Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895–1970 by Wade Davies (review)

in native hoops, wade davies provides readers with a deeply researched and engagingly written dive into the history of American Indian basketball. Davies tells a story that is not only about sports but also about Native American resilience, creativity, and presence. For Davies, Indigenous Americans have made basketball their own, a game played not to prove anything to white society but as an authentic component of Indigenous lives in North America that emerged out of and carries on Native historical sporting traditions.

Davies, an accomplished scholar, is a professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula. He has written widely on Native American health care and sovereignty. Native Hoops touches upon themes that he has covered throughout his career. His book also contributes to a growing body of recent scholarship that explores how Indigenous Americans have engaged with modern sports cultures, particularly in the United States, including Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert's Hopi Running: Crossing the Terrain between Indian and American (University Press of Kansas, 2018) and Full Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School, Basketball Champions of the World by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), about women's basketball at the Fort Shaw Indian School at the turn of the twentieth century.

Davies divides his book into ten chapters. He shows how Indigenous Americans adopted a game in the late nineteenth century that Dr. James Naismith had only recently invented in 1891, bringing to basketball their own history of team sports like lacrosse, ancient Mesoamerican ball games, and double-ball. Davies then shows how young Native Americans continued to learn the game at off-reservation boarding schools and at Indian day schools, where they first developed a distinctive, up-tempo style of play that many would later tag as "Rez Ball." Initially, American Indian women played basketball in far greater numbers than men. They were the first to speed up the game and run up big scores, but by the 1920s, educational institutions had eliminated opportunities for female athletic competition. During World War I, a growing number of Indigenous men learned basketball and brought it back to their homes.

In his final chapters, Davies looks at how Native communities adopted basketball during the years immediately before and after World War II. He covers basketball at CCC-ID (Civilian Conservation Corps—Indian Division) camps during the Great Depression, in day and public schools, and among urban Indian communities after World War II. He reveals how, twenty years before Title IX, Native organizations revived women's teams. In some of his most fascinating passages, he discusses how, starting in the 1950s, tribal communities like the Klamath established American Indian–only national basketball tournaments. In the case of the Klamath, the tournament proved to be a valuable resource that helped them survive termination policies during the 1950s and regain federal recognition in the 1980s. Davies's conclusion serves as an epilogue that brings Native American basketball from 1970 up to the present day. He discusses how Title IX opened up new opportunities for Native women to play as they had earlier in the century and how rule changes, such as the shot clock and three-point line, enhanced the run-and-gun "Rez Ball" style practiced among both female and male Native American players.

For his source material, Davies mines state historical societies, as well as agency and Indian school records, along with nearly three hundred local, tribal, and national newspaper titles from around the United States. He effectively uses oral history, providing excerpts from dozens of interviews with former players, coaches, and authors, most of which he conducted himself. Additionally, he draws from a thorough collection of secondary historical literature on American Indian education and Indigenous sports.

Davies makes a strong case for basketball as a game that Indigenous people have made their own. Institutions like boarding schools attempted to separate athletics and education from tribal communities, but he argues that they never...