Of course, racism and prejudice still existed,
but the community started to see these students as talented
and capable rather than as uneducable troublemakers. In nineteen o three, S. M.
(33:20):
Mcowen contacted Fred Campbell with an intriguing invitation. McCowen had
previously been superintendent of the Chillico Indian School, but he
had recently moved into a new role, director of the
Model Indian School that was being created for the St.
Louis World's far mcowen asked Campbell to select some of
(33:40):
Fort Shaw's best students to participate in the Model School,
which was going to run from June one to November one,
nineteen o four, and Campbell agreed. But that becomes a
whole other story, So we're gonna talk about what this
agreement meant for the basketball team and how it led
to their becoming World champions in part two of this podcast,
(34:04):
I'm excited for part to you me too. It's a
really fun story. You don't I mean when you think
about this being a completely new sport relief for people,
and now it completely shifted perceptions. I have a new
appreciation for basketball. I really admire the girls and young
women who played on this team. We're gonna get to
(34:25):
talk more about them next time. To heay so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio
(34:49):
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History and you can subscribe to
our show the Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
(35:11):
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hello and Happy Saturday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. On June twenty, U S Secretary of the
Interior deb Holland announced that the Department of the Interior
is starting an investigation into the system of boarding schools
for Indigenous students that was run by the US government
and religious institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
(00:22):
the words of a bill titled Truth and Healing Commission
on Indian Boarding School Policy Act, which Holland introduced in
the House in quote. The Indian Boarding School Policy was
adopted by the United States government to strip American, Indian
and Alaska Native children of their indigenous identities, beliefs, and
traditional languages to assimilate them into white American culture through
(00:44):
federally funded Christian runs schools, which had the effect of
cultural genocide. This announcement came not long after the announcement
of a mass grave discovered at the site of the
former cum Loops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada.
Canada's sist of residential schools was extremely similar to the
one in the United States. That discovery was announced in May,
(01:06):
and the grave is believed to contain the remains of
at least two hundred fifteen children. Another discovery of more
than seven hundred fifty unmarked graves at the site of
a former school in Saskatchewan was announced on June, and
a third discovery of a hundred and eighty two human
remains and unmarked graves and British Columbia was announced on June.
(01:27):
We've talked about these systems of schools in both the
US and in Canada on a number of episodes of
the show, most recently in our three part on Jim Thorpe.
And given all of this recent news, we're re releasing
another episode that's related over the next two Saturdays. It
is our two part on the Fort Shot Indian School
(01:47):
girls basketball team, which originally came out November. And one
correction here when talking about the origins of basketball in
this episode, we say that Springfield College, where the it
was developed, was in Connecticut. Who was in Massachusetts. I
have no explanation for this mistake I made it. I
typed a totally wrong word rather than typing the name
(02:11):
of the Commonwealth where I live. Well, you know, we
only type ten words a week, so they all are
perfect every time. Sure, so keep that correction in mind.
And here you go. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
History Class. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
(02:36):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. From time to time we get requests from
listeners for an episode about some kind of sports history,
and we do. I mean, we have episodes that are
related to the Olympic Games and some that are on
swimming and weightlifting, and several different types of racing, including
(02:59):
horses and speedboats and automobiles. We have not really talked
a lot about team sports, which I think is what
people are asking for when they ask for sports. Today's
subjects the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team. They
became world champions in nineteen o four, which is pretty
early in the entire history of that sport. But the
(03:22):
story also plays out right in the intersection of two
other pretty big stories. There's the American Indian boarding school
program in the United States and also the nineteen o
four St. Louis World's Fair. So we're going to tackle
the story in two parts. In today's part one, we
have the background on this boarding school system that the
Fort Shaw School was part of as well as how
(03:43):
basketball came to and flourished at the school. And then
in part two we will talk about how the team
became World champions while they were there. And as a
note at the beginning, we are going to be talking
about a lot of intentional efforts to quote American eyes
Indigenous children. And this is a weird word because the
(04:05):
word American can encompass the whole diversity of races and
ethnicities and cultures and religions. But these efforts to americanized
Native children, that was really only about one type of American,
one that was white, Christian and English speaking. So we're
we know that American means a lot of things besides that,
(04:25):
but in this context, that's what it was really about.
