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Caitlin Clark, Rez Ball, and the Pros

Caitlin Clark will play her first pro basketball game tonight for the Indiana Fever of the Women’s National Basketball Association. In her four years at the University of Iowa she had already broken records and helped create a storm of interest in the women’s game. And she already has endorsements—now legal for college player—which make her a millionaire, but her starting salary as a WNBA rookie number one draft pick is set at $76,000.

This—and the millions of dollars that the men receive as rookies, and the hundreds of millions they receive as stars—is cause for conversation in the world of women’s sports. So too is the fact that Caitlin Clark is white in a game of African-American stars. The press is comparing this to the coming of Larry Bird—another white Midwesterner—into men’s professional basketball more than four decades ago. Bird and his rivalry and friendship with Magic Johnson vaulted professional basketball into the mainstream of men’s professional sports. Until then the NBA was an afterthought to major league baseball and football. Some see Caitlin Clark doing the same for the women’s game.

Clark’s game is three-pointers from Stephen Curry’s distance—well beyond the 3-point lines on the floor for the college, pro, men’s and women’s games. It’s passing, long heaves downcourt, and flashy hard bounce passes skipping by unready defenders to a teammate under the hoop. Rebounds and steals too, all based on quickness and an uncanny sense of the court and where everyone—friend and foe—is and is going to be in the next seconds.

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Caitlin Clark reminds me of Rezball. I’ve been watching Nixyaawii, the team from the nearby Umatilla Indian Reservation, play basketball for the last decade, and I have been seriously reading about and following boys’ and girls’, men’s and women’s “Rez Ball”—or Rezball—for almost that long. Lapwai, Idaho—on the Nez Perce Reservation—has accumulated more boys’ and girls’ state championships than almost any other Idaho team. The boys won their 13th state 1A D1 title this March, beating Lakeside from the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in a return and revenge rematch of last year’s title game. The Lapwai girls lost in the title game this year, which would have given them 12 state titles.

Lapwai listed 266 students this year—but that includes junior high! I don’t know about this year’s wins, but remember when they were on a multi-year win streak and regularly beating schools with five times the enrollment.

Back in Oregon, a few years ago a girl from Nixyaawii named Mary Stewart would nonchalantly bring the ball up court and skip a pass to a waiting teammate underneath, or head fake one way and another and drop in a three from long range. Kind of like Caitlin Clark!

Clark would be right at home in a Rezball gym. How to describe it? New York Times writer Michael Powell, in his book Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation, says that even when comparing with NBA run and gun teams, Rezball is a “blur.” It’s shooting within seconds of crossing the halfcourt line, swarming, often full-court, defenses, intensive teamwork and no-look passes. It’s also packed gyms on reservations, and packed fieldhouses with team followers at state tournaments.

And it is a national phenomenon. Not only at Lapwai, Idaho or the Chinle, New Mexico of Michael Powell’s book, but on reservations in Nebraska and the Dakotas, with players that are Crow, Nez Perce, Lakota, Navajo and members of many tribes. It might vary in the particulars, but the speed, pace, and skills of the game, and its place in the communities and the reservations where it lives are all Rez Ball.

A couple of years ago, I read Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana, by Abe Streep. Abe followed the team from tiny Arlee, Montana as it made its way to a Montana State championship. He’d written a long New York Times Magazine piece about Arlee’s run to the championship, and, with curiosity and the encouragement of players and the families he’d spent the year with, turned it into a book that would include accounts of the problems and joys of reservation life and the obstacles to fine basketball players continuing in the college game.

The star of the team Arlee clobbered in the championship game got a full ride to Montana State. Phil Malatare, who dreamed of playing at U Montana, finally got a walk-on, but didn’t have the right high school classes to attend the U. I wrote a blog post about it, and a friend from Missoula told me to look in my back yard. Malatare was at Eastern Oregon U., where he was newcomer of the year and then player of the year in the Cascade Conference.

He’s one of a few Indians who have been successful in the college game, away from family and friends and the fury and importance that Rez Ball has on the reservation. And, at this point, only five Native men and four Native women have made it to the NBA and WNBA.

Individuals have had a hard time making the leaps, but the game, Rez Ball, seems to have made its way to the pros. There’s Curry bringing the ball up and launching from near half-court, or breaking for the hoop and dropping it off no-look to a teammate. And now Caitlin Clark doing the same.

An old pro is trying to bring Rez Ball to our attention. LeBron James is producing a film based on Powell’s book on the Chuska New Mexico Warriors. Coming soon on Netflix!

