Sports and Recreation

Sports and Recreation

Sources

Leisure Pursuits. Native American peoples engaged in a variety of leisure activities. Heavy betting accompanied most games and contests. Warriors of all tribes competed in swimming and running matches to test their strength and endurance. A less rigorous activity was the hand game. Approximately eighty-one Plains and western tribes played this guessing game in which a person concealed objects in each hand. Another person would then guess which object was marked. If he chose correctly, the guesser won a counting stick; if he guessed wrong, he would lose one. The hand game was played by two teams with individuals from each side taking turns at guessing. Elaborate hand gestures, singing, and drumming marked the event, and it ended when one side won all the counting sticks.

Stickball Games. At the time of European contact in 1492, the native inhabitants of North America played several different stickball games. Toka, the forerunner of field hockey, was a traditional women’s game among the Tohono O’odhams (more commonly known as Papagos) of northern Mexico and southern Arizona. A similar game was called shinny. Probably the most well known stickball game was lacrosse, played by tribes in the eastern portion of North America from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

Lacrosse. The origins of lacrosse are uncertain, but some anthropologists maintain it evolved from a Mesoamerican rubber-ball game. Early French colonists called it lacrosse because its curved stick (crosse) looked like a bishop’s staff. The Onondagas called it dehuntshig-wa’es (men hit a rounded object) while the Cherokees referred to it as da-nah-wah’uwsdi (little brother of war). Usually a male team sport, lacrosse differed from toka and shinny in that it used a netted racket by which a player threw and caught a ball. The object was to get the ball, usually made of deerskin or animal guts, past a goal. The ball could not be touched with the hands. Game equipment varied by regions. Southeastern players used two sticks (each 2.5 feet in length), while northern tribesmen had only one stick (3 or more feet long). Teams ranged in size from a few players to several hundreds, and events could last all day. The competition was occasionally fierce, with broken limbs, concussions, and even death resulting for some contestants. Aside from its worth as a recreational activity, lacrosse served a more important role in native society by bringing communities together. Ceremony surrounded the game, and holy men ritually prepared players and equipment before each match. Also tribes sometimes used it as an alternative to war by settling their disputes on the lacrosse field.

Sources

Stewart Culin, “Games of the North American Indians,” in Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902–1903 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1907);

Thomas Vennum Jr., American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War (Washington, D.C. & London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).