And also, if it's not obvious at this point, we're
gonna be talking about some pretty abhorrent views in this
episode the next one. Yeah, So when we use the
word American eyes in this context, no that we're referring
to that usage at the time someone else's very specific,
(04:46):
very narrow view of that. Fort Shaw, Montana began its
life in June of eighteen sixty seven as an outpost
which was called Camp Reynolds, and that was on land
that the United States had acquired from France through the
Louisi in a purchase, which of course took place in
eighteen o three. The following month it was renamed Fort
Shaw Military Reservation. It remained in operation as a fort
(05:09):
until eighteen The fort served to protect white travelers and
traders and the troops garrison. There were an active fighting
force in the United States ongoing wars against the region's
Native nations and tribes. Yeah, those wars had really gone
on for centuries, and this is playing out towards the
end of those centuries of active warfare. Also after the
(05:33):
major removals of indigenous tribes from their home territories, like
the bulk of that had happened, but it was still ongoing.
So this is toward the end of that phase of history,
but still things related to it were going on. So
about a year after the Fort ceased military operations, the
Office of Indian Affairs converted it into a government boarding
(05:54):
school for Native American children. The Fort Shot Indian School
became part of the nation's network of federal off reservation
boarding schools that were meant to americanize the Indigenous population.
The flagship of this system was Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian School,
which was established in eighteen seventy nine. Its founder, Lieutenant
(06:16):
Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, believed that Native Americans would become
extinct if they didn't immediately conform to white culture. By
forcing them to do so, he thought he would save
the indigenous population. This is often summed up as quote,
kill the Indian and save the man. He's obviously not
the only person who thought this. There are other policymakers
(06:38):
who were of the same mindset. Pratt spoke at length
about this whole idea a little later on in his
career at the nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction,
and he gave an address that began quote, a great
general has said that the only good Indian is a
dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has
been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense,
(07:02):
I agree with the sentiment, but only in this that
all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.
Killed the Indian in him, and save the man. Although
Carlisle was the most well known of these off reservation
boarding schools, it wasn't the first or only such effort.
Mission schools and other religious efforts go back almost at
(07:24):
the beginning of European colonization in North America, and we've
talked about some of these in past podcasts, including the
Harvard Indian School in Massachusetts and the Foreign Mission School
in Connecticut, and we'll link to both of those episodes
in the show notes church efforts to educate the indigenous population.
These earlier schools a lot of the time were at
(07:45):
least at first, more about spreading Christianity than about straight
out cultural assimilation, but that started to shift in the
early nineteenth century. In eighteen nineteen, Congress past the Civilization
Fund Act, and this act set aside funding for missionary
societies to run quote civilizing schools for Native Americans. Into
(08:06):
the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of boarding and
day schools were built near and on reservation land, and
they had the dual mission of educating and so called
civilizing the native students. The government run off reservation boarding
schools like the ones at Carlisle and Fort Shaw, joined
this extensive network of boarding and day schools. Between eighteen
(08:30):
eighty and nineteen o two, the federal government built about
twenty five boarding schools that were physically removed from their
students reservations, sometimes by hundreds of miles, and collectively, all
these boarding and day schools, both on and off reservations,
had the same goal to remove all traces of Indigenous
culture from the Native population and replace it which with
(08:54):
that which was considered appropriately quote American. To do this,
the off reservation boarding schools removed Native children from their homes, families, tribes,
and cultures for periods of months or years. It was
just too far away a lot of the time for
people to go home, even for breaks. Students were held
to really strict scheduling and military style discipline. Classes were
(09:17):
taught only in English, and children who didn't already have
an English name were given one and called by that instead.
