Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Montana: The Unlikely Fort Shaw Basketball Champions with Sharon McMahon

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

Sharon shares a story only the buffest of history buffs will know about Montana in this solo episode. In the early 1900s, Indigenous children were taken from their families to attend residential schools where they were assimilated into European culture - cutting their hair, learning new languages, and wearing European clothes. However, they wanted the women to get just enough physical activity at the Fort Shaw school, so they started a basketball program. The program exploded and became wildly popular, drawing crowds of hundreds of people per game. In this episode, Sharon will tell the story of how these women went from playing in a small gym to being named World Champions at the 1904 World’s Fair, to playing an exhibition game at the Olympics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my friends. Welcome, welcome. So thrilled you're joining me today. I have a story for you. I have a story that probably only the most buffiest of history buffs, only the buffiest of history buffs will have heard of this. And I would imagine that is probably not many of you. So let's dive in to this incredible story from the state of Montana, the Fort Shaw Champions. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. So I would imagine that many of you have heard the current event stories talking about the residential schools for Native Americans and indigenous people throughout the United States and Canada. You've probably seen those stories where they've used technology to determine that a number of

children, in some cases, hundreds of children were buried at residential schools. But let's just set the stage here for a minute before we dive into this story about residential schools in the United States. I am not an expert on Canadian history, but I would imagine that there are many parallels of this story in Canadian history as well. When the colonists from Europe begin to settle North America, eventually the net effect is that indigenous groups were pushed farther and farther out of the eastern portion of the United States, farther west of the Mississippi, and their groups were in many cases killed off due to disease or war, and many of them were consolidated onto reservations, and their children were sent to boarding schools or residential schools. The purpose of these schools was to help the native children assimilate into European culture. It was essentially to remove

their native language, their native customs, and to help them dress like Europeans, wear their hair like Europeans, speak English. And that, of course, has had long-lasting and significant effects on the indigenous people of both the United States and Canada. And I want to talk today about a very unique event that happened within this system in the state of Montana. Fort Shaw was an abandoned army fort that was used as a boarding school for native children that was set up by the Department of the Interior in around 1892. And around the turn of the century, it had approximately 300 children that lived there, mostly from the Blackfoot tribe. And they came from around the

areas in Montana and nearby regions. There were about 30 staff there. And when children would arrive, they were groomed to look and act like the Victorians. They were made to cut their hair. They were made to wear sort of Victorian dress. So if you think about girls wearing dresses of that timeframe, that's what they would wear. One person said, none of us wanted to go and our parents didn't want to let us go. And we cried for this was the first time we were to be separated from our parents.

Nobody waved as the wagons escorted by the soldiers took us toward the school at Fort Shaw. Once there, our belongings were taken from us, even the little medicine bags our mothers had given to protect us from harm. Everything was placed in a heap and set afire. And that was from a book that was written by James Schultz, where he had been researching children who were sent to a school like this. This was specific to the Fort Shaw School, but very, very common occurrences at residential schools around North America. One of the things that I have found interesting learning more about that I have to say I did not learn in any of my college classes or high school classes for that matter, which was about what teenage women in particular were allowed to do when they were attending schools. And so this

was not specific to boarding schools, but it could have been in regular public schools as well. I've mentioned this on a previous podcast and I really wanted to dive more into this concept that it was highly encouraged for teenage girls at the turn of the century to play basketball. Obviously not the same as the NBA, slightly different rules, but the same exact concept. I mentioned this in my main episode. The subject of the main episode was a basketball coach. The Fort Shaw Residential School had a basketball program for girls that was absolutely remarkable. Now, do not take this to mean that I'm glorifying the children being sent to a residential school in any way. But yet this program led to some remarkable events.

One of the reasons people encouraged turn of the century teenage girls to play basketball was the sensibility that women needed to have some physical activity for their health. Couldn't just lay around that was bad for your health, but you couldn't have too much physical activity because it was also bad for your health, might make you hysterical. You don't want to work out too hard, but you want to work out a little bit. And also they need to have something to do, right? They didn't call it working out at the time, right? It was just like having some physical activity. The young women who formed this Fort Shaw basketball team came from several different

tribes. Many of them were the daughters of indigenous women and white men, and they ranged from ages 15-ish to their early 20s. Prior to 1902, the Fort Shaw School did not have enough funding to permit any of their players to travel to compete. Because as one can imagine, if you're living in very rural Montana at the turn of the century, it's not like there's 25 other high schools in a two-hour bus ride to play, right? Like you have to travel to play each other. So the superintendent of the school was the basketball coach and he began to influence neighboring areas to start their own basketball team so that they could have people to play

