1904 World Champions: The Story of the Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team
Winning more than a basketball game
Female basketball players Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have brought global attention to the Women’s National Basketball Association like never before. In the same year, the Biden administration became the first presidential administration to formally apologize for the federal government’s role in the Indian boarding schools of the 1600s through the early 1900s. While seemingly unrelated, the conversation about females and basketball, Native Americans, and the U.S. government has transpired before, almost a century and a quarter before the rising WNBA popularity and federal apologies to Indians made headlines. This is the story of the 1904 Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team and their fight to survive on and off the court to become world champions at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Their story of surviving the harsh conditions of the federally-funded Indian boarding schools, grieving the loss of their culture and assimilation into becoming Americanized citizens, and bringing glory to their team and community by winning the world championship is one that deserves to be told honestly and respectfully.
Author’s Note: Information was limited for the topic of Indian boarding schools and the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team. Thank you to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, the Sun River Valley Historical Society, Dan SaSuWeh Jones, and Linda Peavy & Ursula Smith for providing the bulk of the information on this harrowing part of North American history.
Indian Boarding Schools
The stories of Indian assimilation and Americanization began as early as the 1600s when Spanish colonizers on the West Coast built mission schools to convert and educate on Christianity to Indigenous peoples. In 1618, the Anglican Church commissioned the Virginia Colony to attempt assimilation of local northeastern Natives. In 1636, British settlers established Harvard University to train Puritan ministers, and 20 years later, constructed the Indian College to recruit and convert Native peoples to Christianity. The hope was the Natives would attend classes, dine with English students, and carry the Christian message home to their communities. Though the Harvard Indian School would end in 1698, it ushered in like-minded institutions to use Christian rhetoric and academia to assimilate Native peoples, such as the case of Anglican-founded William & Mary College and Putrian-founded Dartmouth College in the late 1600s.
The 1800s were rife with Native and American conflicts. Following President Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase and the 1804-1805 Lewis and Clark Expedition, the U.S. government encouraged Americans to go West and settle the new frontier that they called the ‘American West.’ The westward expansion from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast laid the groundwork for the exploration of the lands and the colonization of the Native Americans that lay west of St. Louis, Missouri.
Quaker Thomas Lorraine McKenney started as the first Superintendent of Indian Trade in 1816 and was a key figure in the development of early American Indian policy. An 1818 House Committee Report stated, “Either that those sons of the forest should be moralized or exterminated,” and Jesuit Father Francis Prucha extrapolated, “The only way to avert the just vengeance of God for these wrongs – and to ‘elevate our national character, and render it exemplary in the view of the world’ – was to speed the work of civilizing and elevating the Indians.” These efforts and sentiments led to the passage of the Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819, which allotted federal funding for Christian and missionary societies to run Indian schools as a form of cultural genocide. The goal of these schools was to strip the Native peoples of the culture and customs passed down through their ancestral lineage and to assimilate them into Americanized Christianity. By 1830, the Indian Civilization Fund supported 52 Christian schools with 1,512 enrolled Native American students. The U.S. government continued to pass mandates, acts, and funding toward Indian policies. The white patriarchal Christian elite, including President Andrew Jackson and President James K. Polk, perpetuated the ideology of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and sought to establish the West as part of their prophetic and ordained duty to “settle” North America. This also increased tensions between the federal government and the Indigenous peoples who had lived and thrived on the lands for thousands of years.
In 1862, two federal acts, the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act, allotted funding and lands for residential and academic institutional development in the West. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act to encourage American men and women to purchase 160 acres in the Western domain for $18 ($567 adjusted for 2024), provided they improved the land within 5 years. The congressionally-sponsored Morrill Act set aside land grants for each state or territory to establish a university to educate the agricultural and industrial populations. Two-thirds of the universities built under these grants were developed in the West, and over 10 million acres were expropriated from tribal lands of Native communities. The lands were ceded, most often forcibly, through treaties, agreements, and seizure. Often, the federal government did not honor these treaties.
Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, Americans sought to take advantage of the funding from the Homestead and Morrill Acts and take their families West to settle on what was the homeland of Indigenous peoples. The Natives called these lands home for generations and violently fought to preserve their way of life and resources from territory stolen and distributed by the federal government to American settlers. The violent conflicts were considered by the U.S. government as ‘the Indian Problem.’ Many tribes were removed from their lands and forcibly relocated to small reservations, sometimes far away from their original homes.
U.S. Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt was a veteran of the Civil War and fought in the Indian Wars out West. In the mid-1870s, he was ordered to capture and relocate Indian warriors from the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Caddo nations to exile in Florida. Here he worked to forcibly assimilate the captured Indian warriors into becoming contributing members of white society by learning English, dressing in American clothing, and adopting white customs.
Throughout this period, the Christian boarding schools assimilated Native American children into the way of life of the American Christian. The earlier schools were on or near the reservations, and students returned home daily to their families and communities. Many of the schools were run by Catholic nuns or Quaker women and, while strict and controversial, were far more humane than what was to come.
Pratt recognized the success of his Native assimilation program and was inspired by the existing Christian boarding schools to expand his methodology to children. He argued that children would be more susceptible to new rules and would more easily adapt to the way of life of the white man than the captive adults. He urged the government to employ his program’s militaristic methodology in the boarding schools and insisted that by training young children to forego their Indian ways and adopt white customs, they would grow up to live peacefully amongst the whites. Furthermore, Indian School Superintendent John B. Riley argued that the proximity of the boarding schools to the reservations was hindering assimilation efforts and suggested the schools should be far from the families and homes of the children. Education, he argued, was not sufficient – the children must be entirely removed from their Native communities to become Americanized.
The topic of the ‘Indian problem’ was controversial. Some questioned the efficiency of the boarding schools and captive warrior assimilation programs, while others argued against the inhumanity of genocide. The American government, however, argued it was significantly cheaper to educate and assimilate Natives than it was to kill them. The cost to keep a standing U.S. Calvary company was estimated at roughly two million dollars, to kill a single Indian warrior cost one million dollars, and the cost to educate one child over an eight-year period cost only $1200.
This approach became the foundation of President Grant’s ‘Peace Policy’ in 1869. The white majority could erase Native culture and customs by removing children from their homes and reprogramming them in off-reservation schools run by Christians and the government, therefore reducing the threat and costs of conflicts between whites and Natives.
The Peace Policy also replaced corrupt government officials with religious leaders to oversee Indian reservations. By 1872, the Board of Indian Commissioners allotted 73 Indian agencies to various Christian denominations, substituting government control for Church authority. Many considered the Christian boarding schools the key to successfully solving ‘the Indian problem’ and were built in multitudes at rapid rates with Christian and federal funding.
At a conference in Lake Mohonk, NY, a group calling themselves ‘Friends of the Indian’ created three principles to guide federal Indian policies: “1) the “need” for inculcation of individualism among native people, 2) that to achieve this end Indians should be universally “educated” to hold euro western beliefs, and that, 3) all Indians, duly educated and thus individualized, should be absorbed as citizens into the U.S. body politic”. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan claimed if any Indian should refuse to surrender their children, or refuse to surrender to assimilation, they were considered “a perpetual source of expense of the Government … a hindrance to civilization and a clog on [our] progress”. Morgan went on to blame Indian parents for the future harm caused to their ‘uncivilized’ children whom they did not surrender to the boarding schools: “We owe it to these children to prevent, forcibly if need be, so great and appalling a calamity from befalling them.”
Morgan and his supporters considered the harsh treatment of the boarding schools to be valuable, calling them ‘survival of the fittest,’ adapted from Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Those who survived would go on to become “fine Americans,” and those who didn’t died out. Thus was the reality of the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans at the hands of the Church and State. The goal was not to simply teach Native children how to pray to Jesus or to read and speak English. The goal was to eradicate any connection back to their tribes, and if they returned home, they would have become so Americanized that they were not welcomed by their Native communities. Native students were taught the value of private property ownership and individualism, a departure from the communal and shared land values of the tribes. They were taught to reject their Native world for the benefit of the American world, to view their home life as savage or uncivilized, and to forget their faith rooted in spiritual cosmology for Christian ideology. By Americanizing the Native children with Protestant, individualist, capitalist ideologies, the boarding school supporters destroyed the future of political, social, and economic institutions that bound Native communities together.
