Sports – One Book: Further Reading

Billings, Andrew C, and Jason Edward Black. Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native American Representations in Sports. 1st ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018.

Colton, Larry. Counting Coup : A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn. New York, NY: Warner Books, 2001.

"Somehow, in the mindless ways that rivers sculpt valleys and shame shapes history, the Montana Indians' purest howl against a hundred years of repression and pain had become . . . high school basketball." Gary Smith, Sports Illustrated, quoted in the prefatory material of Colton’s book.

D’Ambrosio, Brian. Warrior in the Ring: The life of Marvin Camel, Native American world champion boxer. Riverbend Publishing, 2014. [ON ORDER] This is more than a book about boxing. True, it is a look at a Native athlete who drove himself to win two world championships as a pugilist. However, it is as much about boxing as boxing is about life itself. Brian D’Ambrosio. From Warrior in the Ring. Davies, Wade. Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970. University Press of Kansas, 2020.

Forsyth, Janice, Christine O’Bonsawin, Russell Field, and Murray G. (Murray George) Phillips, eds. Decolonizing Sport. Halifax ; Fernwood Publishing, 2023.

Graves, Byron. Rez Ball. New York, NY: Heartdrum, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2023. [Fiction]

Jenkins, Sally. The Real All Americans : The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation. New York: Broadway Books, 2008.

Klein, Alan M. Lakota Hoops : Life and Basketball on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2020.

Lipsyte, Robert. The Brave. 1st ed. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1991. [Fiction – boxing]

Oxendine, Joseph B. American Indian Sports Heritage. Champaign, Ill: Human Kinetics Books, 1988.

Peavy, Linda S. and Smith, Ursula. Full-court quest: the girls from Fort Shaw Indian School, basketball champions of the world. University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Peavy, Linda and Smith, Ursula. “‘Leav(ing) the white(s) – far behind them’: the girls from Fort Shaw (Montana) Indian School, basketball champions of the 1904 World’s Fair.” In Brownell, Susan. The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games : Sport, Race, and American Imperialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

“Who were these young women and how did they come to be at the 1904 St. Louis Worlds’s Fair? . . . The team’s rise to basketball glory began at an Indian boarding school . . . The members of the Fort Shaw girls’ basketball squad . . . were . . . model “products” of the government’s Indian education system . . . they had been brought to St. Louis . . . to demonstrate to the world the extent to which the prevailing federal policy of acculturation and assimilation through education was meeting its goal of “civilizing” Indian youth. From Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith. From “Leav(ing) the white(s) - far behind them

Salamone, Frank A. The Native American Identity in Sports : Creating and Preserving a Culture. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2013.

Chapters include (but not limited to):
- Amateur boxing and assimilation at the Stewart Indian School, Carson City, Nevada, 1935-1948 / Andrew McGregor
- Native American wrestling / Frank A. Salamone
- Sacred ground and ground strokes: the development of native American tennis / Misty May Jackson and Jannus Roosien Cottrell
- Billy Mills: Olympic champion, Lakota warrior / Andrew McGregor

Tardif, Cameron. “Assimilationist Athletics: Indian Boarding Schools, Sports, and the American Empire.” Journal of Sport History 48, no. 1 (2021): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.48.1.0001.

Sports functioned as both a conduit to assimilation—ostensibly minimizing the assumed biological barriers—and as a tool expediting integration. John Bloom, a leading scholar on sports at Indian Boarding Schools, posits that athletics packaged the white mythology of Indigenous peoples as physical creatures in a socially acceptable and marketable way. Cameron Tardif, from Assimilationist Athletics

Vennum, Thomas. American Indian Lacrosse : Little Brother of War. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

Voorhies, Barbara, ed. Prehistoric Games of North American Indians : Subarctic to Mesoamerica. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2017.

Watta, Evelyn. “16-year-old Native American boxer Mariah Bahe: ‘My biggest dream is to win at the Olympics'” Olympics.com, 2021 (March 8).

Includes interview and pictures; also serves as promotion for an Olympic Channel series, Maria, A Boxer’s Dream. Available on YouTube