Indigenous languages and religious practices were all forbidden, and punishments
for breaking those rules were harsh and even abusive. The uniforms, meals, lessons,
and recreation were all meant to americanize the student's dress, speech, demeanor,
(09:41):
and beliefs, and many of the schools teachers and administrators
told the students that their native beliefs in ways of
life were wrong. And backward and evil and even savage.
This was such an explicit effort, Like at Carlisle they
even took before and after pictures after students arrived at school.
(10:02):
They would take before pictures of people in their own
traditional dress that they had come to the school in,
and then like give them haircuts and dressed them in
other clothes and take pictures afterwards. Most schools divided their
class time between academic and vocational instruction, under the idea
that students would graduate knowing some kind of productive trade.
(10:23):
So for the boys that might be things like blacksmith
ng and farming. For girls, the trade was often sewing
or domestic work. Some schools even hired out their students
labor while they were attending school. But even so, the
graduation rates were actually really low, and there were a
lot of limits to the so called assimilation that the
(10:44):
schools were enforcing. Even though the students were expected to talk, dress,
act and work like white people, once they graduated or
otherwise left the school, they were still considered to be
Native American. They were still subject to the same segregation
and discriminate as the rest of the indigenous population. In
addition to all of that, conditions at many of these
(11:06):
schools were very poor, and hundreds of students died of
disease and malnutrition, as well as of injury or exposure
after running away from the school. There have also been
numerous reports of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse taking place
at the schools over the decades. Sometimes Native parents really
had no other choice as to whether to send their
(11:28):
children to these boarding schools. In some cases, there just
wasn't another option available for getting an education, or life
was so difficult on the reservation that it seemed like
the choice was between boarding school and starvation. It is
obviously not really a choice. Some government Indian agents took
children by force or strongly pressured parents to send their
(11:50):
children to board boarding school. This was especially true when
it came to the leaders of tribes that had recently
been at war with the United States. Their children were
aggressively recruited, sometimes taken without their consent, and sent to
far off boarding schools, almost as hostages. Simultaneously, though, there
were families who sent their children voluntarily, hoping that if
(12:14):
they received an education at a government school, learning English
in the ways of white society, they might return home
to better advocate for their own people, and this was
especially true when it came to schools that had better
reputations in terms of how the students were treated or
weren't so far away from the rest of the community.
Somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand children went to
(12:36):
federal off reservation boarding schools from the late eighteen hundreds
into the early nineteen hundreds. But at the same time,
roughly a hundred thousand Native Americans went to school through
similar Americanization efforts at on reservation boarding schools and day schools.
So during these decades, the Native children who were receiving
some kind of formal education were overwhelmingly doing so at
(13:00):
program that was meant to Christianize and quote americanize them.
The United States, we should mention, was not the only
nation to have schools and other programs like this. Canada,
for example, had a very similar system of residential schools
that began operating in about eighteen eighty and the last
of those actually closed in nineteen In Australia, so many
(13:22):
Indigenous children and children of Aboriginal descent were forcibly removed
from their families that they became known as the Stolen generations.
There's actually a pretty old podcast about that back in
the archive, and we've gotten a number of requests related
to this in some way. Over the years, we have
gotten approximately an equal number of requests for the residential
(13:46):
school program in Canada and about specifically Carlisle School in
the United States. But like Carlisle, as we've just said,
was part of a much, much bigger system. So after
the break, we're going to talk more about Fort Indian
School specifically and how it wound up starting a basketball program.
(14:11):
Fort Shaw Indian School was centrally located among eleven different
reservations that were scattered across four states. This included Colville,
Spokane and kurt Elaine in eastern Washington, Fort Hall in Idaho,
Wind River in Wyoming, and Blackfeet Flathead, Fort Bell, nap
for Peck Crow and Northern Cheyenne in Montana. Even though
(14:34):
Fort Shaw was roughly central to all of these different reservations,
the closest ones were still more than a hundred miles away.