against. And this team of girls at the Fort Shaw School was called the Dusky Bells. They started playing home games in Great Falls, Montana, because it was really the only building that had enough seating because it became a very popular spectator sport. The building that they played home games in sat about 700 people. So imagine turn of the century, imagine 1902, 700 people coming out to watch girls basketball. That was something to behold. The Fort Shaw team defeated all of the high school opponents in Montana, and then went on to defeat all of the college basketball teams all over Montana. They became this big sensation. This is what one of the newspaper headlines said, in championship form, Indian maidens beat parochials in basketball. Clever teamwork wins out. It became in part such a popular spectator sport because so many people

had had very few interactions with any Native Americans. And they thought that this was maybe their opportunity to check it out, to see what there was to see. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday.

Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. So the superintendent of the school felt like if Europeans were going to accept Native Americans as part of society, that they would need to see Natives dressing and behaving like white people. But that was an important part of assimilation. He really felt like it was his job to expose the larger Montana community to the worth of the people who

were going to Fort Shaw. And again, you can make all kinds of arguments about how problematic this thinking is, that we should not have removed people from their cultures and then put them in an exposition format. You could make that argument and you would probably not be wrong. format, you could make that argument and you would probably not be wrong. So the girls would play five on five in front of crowds. Also, while they were at the game, they would take, you know, breaks or before and after the game, they would show off their other skills. They would play music, they'd have poetry recitations, they would do ballroom dancing. They would show off their calisthenics, like their exercises. And people would purchase these exhibition tickets, and they would, in many cases, travel long ways to see these exhibitions. So in 1903, Fort Shaw became so well known that they were invited to participate in the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.

And what they were invited to participate in was not necessarily just about basketball. They were invited to be part of the Model Indian School. And the Model Indian School exhibition, the intent behind it was to validate America's policy of assimilation. The goal was to show that natives were not quote-unquote savages and could assimilate into white culture. The superintendent of Fort Shaw took 10 players, players whose names had been changed to things like Emma, Katie, Flora, Sarah, and took a chaperone. They had to fundraise to get to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. And one of the ways that they fundraised was they played and conducted a bunch of exhibitions on the way from Montana to St. Louis. And once they arrived in St. Louis, they were going to have to be at the World's Fair in St. Louis for eight months. Eight months! This was not just a, like, yeah,

we made it to state. We go there, we play, and we return home a few days later. No. These girls were going to the World's Fair to actually live there to be part of this model Indian school exhibit. So while they were there, they had to live in the Indian school exhibit hall. They lived there in the exhibit hall. While they were there, they did things like perform the poem Hiawatha by Longfellow. Sometimes they would wear traditional native dresses, like traditional buckskin dresses, so that fairgoers could see them. It was estimated that 30,000 fairgoers per day visited the Model Indian School at the fair. Most of them wanted to see natives on display in their traditional garb. They found out that they preferred watching the basketball team

while they were wearing their buckskin dresses. This exhibit that the girls lived at. They lived in the exhibit. I mean, think about this. Let's say you go to a natural history museum and you are there to talk about what life was like in a covered wagon in the 1880s on the plains of America. And you don't just perform there. You don't just act as a history interpreter. You live in the exhibit. You live there. That's what these girls were doing. They did not have somewhere else to go afterwards. So the superintendent of Fort Shaw said that summer, said that summer, Fort Shaw will play any girls basketball team in the world, bar none. And so that was like, wow, okay, shots fired across the bow. Who else could we get to play them? Because that was a big challenge. We will play anybody. Fort Shaw played an Illinois team in July. The game was played, by the way, the Illinois team that they played was played outdoors on uneven ground, which, as you know, is not how basketball

is normally played. Fort Shaw won that game. At the conclusion of all of these competitions, they competed in a best of three games against the Missouri All-Star team. And one game, the Missouri All-Stars didn't show up. The other two, Fort Shaw won. The girls were declared the undisputed world champions of basketball and given a huge trophy for their World's Fair wins. So I got to give you a little bit of a breakdown about something else here too. In 1904, the Summer Olympics were also held in St. Louis at the same time as the World's Fair. There were 651 athletes competing in the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis. Six of the 651 athletes were women, and the other 645 were men. Competitors came from all over the place.

There were about 15 nations represented in total. the place. There were about 15 nations represented in total. Originally, the Olympics were supposed to be held in Chicago and Teddy Roosevelt had them moved to St. Louis so that they could be held at the same time as the World's Fair. This ended up being not the best idea. The Olympics became just kind of like this side attraction. The World's Fair was the main attraction and the Olympics were like, Olympics. When the Olympics really should have been like, the Olympics, right? They were just kind of like, oh, the Olympics. People were confused and we're going to the Olympics. We're going to the World's Fair. people were confused. And we're going to the Olympics, we're going to the World's Fair.

