PAGE 10 MONTANA SENIOR NEWS
JUNE/JULY 2009
Full-Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School Basketball Champions of the World by Linda Peavy & Ursula Smith; University of Oklahoma Press, 2008 Reviewed by Connie Daugherty In March 2009, the Montana Book Award Committee - a statewide group established in 2001 by the Friends of Missoula Public Library - announced its annual winner. At the time of the announcement, I was attending my granddaughter’s 6th-grade basketball games, and March-Madness was in full swing. So, naturally I picked up Full-Court Quest. From the first page I knew I’d found a treasure. While the story is obviously about basketball, women’s basketball, it is also about the U.S. government’s experiment in American Indian boarding schools. It is about growing up, forming friendships, and crossing societal boundaries. It is a story that was all but lost in local lore until these two talented researcher-authors chanced upon a team photo. Their curiosity and interest was aroused and after ten-years of extensive and detailed research, Full-Court Quest became a reality and includes not only that familiar inspirational photo, but also others the authors collected along the way. The book is written in a touchingly personal style that pulls the reader in and provides understanding as well as bushels of detailed historic information. We have all heard the theory that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world creates a wind across the globe. This is sort of what happened with this bit of history. In the telling of the tale, Peavy and Smith show how all the individuals and separate incidents come together at one magical place in one magical moment in history - the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. “The story of the Fort Shaw team’s journey to St. Louis had its beginnings a dozen years earlier, in 1892, with the establishment of an off-reservation government school for American Indian children at an abandoned military fort in central Montana, and at almost the same time - but on the other side of the country - with the invention of the game of
basketball,” explain the authors in the preface of Full-Court Quest. In January 1892, James Naismith published an article detailing the rules of his new game in The Triangle, the YMCA’s monthly journal. “[T]he new sport’s critical quality was teamwork…. In the late nineteenth century, with immigrants pouring into the country, American society was becoming increasingly diverse, and… increasingly fragmented…. [A] game demanding teamwork… could be a means of building a sense of community within ethnic groups… ultimately… assimilating them into American society.” Basketball, like most sports of the time, was never intended to be a woman’s sport. It was considered much too rigorous for a woman’s constitution. But almost as soon as the game was established it was discovered and adopted by an energetic physical education teacher at Smith College and, “basketball would alter forever… girls’ perception of appropriate physical exercise for women as well as their perceptions of themselves.” By 1896, the three-year-old Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School was well established and growing with students coming from all corners of Montana and Idaho. Indian children were not only learning to read and write English, they were also learning to be bakers, seamstresses, and cobblers. It was also the year that girls’ basketball came to Fort Shaw – brought by a former student/worker who had discovered the sport while attending the famous Carlisle Indian School in Oklahoma. By 1897, an exhibition game was included in the annual spring closing exercises at Fort Shaw. “[T]he school was the only educational institution in Montana - white or Indian, college or high school - to incorporate basketball into its physical culture curriculum.” At the very least, it was the only school to allow public exhibitions of girls playing this new sport. Girls, who had to put aside their long, confining skirts in exchange for bloomers and middies. Although the team at Fort Shaw might have been the first team to offer a public exhibition of basketball, the new sport was not unheard of around the state. But it wasn’t until 1902 that the Fort Shaw girls would have a chance to compete against any other teams. Once begun, these public competitions not only grew beyond expectations, but had unexpected consequences as well. When the residents of Sun River and Great Falls turned out in record numbers to watch this new sports competition, they adopted and supported the Fort Shaw girls as their local team. “Relations between the