The schools evolved over three tiers and were primarily geared towards educating boys while the girls received domestic training. The initial tier was the day school program, located near or on the reservations and used by Christian missionaries since the 1600s. The secondary tier was the federally-funded boarding schools, often near railroads for easy transport. The boarding schools were near the reservations and also used as federal offices for Native adults and leaders to receive legal or financial services. The American site leaders often invited the local tribes to witness American concerts and holiday celebrations or to observe the children marching in military dress and adoring American short hairstyles, reciting English speeches, playing American sports, or otherwise adhering to American Protestant values. These invitations served to demonstrate the dominance of the American way over Native values and customs and to overwhelm the Native adults and communities of the loss of their children’s understanding of the Native way of life.
Despite the government’s emphasis on the school’s importance, the schools were not conducive to effective learning. The schools were generally underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded. The average turnover rate for boarding school teachers was 75%. Most students had one teacher for grades 1-3, and very little acquired more than a 7th-grade education. The overcrowded schools lacked adequate ventilation and lighting, nutritious food, clean and hot water, hand and body soap, and improper clothing and footwear. This led to the spread of diseases such as trachoma, a bacterial eye infection, which affected an astonishing 163 of 168 students at Rainy Mountain boarding school.
The third tier of Indian schooling was the off-site boarding schools, called ‘Indian Industrial Schools’ during their heyday. The off-site schools intended for the children to be far from home and any influence of their culture and to kill Native heritage to assimilate into white culture. Pratt once said in a speech, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” This sentiment is an indication of the mentality to support the boarding schools’ mission of cultural genocide. Pratt started the first off-reservation boarding school funded by the U.S. government, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in 1879.
The children were seized from their homes and families, sometimes at night and most often by military gunpoint, and sent East to the schools. The Indian Industrial Schools were considerably more populated than the day and near-reservation boarding schools. They came by wagon, steamboat, and train from more than 142 tribes, including Sioux, Chippewa, Cherokee, and as far as Alaska Native. Some of the tribes were strangers to one another, some were peaceful allies, and some had long-standing animosities. Many of the children feared they would be killed upon arrival at the schools and embraced death by singing songs of courage on the train ride over. Luther Standing Bear of the Lakota tribe, who was one of the first children to arrive and survived the Carlisle school, wrote, “I thought we were going East to die. But so well had courage and bravery been trained into us…in going East, I was proving to my father that he was honored with a brave son.” If children died along the way, as some did, their bodies were not returned to the families, and the families were often not told of their child’s death. They were not granted Native burial rituals, and many were buried in unmarked graves.
The children arrived during the night to deter crowds of local residents. Upon arrival, the students' long, flowing hair - a symbol of vitality in many Native cultures – was cut and unable to braid. They were dressed in military uniforms, given American names, and were commanded to speak only in English. They were assigned military rankings and marched around from building to building, some kids as young as four years old. They were given insect-infested food and beaten or starved if they spoke in their native tongue, practiced beloved cultural rituals, or asked for more food at meals. The schools did not adequately provide winter clothing and footwear, and many children, especially in the northern schools, died or possibly suffered frostbite from marching outdoors.
The school system ran between 1819 and 1969, with generations of families passing through the doors. Those who returned to their tribes would never be fully welcomed or regain their full status as Indians within their tribes. Pratt praised the success, especially their rejection from their tribes, for it was proof that the Native way of life could be killed and no longer be a threat to the white man. Congress was enthusiastic, and 400 more boarding schools across the country were modeled after the Carlisle school. The schools were celebrated at the 1904 World’s Fair of St. Louis as a victory for the American way of life.
The 1904 World’s Fair of St. Louis
The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (‘LPE’), informally known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, was an international spectacle that boasted the latest achievements in technology, science, commerce, foreign policy, civics, cultures, the arts, and athletics. The Fair was held in St. Louis, Missouri, to commemorate the centennial of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.