Fort Shaw was actually a replacement for another school, a
government run day school on Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which
burned down in the federal government looked too recently vacated
(14:55):
Fort Shaw because it would be easy and inexpensive to
turn it into a school. The officers quarters became housing
for faculty and staff. The barracks were student housing, and
since it had been a military base, had already had
other necessities like a mess hall, a chapel, a laundry,
and a hospital. Another bonus, from the government's point of
(15:16):
view was that long hundred plus mile journey home, and
some of them were from much farther away than a
hundred miles. The school was far enough away from all
of the reservations that its students came from that, in theory,
it would discourage students to visit home. It would discourage
family to come and visit students, both of which the
administrators thought might slow down the student's assimilation or cause
(15:40):
students to quote relapse into their native ways. They also
believed that this distance would deter students from trying to
run away. This was not entirely true. Children definitely tried
to and did run away from Fort Shaw After its
conversion into a school. For Shaw reopened on December two
(16:02):
for students ages five to eighteen. It's students included members
of numerous tribes and nations, including the Blackfeet, Chippewa, cree Crow,
Northern Cheyenne, Shoshonee, grovan A, Sinnaboine, and Sue. Many were
of multi tribal descent, and many had one white parents.
Although only some of the students spoke English upon arrival
(16:24):
at the school, nearly all of them spoke more than
one indigenous language as we sat at the top of
the show. A core element of Fort Shaw Indian School's
purpose was to remove students from their own cultural beliefs
and practices and instead assimilate them into white society. So
this included English and cultural instruction, along with some academic
(16:45):
and vocational classes, plus music, theater, and physical education. A
lot of the youngest students spent their first couple of
years learning English and white cultural norms before focusing on
any academic or vocational study vocate final classes weren't just
about teaching the children useful skills that could help them
earn a living once they graduated. They were also about
(17:07):
actually keeping the school running. The children's labor at Fort
Shaw included raising the vegetables and livestock that provided food
and milk for the school, sewing all of the school uniforms,
and laundering and mending them. They also made items that
were sold to earn money for the school. Girls learned
embroidery and lace making, while boys learned things like blacksmithing,
(17:29):
furniture making, and general carpentry. Their pe courses were also
separated by gender. The boys got to play team sports
along with doing track and field. The girls mainly had
what was called physical culture. This is sort of a
cross between a health class calisthenics and European style gymnastics
that was popular at the time. Josephine Langley, known as Josie,
(17:51):
was hired as an quote Indian assistant along with two
other young women from the Blackfeet reservation in Josie wanted
to be a teacher and she hoped that by taking
this job as an assistant, she would be able to
work her way up the ladder. She had probably learned
to play basketball while studying at Carlisle Indian School, and
(18:11):
she introduced the sport at Fort Shaw around eight, at
first playing with a soccer ball and makeshift baskets until
the school eventually approved the purchase of regulation equipment. Games
were played in the Army bases old dance hall, which
had a packed dirt floor and was easily big enough
to accommodate the court and the players. Basketball, which was
(18:33):
actually two words this point, was not just new to
Fort Shaw Indian School. James Naismith had developed the sport
only about five years before its introduction there. He developed
it at Springfield College in Connecticut, which was also known
as the International Y m C. A training school. He
had been looking for a team sport that could be
(18:54):
played indoors, particularly during the winter months, when the college's
football teams regiment of calisthenics, marching and weight training was
just not sufficient to keep up their physique. Around the
turn of the twentieth century, football was extremely violent. Teams
basically faced off against each other in a wedge formation,
(19:14):
and they kind of threw themselves at each other full force.
It was not at all something that could be played
in a confined space on an indoor surface without risking
even more injuries than were already happening during regular play.