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image AP

Julia Keefe’s Indigenous Big Band

ta ‘c meeywi folks (good Morning)

The Joseph Center was fortunate to have Julia Keefe’s quartet perform here in February. For those who have not followed this Nez Perce musical thread, here is a press release about Julia’s Indigenous Big Band’s upcoming performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

This press release captures many things that we have worked on at the Center, first and foremost our “Nez Perce Music” exhibit, which traces the use of music in assimilating Indians, and Native peoples’ use of music and the tools of music to resist. That exhibit–which features photos of the Carlisle Boarding school band and an 1890 Nez Perce musician there to Julia Keefe today, photos of an 1800s Spalding Nez Perce hymnal and of Nez Perce drumming and dancing on the Colville Reservation in the early 1900s–just came black from display at Eastern Oregon University, and is available for display elsewhere. Call or email us!

Here’s the link to Julia’s press release:

https://www.juliakeefe.com/so/bcOyxB8d4?languageTag=en&cid=9d221399-b4b1-43c9-a348-807f7d32f0f8

Ned Blackhawk: a New History of America

I’m only 107 pages into Ned Blackhawks new book, The Rediscovery of America, and am already taken with an entirely new approach to American history. I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths, and found it fact-filled, well written, and engaging, but, in the end, I found it limited, a kind of “Jeffersonian history.” In large part, Lepore takes the opening words of the Declaration, “We the people,” and sees the march of American history as the gradual expansion of “we.” It starts with male property owners, then embraces all (white) males, and gradually adds freed slaves, women, and, finally, in 1924, American Indians.Read Rich’s Post →

Replacement theory and American Indians

“Replacement theory” comes to my mind often; it has since I first heard the idea that at some point in the near future, white people are going to be a “majority minority” in America. In other words, we white folks will no longer be 50 percent of the total population, but we will be the biggest of the several rainbow groups that are “replacing” us. The fact that white now includes people of southern and eastern European extraction, Italian Catholics and Greek Orthodox—folks who a few generations ago, roughly before WW II, were not the Northern European, Scotch and English who had dominated the first century or two of white settlement—is not discussed.Read Rich’s Post →

Measles

The recent upsurge in measles cases in Florida and the US in general has doctors and public health officials scratching heads. Apparently, there is a big difference in infection rates when the percentage of children who receive the MMR—Measles, Mumps, Rubella—vaccinations drops from 95 % to 91%; transmission among the unvaccinated spreads more rapidly, and a few—stats say 3 %–of the vaccinated still get a mild case of the disease. That, in my understanding is in a nutshell what is happening in Florida and threatening elsewhere as measles cases in 2024 rise.Read Rich’s Post →

Native Gains: Deb Haaland, Joe Biden, and Harry Slickpoo

It’s hard to get a handle on it. So much has happened in and for Indian Country since Biden took office and appointed Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) Secretary of the Interior. Haaland had held tribal offices, headed the New Mexico State Democratic party, and had served in the US House of Representatives before she became the first Native American to be a US Cabinet secretary. She knew the ropes, and she hit the ground running.Read Rich’s Post →

Julia Keefe and Native American Jazz

What a treat! What a performance! On Saturday, wrapping up what looks like it will become an annual “Josephy Fest,” Julia Keefe, the Nez Perce jazz singer, brought her quartet to the Josephy Center, and closed the show. She and her New York drummer, Adam Benham, U of Idaho piano player, Kate Skinner, and Mali Obomsawin, an Abenaki First Nations bass player who also plays in the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, were stunning.Read Rich’s Post →

Political parties, armies, and nations change

Segregationist Southern Democrats had a grip on the party—and in some cases the country—for years. Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of Civil Rights legislation alienated Southern Democrats, and chased them into the Republican Party—which had been the party of Lincoln and abolition!

Germany’s radical Nazi government gained power in fewer than twenty years, was defeated, and went from genocidal rampage to conversion to Western democracy in a few years; Japan’s Imperial aggression transformed itself into a Western leaning and anti-militaristic state.Read Rich’s Post →

Northwest Fisheries: 50 years of Boldt!

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday—and a fine game it was. Congrats to the Chiefs! Today is Abe Lincoln’s birthday, which we celebrated separately until we bundled him with Washington and made it Presidents’ Day.