World’s Fairs typically had a theme. The 1893 fair in Chicago, built in part by Walt Disney's father, commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in America. The 1905 World’s Fair in Portland, Oregon, emphasized the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The fairs served as propaganda events to show the country in a ‘more prosperous, optimistic light during depressions or to help Victorian-era white Americans rationalize policies against American Indians and Filipinos that bordered on exterminative’. The St. Louis fair was larger than any World’s Fair before it – 19 million people worldwide attended the seven-month fair that spread across 1,200 acres in over 1,500 buildings erected by fair organizers and featured extravagant exhibits from 50 foreign countries and 43 of the then 45 states. No previous World’s Fair had brought together so many people from so many different cultures and countries. The endeavor cost local, state, and national governments nearly $15 million, or $509 million in today’s money, and thrust St. Louis into the international spotlight.
Fairgoers could walk the mile-long promenade, known as ‘The Pike,’ and enjoy pop culture entertainment, concession stands featuring ‘American’ foods such as hot dogs and hamburgers, Coca-Cola, and ice cream waffle cones. They could watch contortionist and circus acts, Boer War reenactments, or walk just off the promenade to experience an observation wheel, giving riders a 265-foot tall aerial view of the town and fair. The fair impressed the crowd with advancements in technology, such as the X-ray machine, the electric streetcar, the personal automobile, and incubators for preterm babies.
Touted with descriptors such as ‘magnificent’ in the papers, the LPE aimed to encompass humanity’s achievements up to 1904, installed the “white American‘ race’” as the single qualified leader of the future continuation of this movement, and showcased the inextricable link to American democracy, capitalism, and culture, as well as the country’s industrial, commercial, and technological prowess. The fair emphasized imperialism as the main ingredient to progress and narrated the ‘good deeds’ of the benevolent white man towards the imperial subjects they colonized.
The popular fair both reinforced and dismantled racial and cultural hierarchies that existed in colonializing ideologies. Exhibition halls showcased people from various cultures worldwide as ‘primitive.’ The ‘Anthropology Village’ crafted by organizer W.J. McGee trafficked Indigenous peoples from all across the world, including Africa, Asia, and North and South America. McGee was infamous for erroneously crafting racist narratives that were “slender in supporting data” to proclaim his theory of ‘racial progress’ and ‘evolutionary order’ in the ‘lesser’ races that he deemed ‘unintelligent and incapable.’ McGee built laboratories at the LPE in the Anthropology Village to showcase his theories, such as “cephalization” (progress explained by the increase of cranial capacity between races) and “cheirization” (progress as explained by the increase in dexterity between races). The intent of the exhibits was to display the evolution of the ‘primitive savages’ into enlightenment and advancement by the guiding hands of the civilized white man.
McGee was not the sole administrator of the village; the U.S. government specifically directed the $1.5 million ‘Filipino Reservation’ exhibit, the largest exhibit in the Anthropology Village. The display was a form of propaganda to disgrace and deride the Filipino resistance and people following the 1898 Spanish-American war and the Spanish concessions of the Philippine territories to the American government. The Filipinos disagreed with the concessions and waged armed and active resistance to their new American colonizer.
The Filipino exhibit featured over 1,100 Filipinos trafficked to the fair who came by boat and traveled to Missouri in unheated box cars, many of whom did not survive. They were displayed to the horror of fairgoers as Filipinos ate dogs, an exaggerated notion of the occasional canine consumption by Filipino people, and bewildered Christian audiences with acts of worship and prayer to their native deities. The site of the Filipino exhibit was positioned directly across from the fair’s intramural railroad line, a visual comparison of ‘savagery’ and progress.
Nearby, fair staff constructed an area called ‘Indian Hill,’ which featured exhibits of people, ‘teepees,’ and cultural goods from over 500 Native American people of 14 tribes located within the acquired Louisiana Purchase territories. In the center of Indian Hill was the Model Indian School, which mixed over 150 Native American students to exemplify the academic and ‘civilized’ teachings of Native American boarding schools. Fairgoers could walk the wide hallways of the three-story building and watch kindergarten or middle-school-aged children attend mock classes in English or arithmetic on one side of the hallway and observe adult Native Americans crafting pottery or baskets while sitting on traditional blankets on the other. This visual dichotomy communicated to the viewers that without American schools, the ‘savage’ Native Americans would remain ‘uncivilized.’