So in creating basketball, nay Smith was trying to invent
a team sport that was fast paced and vigorous, but
did not involve large young men hurling themselves into one
(19:37):
another as hard as possible. That's kind of a side
note here. The football that Nate Smith was trying to
replace was also really new. The first college football game
is generally marked as happening between Princeton and Rutgers on
November six of eighteen sixty nine, although that initial game
was closer to soccer than to American football as we
(19:58):
know it today. This rugby soccer hybrid of American football
grew up over the next decade or so, and the
Carlysle Indian school football team, which was founded in eight
played a big role in the evolution of that sport.
On average, the car Lysle football players were much smaller
than the players on the teams that they played against,
(20:19):
and they came up with a ton of strategic tricks
to get around this disadvantage. If there wasn't a specific
rule against it, they would try it. There are still
American football rules today that came about as the Intercollegiate
Football Rules Committee outlawed Carlyle strategies in between seasons. I'm
just going to continue with this digression for a moment
(20:39):
to say that I do not care about football as
a sport. There are a lot of you know, social
and economic and medical and political issues around football that
I care a lot about but like it's, it would
take a lot to make me sit down and watch
a football game all the way through uh eve. And
(21:00):
so this whole story of the Carlisle, Indian School football
team is fascinating and I want to do an episode
about it one day. Um Jim Thorpe, who's name in
the Fox language translated to bright Path, was the first
Native American to win a gold medal at the Olympics
for the United States. He was one of the players
and their strategies and the ways that they bent every
(21:23):
rule if it wasn't specifically outlawed, their coach Pop Warner
would would try it. So like that's the whole story
is just fascinating and bizarre and has stuff in it
like the Carlisle team sewing these leather football shaped patches
on their uniforms to trick Harvard into thinking they all
had the ball, and then Harvard retaliating by painting all
(21:46):
of the ball's maroon. It's it is a great story
and it's one of the few other things about team sports.
I might interest myself enough in doing podcast on it
sometime later. I like a little subverse and through sewing
that makes it super fun. Yeah, it's it's um, it's
it's fascinating anyway, So Nathanis original game of basketball to
(22:09):
get back to basketball had thirteen rules. We're not going
to read them all, but they included that the ball
could be thrown or batted with one or both hands,
but not with a fist, shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, and
striking opponents where all fouls as was hitting the ball
with a fist. The game was played in two fifteen
minute halves with a five minute rest, but otherwise the
(22:32):
clock did not stop during play, so it was a
very fast paced game, not a lot of stopping at
pretty low scoring compared to today, although it wasn't listed
in the thirteen original rules. The game started with a
jump ball or a tip off at center court, and
both teams returned to center court for another jump ball
after baskets were scored. Soon after Na Smith drafted the
(22:55):
first set of rules, women's colleges in the Northeast started
taking up basketball as well. Senda Baronson of Smith College
released an adapted rule set for women in eighteen ninety two.
In eighteen six she headed up a committee to create
an even further modified set of rules for girls, which
made the game so much easier and less intense that
(23:15):
a lot of programs, especially west of the Mississippi, just
ignored them and had the girls play by what we're
called the quote boys rules, especially for girls teams that
had already been playing by the same rules as everyone else. Uh,
they were like, no, I'm not doing that. So the
(23:36):
basketball program at Fort Shaw was actually the first basketball
program organized in the state of Montana. It immediately became
immensely popular among the girls at the school. Physical games
played in teams were already a really important element of
pretty much all of their indigenous cultures. Basketball also had
some similarities to a number of Native girls games. These
(23:59):
include a double ball, which used a pair of balls
tethered together and then tossed from a stick, which was
exclusively a women's sport among most of the Planes tribes.
There was another game called shinny, which was a lot
like field hockey and used curved sticks, which was generally
a women's rule or a women's game as well. Uh.