It ended up not working out the way probably Teddy Roosevelt had envisioned it. The Olympics, y'all, took six months to complete. Six months is how long the Olympics went on in 1904. Now the Olympics are like what? They're like two weeks, three weeks tops. And like the main events are, you know, really consolidated into like a 10 day period about, and there's some preliminary events where they, you know, see who's going to make it to the final rounds. Can you imagine the Olympics going on for six months. And because the World's Fair was also going on, a lot of the competitors at the Olympics were like never recognized. Literally, we don't even have records of everybody that was competing in the 1904 Olympics because of how much they were overshadowed by the World's Fair that the Fort Shaw basketball team was living at. Fun fact, boxing made its

Olympic debut in the 1904 Olympic Games. Basketball was an exhibition at the Olympic Games, and some of the Fort Shaw girls showed off their basketball skills at the Olympics as an exhibition, but basketball did not actually become an Olympic sport until 1976. Going back to the girls playing at the Olympics, they played in front of thousands of spectators. It was very noteworthy because very few women were allowed to participate in things like sports. As I mentioned, six women out of the over 600 participants in the Olympics, and certainly very few people of color were permitted to participate. So to see a female team of color playing a sport, even though it was an exhibition at the Olympics, was very noteworthy.

After the World's Fair ended, journalists all over the place kept calling the Fort Shaw basketball team the champions of the world. Like that is what they were, like world champion basketball players. And most of that notoriety has kind of been lost to history. I would imagine, again, unless you are the buffiest of history buffs, you probably have never heard of them. So one other little fun fact that I think is interesting, if you are a movie musical fan, the movie Meet Me in St. Louis has Judy Garland in it. That was set at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. If you watch that movie, you will see prevailing cultural depictions

of Native Americans in that movie. There is a song called Under the Bamboo Tree in that movie. Some of the lyrics talk about a happy native. And that sort of cultural depiction of happy natives was very, very prevalent and popular during the 1940s when Meet Me in St. Louis was created or when it was released. quote-unquote primitive cultures that were being exhibited at the fair, like the model Indian school, there were native groups from the Philippines, Congo, etc. That concept of like the human zoo, that you would go gaze upon these natives doing native things was something that upper class, middle class families thought was good and interesting. And now that idea is like,

absolutely not. We're not putting people on a display and having them live in the display for eight months. So one of the things that I found interesting when I was reading more about the Fort Shaw basketball champions is that an author who was researching their history said they were both objects on display and full participants in a grand adventure. And what a unique perspective that is. Probably unlike anything else that had ever occurred where they were both objects on display and participants in a grand adventure. And Linda Peavy, who wrote a book about this, also said it wasn't that they were always happy with how things were going at the school, these girls are champions of the world. By the way, you can look up a map of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and you can see marked

on the map where the exhibit was that the girls lived in, which again still blows my mind that they lived in the exhibit for eight months. You could also look up the uniforms that they wore, which kind of had like wide sailor collars, wide collars that like extended to their shoulder. They had long sleeves, they wore tights. They were kind of like a skirt that went to the knee with like kind of loose fitting pants that go to the knee with like kind of loose fitting pants that

go to the knee that you'd wear underneath the skirt they wore those underneath the skirt for modesty purposes so they returned home they had you know won all of this incredible success seven of their graduates were promised full-ride scholarships to Vassar College by a philanthropist. His name was Charles Madison. And sadly, that went wrong. discover that instead what he intended to do was tour them around the country as a vaudeville act to raise money for his quote-unquote philanthropy endeavors and the team quickly became disillusioned and they were home by December they were like we are not going to be a vaudeville act. They did play for one more year after the 1904, eight plus months away from home. And they won the championship that year

again. And then the team was disbanded and the team was disbanded because the school closed. And the team was disbanded because the school closed. So isn't that an interesting story? The Olympics were six months long, that these girls were the basketball champions of the world, that America has a very long history of removing Native children from their families of origin and putting them in residential schools to convert them to looking and acting like Europeans, that they lived at the World's Fair for eight months, and then the team was disbanded and the school closed. If this interests you, if you want a couple of books that you can read, there is a PBS documentary called Playing for the World. Another resource you can check out is a book called Full Court Quest by Linda Peavy,

which is a book about the team if that topic interests you. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you had some brain tingle moments. I hope you found some new stuff to learn about today, about residential schools, about Fort Shaw, Montana, about women's basketball, about the 1904 Olympics, about the 1904 World's Fair. So many interesting topics. And I will see you guys next time. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating

or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind-blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.