While many Indigenous people were forcibly trafficked to St. Louis to be a ‘living display’ for the LPE tourists, some arrived of their own volition, with goals and intentions of their own. One such group was the remarkable Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball team of Montana, the team that disproved racist notions of inferiority of non-white people perpetuated by anthropologists like McGee and his fellow crowds. Their championship title proved to the throngs of thousands that Anglo-Europeans did not have the athletic superiority touted by imperialist Americans, and their decorum demonstrated that they were not ‘savages.’ They were Indian, they were female, and they were world champion basketball players.
Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team
The Fort Shaw Indian School emerged from a repurposed military base on the outskirts of Great Falls, Montana, originally used to protect settlers from Indian attacks in the Sun River Valley of central Montana. The ‘Queen of Montana’s Indian Forts’ served as the regimental headquarters for the Military District of Montana territory and featured twenty-five buildings, including administrative offices, officers’ quarters, a hospital, barracks, laundry, a bakery, a stable, and even a water pumphouse. The base was abandoned in 1891, and a year later, the Bureau of Indian Affairs allocated the site to become an Industrial Indian School. By 1900, the school had over 300 students aged five to eighteen and 30 staff members. The Fort Shaw School enrolled students primarily from the Blackfeet reservation, an area that covered roughly 23 million acres from the Rockies on the west, the Dakotas to the east, the Canadian border to the north, and the Musselshell River of south-central Montana to the south. 2,000 students passed through the school during its operative years and represented tribes such as the Nakota Sioux (Assiniboine), Piegan Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Gros Ventres, Shoshone, Bannock, Chippewa, Cree, and Crow. Of the Indian schools in the region, Fort Shaw held the most positive and humane reputation. Many Indian families sent their children away from their reservations to have the best chance of survival in the changing world, and many of the students were mixed-blood white and Native.
Athletics, such as football and basketball, were an important part of the federal Carlisle Indian boarding school model and were practical for exercise and preventing disease, and crucial for cultivating discipline, sportsmanship, and teamwork. In 1892, James Naismith introduced the world to basketball through his work with the Christian YMCA, and the ‘masculine Christian’ sport was an almost overnight success. Naismith launched the University of Kansas basketball team in 1898, the same year that Frederick C. Campbell took over Fort Shaw as the superintendent and the boys’ athletics coach.
At the Fort Shaw Indian School, the student-beloved Coach Campbell introduced competitive sports to boost the self-esteem and morale of the students. He also promoted the new sport of basketball to surrounding area schools so that the Fort Shaw teams could compete with others. Many of the school children had never played basketball, but it was similar to the Indian field games of shinney and double ball, and the students learned the game quickly. A former student and staffer, Josephine Langley, organized a girls basketball team in 1897. Native tribes traditionally valued female physical prowess and ability out in the plains and forests for hunting, farming, and woodchopping, contrasting with the white emphasis on women being ‘ladylike.’ The athletically gifted girls were eager and enthusiastic to play.
The military dance hall became an indoor basketball court in 1902, and seven girls formed the original team. Coach Campbell took over the team in 1902, and under Fort Shaw teacher and Assistant Coach Sadie Malley’s insistence, they played the same rules as the boys: 20-minute halves, no breaks, no stop-clocks, and court tip-off after every basket. To fund equipment, travel, and uniforms, the Fort Shaw girls dazzled crowds with mandolin music and singing performances, gymnastics and dancing routines, and English-speaking recitations. Lizzie Wirth, sister of player Nettie Werth, music teacher Fern Evans, and Lillie B. Crawford served as instructors and chaperones for the girls' travel basketball team.
The players represented a variety of tribes, some amicable and some antagonistic. Campbell’s coaching style and the game brought the girls together, melding tribal differences and fostering teamwork to eventually win the LPE’s World Championship. Their names are:
Josephine Langely, center and right guard, team captain. She was the daughter of a Piegan mother and a Métis father who served at Fort Shaw’s military base. After the first season, she became a full-time school employee and gave her captain title to Johnson.
Genie Butch, left guard. She was born to an Assiniboine mother and white father and raised on the Fort Peck Reservation in eastern Montana.
Bettie Johnson, captain, left guard, and left forward. She was born to a Piegan mother and a white father and left the Holy Family Mission for Fort Shaw.