Some tribes also had versions of lacrosse that were played
(24:21):
by women. Basically, there were a lot of team sports
with balls specifically played by women. Among a lot of
different indigenous cultures. Basketball was also a lot more fun
and physically active than physical culture class, and it was
the one time of day when students could really shed
some of the school's cultural expectations. They could participate in
(24:41):
unladylike behavior like running and jumping with abandon. Although the
boys at the school had shown an initial interest in
basketball as well, soon the girls were outperforming them on
the court and their interest waned. They also had plenty
of other team sports to choose from, whereas the girls
did not because was no other basketball program in Montana
(25:02):
at the time. For the first few years of basketball
at Fort Shaw Indian School, all of the games for
intramural scrimmage matches. Even so, they were as popular with
the local community as they were with the girls at
the school. At an end of year ceremony game in
eighteen seven, they did an intramural demonstration that brought in
three hundred spectators to watch. In eight Fred C. Campbell
(25:27):
became superintendent of Fort Shaw, and he seemed to have
had a genuine interest in making things better for the school,
improving the school's image and that of his students, and
he also wanted the community to begin seeing those students
in a different light. Racism against Native Americans was endemic
and severe, and Campbell recognized that all this work they
(25:48):
were doing to quote assimilate the students was not really
going to be effective if once those students graduated from
the school they were still shunned from white society. So
he started in vi people from the community to the
school and taking students out into the community to try
to basically get everyone used to each other hopefully change
(26:09):
the hearts and minds within the community. So a natural
way to do this was by hosting basketball games. And
we're gonna talk a little bit more about that, but
first we are going to pause and have a word
from one of our fantastic sponsors. In addition to being
(26:30):
the superintendent of the school, Fred Campbell had been an
athlete himself. Some sources actually credit him with being the
one who introduced basketball at Fort Shaw, but it was
definitely played there for a couple of years before he
became superintendent. From his own firsthand experience, he thought athletics
were a good way to build a person's self esteem
and sense of worth, on top of helping to develop
(26:52):
a strong and healthy body, So he focused on improving
and building up all the school's athletics teams, but it
was really the girl's bath ketball team that he saw
as having the most promise for bringing good publicity to
the school and its students. Basketball had barely made its
way into Montana at this point. There were so few
(27:12):
other teams to play against that the Fort Shaw girls
team's first game against another school was actually against a
boys team, and that team was from Great Falls. Then
Campbell organized another girls team in sun River, which was
not far away, so the Fort Shaw team would have
someone else to play. When it was time for games,
he would bring the sun River team in by wagon.
(27:34):
Fort Shaw defeated sun River easily every time. Of course,
more more schools, more other programs started having basketball teams,
but to play against those other teams, the Fort Shaw
team had to start traveling farther and farther away. In
late nineteen o two, they traveled to Butte, Montana by wagon,
(27:54):
and then trained where they where they defeated the Mute
High team fifteen to nine. The next day they traveled
to Helena again by train, and this time they were
defeated fifteen to six. Again, I will point out how
much lower these scores aren' than what we would normally
see in a basketball game today. There's only one of
(28:15):
one digit three. I think that original basketball sound is
a little more my taste maybe than current basketball, because
that is one of my things of like you could
just kind of watch the last bit because there's so
much scoring before that, which is not too in any way.
Throw shaded basketball if you love it, that's cool. That's
(28:35):
just always been my thing of like I could come
in for the last ten minutes, right um, that's when
it's really a nail biter. So after that loss though
at Helena, Campbell started refining the girls positions on the team.
He realized that Fort Shaw had lost the ball to
Helena in more than half of the jump balls at
center court, so he moved Nettie Worth, who wasn't the
tallest on the team but had a really incredible vertical jump,
(28:58):
to center. Nettie and her sister Lizzie were a Sinnaboine
and had been among Fort Shaw's first students when it opened.
This change was not quite enough to help Fort Shaw
defeat Beaute parochial school in the next game they played.
They lost that one fifteen to six, so Campbell made
another switch. He left Nettie Worth as center and he
(29:19):
made Many Burton and in a sense of her forwards.