Today is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision, made in Federal District Court, which upheld Northwest Indians’ treaty rights to fish off reservation in their “usual and accustomed places.” Read Rich’s Post →

Blessed are the peacemakers

This history blog of mine usually focuses on Nez Perce, Native American, and American history and history telling. I like to find the missing pieces of our history—my current obsession is the under-told story of the beaver’s place in the US economy and Euro-American Westward expansion. I highlight the places where historians have found new links and chinks in old stories—in my student days, the role of disease in depopulating Indigenous America was not taught, the roles of the plague and the Little Ice Age in European expansion and emigration not seriously treated. Today they are routinely credited with major impacts on US history and world events.Read Rich’s Post →

Elders

The Kiowa writer Scott Momaday passed this week. He was 89. I met him once, when he came to Wallowa County to make the presentation of a horse by the Wood family to the walʔwá ma, or Joseph Band Nez Perce. He’d come across the story of the horse that Chief Joseph told Erskine Wood he’d like when the 14-year-old boy stayed with him at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Erskine’s father, C.E.S. Wood, who had served under General Howard in the Nez Perce War and become a friend of and advocate for Joseph after the war, told the boy to ask the Chief what he might do for him in gratitude for hosting his son. Joseph said he’d like a good pony; the boy thought that his father was a powerful man, and that the Chief should have asked for something more glamorous than a horse, so did not pass the message on to his father. He told the story, and published a diary of his Days with Chief Joseph, years later.Read Rich’s Post →

How the Holocaust resonates today

I recently watched the Ken Burns documentary on “The US and the Holocaust,” some of it for the second time. I have visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. multiple times. I had a good friend, now deceased, whose US Army Tank unit liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. The images of the Nazi genocide from these three sources haunt me. I remember the piles of glasses and shoes at the museum, collected as prisoners were loaded onto trains and into gas chambers. I remember the spiraling towers of photos of communities lost, and the videos of Josef Mengele’s experiments on prisoners—experiments with diseases, amputations, and freezing temperatures. And I can’t get the image of friend Jack recounting a scene at Buchenwald: hand scratches on a wall that prisoners, supposedly dead and hung like animals on a rail, put there on the way from gas chamber to crematorium. Jack scratched an imaginary wall with his own hand as he told the story.Read Rich’s Post →

Sea Otter–filling in the pieces

The new issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly just landed on my desk—and sent me back to the Fall 2023 edition. I am always amazed at the scholarship and the range of topics in OHQ. And sometimes kick myself for not digesting them whole as they show up. There is always something new about the old that helps me understand where we are today.Read Rich’s Post →

Migrants

My family doesn’t trace lineage to the Mayflower, played no roles in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. And I don’t remember anyone referring to our grandparents and great grandparents as “migrants”; they were “immigrants,” people from specific European places seeking new lives in America. And, in those days, roughly from the Civil War to 1900, the biggest groups of immigrants to the United States were German speaking people from war-tossed, shifting borderlands across Northern Europe. Further north, Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians joined the emigration to America, theirs an escape from family farms that had been whittled, generation by generation, to parcels unable to support families.Read Rich’s Post →

Marc Jaffe

I just got a brief and beautiful note from Vivienne Jaffe that her husband, Marc Jaffe, had passed on December 31 at the age of 102. Images of Marc, walking in from his morning horseback rides to breakfast at Fishtrap, addressing the Fishtrap audience to tell them about the special place and literature they were part of, driving me from Alvin Josephy’s house in Greenwich Ct to his place in Williamstown, Massachussettes in our last real visit, come flooding back.Read Rich’s Post →

A Good Wallowa County New Year’s Story

About twenty years ago, a group of us started swimming at the foot of Wallowa Lake in June. We swam almost every day, some with wet suits, some bare-skinned. I was always the slowest swimmer in the group, and my distances didn’t match those of my friends. But I was relentless, and soon gave up the wobbly wet suit and still get in over 60 days of summer swims each year!Read Rich’s Post →

Eurocentrism in America and Palestine

In the introduction to America In 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus, a book of essays Alvin Josephy edited and published on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean, he wrote that:

“Commencing with Columbus’s arrival among them, Spanish, French, and English invaders, colonizers, pirates, and imperial explorers all but exterminated them [indigenous people], slaughtering Caribs wholesale with fire, steel, European tortures, and savage dogs, working thousands of them to death as slaves, and wiping out their settlements with the pox, measles, dIphtheria, and other white men’s diseases to which the Indians had no resistance…Read Rich’s Post →

War’s sidekicks and allies

In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Ned Blackhawk argues that

”the most traumatic development in American history [is] the loss of indigenous life due to European diseases. Epidemics tore apart numerous communities and set in motion large-scale migrations and transformations. North America’s total population nearly halved from 1492 to 1776: from approximately 7 or 8 million to 4 million.”Read Rich’s Post →

Heroes

My recent scrape with death—for those who hadn’t heard, I rolled my car in the Wallowa River canyon on Sunday on the way back from a fine Portland Thanksgiving—and the crazy recess in the war in Israel/Gaza have me thinking about fortune and history, about being in a certain place in a specific time, about the people and events that create our life stories. About my heroes.Read Rich’s Post →