Fort Shaw Indian School
From Hoopedia
When basketball was new, a progressive principal of an Indian boarding school taught the game to his female students. They picked it up quickly and well, barnstorming across Montana and defeating all comers. Local club teams, high school teams, college teams all fell to the ladies from Fort Shaw. Their speed and teamwork were simply overwhelming. Today they call this style of play "Rezball." Back then, it was just the way the Fort Shaw team played.
In 1904 the young ladies from the Fort Shaw Government Indian Boarding School, located in Montana’s Sun River Valley, attended the Model Indian School at the St. Louis World's Fair. The school was, in fact, part of the Federal government's "anthropological exhibit" of America's indigenous peoples. The Fort Shaw team again took on all comers and emerged victorious.
For their efforts, the team received a trophy commemorating their achievements, declaring them World's Fair champions. Upon their return to Montana, they were hailed as Champions of the World.
Montana team more than performers at 1904 World's Fair
By Evelyn Boswell, MSU News Service
One hundred years ago, 10 Montana Indian girls moved to St. Louis and performed at the 1904 World's Fair.
The fair featured performers from around the world, but many were considered living exhibits who could illustrate lessons about the supposed progress of the world from "savagery" to "civilization," said Robert Rydell, a Montana State University (MSU) historian who specializes in the study of American cultural history.
The girls -- a stellar team of basketball players from the Fort Shaw Indian boarding school near Great Falls -- went to the fair to perform, but they were considered a curiosity like the Eskimos who lived at the fairgrounds in papier mache igloos and wore seal skin coats, Rydell said.
The girls played exhibition games twice a week, welcoming any challengers, according to Ursula Smith and Linda Peavy, Vermont researchers who revived the public's interest in the team. Besides playing basketball, the girls gave weekly literary programs and musical concerts. A photo in the winter 2001 issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History showed the girls wearing diaphanous white gowns as they performed "Song of the Mystic."
The Fort Shaw basketball players were part of a world's fair landscape filled with thousands of people who probably thought of themselves as performers, but were regarded as specimens used to lend legitimacy to imperialism, Rydell said. The fair featured 1,200 Filipinos, for instance, who came from the Philippines by ship, traveled to Missouri in unheated box cars and lived in what was called the Philippines Reservation.
The Montana girls lived among 150 Indian children who were part of the fair's model Indian school exhibit, Rydell said. When they returned to Montana 5 1/2 months later, they carried the title of 1904 world champion basketball players.
"They were not forced to go to the fair," Rydell said. "They went for their own reasons, but at the fair, they were viewed less as human beings in their own right than as exotic specimens."
Smith said, "They wanted to go in a sense, because they were very excited. They had super success, super recognition from their parents and tribe about what they had done."
Once at the fair, "They were very aware of being on display," Peavy added. "They chose to be fully participatory. It makes them unique role models for all of us when in situations not necessarily of our own choosing, but rather to make the most of it."
A recent conference at MSU was devoted to American Indian issues similar to those faced by the Fort Shaw basketball team. Rydell was asked to discuss world fairs in general and provide context for the other speakers.
He described world fairs, which were known also as "International Expositions." The first, the Crystal Palace Exposition in London, was in 1851. World fairs were designed more for education than amusement and were to teach the American public about "progress" and the wisdom of U.S. foreign policies. They were used to show off new products like ice cream cones. They showed the country in a more prosperous, optimistic light during depressions. They helped Victorian-era white Americans rationalize policies against American Indians and Filipinos that bordered on exterminative, Rydell said.
"These were extraordinary events in extraordinary times," he said.
World's fairs usually centered on a theme. The St. Louis Fair, for example, was designed to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase. The 1905 exposition in Portland, Ore. generated interest in Lewis and Clark, who were considered "small, small, relatively insignificant explorers" before then. The 1893 fair in Chicago -- built in part by Walt Disney's father -- celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America.
Evelyn Boswell, (406) 994-5135 or evelynb@montana.edu