Many was a member of the lem High Shoshony nation,
which was not actually in favor of sending children away
to government government boarding schools. But Many's father worked as
a translator and he thought that she could benefit from
getting an English education. Emma Sansor and her siblings were
(29:40):
actually Matee of French, Canadian and Chippewa Cree descent. They
were listed in their school records as Sue because their
particular people were essentially landless in the United States, they
were not part of a federally recognized tribe. Some of
the people at the mission school that they had attended
previously falsified the tribal affiliation to be able to get
(30:01):
them into the school, which, like we talked previously about
how there were all kinds of reasons for for children
to go to these schools, and this was a case
where Emma and her siblings were in dire financial straits
and so at the people who made this change to
their tribal affiliation, we're doing what they thought was best
for them. So this combination of girls and positions that
(30:25):
Campbell came up with became a winning one for Fort Shaw.
Their next game was against a college team, Montana State
University in Missoula, now known as the University of Montana.
Fort Shaw won nineteen to nine, and from there they
were undefeated for the rest of the season, playing at
least six more games, including against another college team, the
(30:46):
Montana Agricultural College Farmts, and resounding wins in rematches against
both Helena High School, which was ten victory, and Bute
Parochial which was an eighteen to eight score. These games
were not all on the road. The school. While it
had that large dance hall that was great for their
own scrimmages and practices, they didn't really have a large
(31:08):
enough space to accommodate the crowds who started wanting to
see the games, so they started using Luther Hall and
Great Falls, Montana as their home game court. Luther Hall
was a ballroom that was big enough for the playing
area and hundreds of spectators. Great Falls is also about
twenty five miles away from the school, and since travel
(31:30):
to and from there had to happen by wagon, the
team and their uh, their chaperones and coach wind up
staying at a hotel, which was a treat for most
of them. Over the course of a few games Great Falls,
Montana started to think of the Fort Shaw team as
their own home team. Although game coverage in the local
paper still drifted into casual racism, especially in descriptions of
(31:53):
the girls appearances and their quote savage winds, it started
to carry a little bit of a tone of local
pride and to focus more on the players other accomplishments
at school rather than the fact that they were quote Indian, yea,
they didn't. They didn't disguise the girls cultural heritage, but
it stopped being written about as though it were a
(32:15):
taboo or something to judge about them. In the end
of the three season, the Fort Shaw team had a
record of nine wins and two losses. The game of
basketball was still so new to the state of Montana
that there weren't official rankings or playoffs, but nevertheless, the
Fort Shaw team was regarded as the state champions. Many
(32:37):
Burton had become so popular, especially for her scoring ability,
that spectators chant whenever they were playing was shoot many shoots.
The basketball games also gave the school an opportunity to
show off some other talents. The band and the mandolin
orchestra provided the before game and halftime entertainment. Sometimes, after
(32:57):
the games, the court was turned back into a dance floor,
or the girls showed off their skills in ballroom dancing.
All of this also brought in lots of coverage from
the local press. Of course, racism and prejudice still existed,
but the community started to see these students as talented
and capable rather than as uneducable troublemakers. In nineteen o three, S. M.
(33:20):
Mcowen contacted Fred Campbell with an intriguing invitation. McCowen had
previously been superintendent of the Chillico Indian School, but he
had recently moved into a new role, director of the
Model Indian School that was being created for the St.
Louis World's far mcowen asked Campbell to select some of
(33:40):
Fort Shaw's best students to participate in the Model School,
which was going to run from June one to November one,
nineteen o four, and Campbell agreed. But that becomes a
whole other story, So we're gonna talk about what this
agreement meant for the basketball team and how it led
to their becoming World champions in part two of this podcast,
(34:04):
I'm excited for part to you me too. It's a
really fun story. You don't I mean when you think
about this being a completely new sport relief for people,
and now it completely shifted perceptions. I have a new
appreciation for basketball. I really admire the girls and young
women who played on this team. We're gonna get to
(34:25):
talk more about them next time. To heay so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio
(34:49):
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History and you can subscribe to
our show the Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
(35:11):
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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