“Big Minnie" Minnie Burton, left guard and left forward. A daughter of a West Shoshone mother, she transferred from Idaho’s Fort Hall reservation school in 1902 and was recruited to the team quickly upon arrival.
Delia Gebeau, left guard. She was born to a Spokane mother and Métis father.
Emma Rose Sansaver, right forward. She was born to a Métis father and a Chippewa-Cree mother. She transferred from the St. Paul's Mission School in 1897.
Nettie Wirth, forward and center. She was the daughter of an Assiniboine mother and a German father. She transferred to Fort Shaw from Fort Peck.
Genevieve "Gen" Healy, guard. She was born to a Gros Ventre mother, Healy transferred from a mission school on the Fort Belknap reservation in 1899.
Catherine "Katie" Snell, guard. She was born to a German immigrant father and an Assiniboine mother and transferred from the Fort Belknap agency.
Sarah Mitchell, forward. She was born to an Assiniboine-Chippewa mother and a Shoshone father.
Flora Lucero, forward. She was born to a Chippewa-Cree mother and Spanish immigrant father.
The Fort Shaw girls basketball team’s first season in 1902-1903 saw them acheive a 9-2 record while bringing recognition to the school and girls' sports at large in Montana. They traveled as far as Butte in the southwestern part of the state, and the young Fort Shaw girls notably defeated the more experienced and older Montana State University and Montana Agriculture College teams three times. They became state champions that season, an exciting and proud experience that brought publicity to the team and school.
The Fort Shaw girls did not recapture the title of state champions the following season, but their rising popularity earned them the spotlight at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. The LPE organizers invited Coach Campbell to choose students to participate as a ‘living display’ in the fair’s mock boarding schools, and he wrestled with the ethics of the invitation. Finally, Campbell approached the girls basketball team and, after describing the underlying racist and imperialist motivations of the fair, left the decision up to the players. After some deliberation, the girls agreed. One hundred years after the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent downfall of their Native way of life, the Fort Shaw girls showed the fairgoers and national press just how resilient the spirit of the ‘aboriginal maidens’ could be.
The team, Coach Campbell, and chaperones Lizzie Wirth, sister of player Nettie Werth, music teacher Fern Evans, and Lillie B. Crawford, boarded the train from Great Falls to St. Louis. The girls were both overwhelmed and impressed by the magnificent spectacle of the expansive World’s Fair. The scene was unlike the girls had ever witnessed back home in rural Montana: streetcars, foot traffic, concession stands, and entertainment captivated their attention. And the girls were a spectacle to the crowdgoers in return. The tall, stocky, brown-skinned girls performed and sang ‘Song of the Mystic’ while wearing flowing white Grecian dresses and scarves, a stark departure from the media messaging of ‘savage’ dress and decorum. They stayed in the Anthropology Village at Indian Hill and were welcomed by the national superintendent of the Indian schools. Fifteen hundred members of the Indian School Service came to observe the Indian Hill tribes and tout the federal Indian school programs’ success in ‘civilizing’ the Natives.
The girls entertained fairgoers and raised funds for their travel and food by singing, playing the mandolin, and dancing. In their free time, they walked The Pike and chowed down on ice cream and hot dogs. When the girls were not reciting English speeches in the fair’s mock Indian boarding school for tourists, they played scrimmages and exhibition games on the fairgrounds and sometimes left the site to play against local high school teams. Throughout the summer, they won every scrimmage and exhibition game, despite not having home-court advantage nor the support of their Montana crowds. The media was delighted, “suggesting that they were unstoppable, speedier, and more agile than the other teams, and adept and feints and strategies that their opponents just could not match.” The girls were elated by the fanfare but were far more excited to learn Native legend Geronimo of the Bedonkohe band of the Ndendahe Apache people was in attendance to watch them.
That same summer, St. Louis hosted the Olympics, and the Fort Shaw girls had the honor to play an Olympic exhibition game before thousands of fans on August 11, 1904. This is a notable feat considering it would be seventy-two years before the Olympics added women’s basketball as an Olympic sport and ninety-two years before the WNBA was formed. The Fort Shaw team received an inscribed silver trophy for winning their Olympic game.
The Missouri coaches, frustrated by the ‘savage’ girls’ dominance on the court, organized a team of Missouri all-star players from high school basketball teams specifically to defeat the Fort Shaw girls. The contest was a best-of-three, and the first game tipped off on September 3, 1904, and fairgoers decidedly called the series the ‘world championship’. The Fort Shaw girls reigned over their opponent 24-2, prompting the St. Louis Post-Dispatch press to record, “To the great surprise of several hundred spectators, the girls from Fort Shaw were more active, more accurate, and cooler than their opponents.”
Disgraced, the Missouri All-Stars forfeited the second game through a no-show. Not satisfied with this path to championship, the Fort Shaw girls requested a second game, to which the Missouri All-Stars obliged. On October 8, the girls easily defeated the Missouri team 17-6, cementing their record as the undisputed World Champions. The victory of the Indian girls and their athletic prowess was a rebuke of the rhetoric of McGee and U.S. propaganda that claimed Anglo-Europeans were dominant because of their physical and intellectual superiority. At a fair predicated on white imperialism, the Fort Shaw Indian girls basketball team beat the Americans at their own game, a game invented by Dr. James Nasmith, a white Christian professor just over a decade before the LPE.
The Fort Shaw girls played one more year after the LPE and won the Championship of the Pacific Northwest. Following the 1905 season, many of the girls graduated and went on to marry and work, and the team disbanded when Fort Shaw closed in 1910. Due to the communication challenges of the early 20th century and the loss of the school as a central reunion site, the girls lost touch. Their stories were kept alive through oral history and newspaper clippings, turning the 1904 Fort Shaw girls basketball team history into legend.
The confluence of the invention of basketball, the Indian boarding schools, and the St. Louis World’s Fair brought about extraordinary circumstances that culminated in an extraordinary story. The U.S. government and Christian churches made concerted efforts to operate over 408 boarding schools between 1819 and 1969 to ensure the dominance of civilized, white America and the erasure of Native American cultures. The tragedy and horror the Indians experienced in their homelands, on reservations, and at boarding schools at the hands of the government and Christian churches left traumatizing wounds for generations to come.
The intention of the extravagant 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was to display white imperialism, progress, and superiority. The show of technological innovations by white entrepreneurs and leaders, the curated mockeries of indigenous people on display in the Anthropology Village, and the commemoration of America’s successes since the Louisiana Purchase (and therefore, theft of Native homelands), were all part of a deliberate demonstration of white Anglo Christian supremacy and American propaganda.
American society continues to wrestle with politics on and off the courts. News of mass Indian graves and horrific stories have come forward to shed light on what the American government and Christianity sought to obscure. In 2024, President Biden became the first president to formally apologize for the federal government’s role in the Indian boarding schools and recognized the deaths of nearly 1,000 children in the boarding school system era. This was not his first attempt at repairing the relationship between Natives and the U.S. government. During his term, President Biden picked Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet member, to be the Interior Secretary to oversee the same agency that carried out the injustices to Native people over the last two and a half centuries. That same year, women’s basketball saw record-breaking viewership: The 2024 WNBA regular season was the most watched season ever on ESPN platforms, and the WNBA Finals was the most watched finals in 25 years.
The Fort Shaw Indian boarding school girls basketball team dominated the courts and the press during their 1903-1904 reign. They overcame the hardships of leaving home, adapting to assimilation, and bore the trauma of cultural genocide. They adopted white American customs, dress, and language and forgot their native ways. But yet, the Fort Shaw girls adapted quickly to the game of basketball. Their ancestral emphasis on female athleticism and the overnight popularity of the new American sport created an opportunity for the girls to shine for millions to watch, disproving those who claimed their indigeneity rendered them ‘physically inferior.’
Despite ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide, the spirit of the Indians could never be killed. The success of the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team exemplified the resilient strength and camaraderie necessary to survive. The mixed-tribe team was but an indicator of how tribes would come together later in the century to become a pan-Native American political power.
May the Indian boarding school survivors and their family members feel honored and heard, may young girls be inspired by the Fort Shaw team and WNBA athletes to continue their love of the game of basketball, and may the intersection of politics and sports continue to bring justice to all.
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