Category: Indian Country Today

Loving the Game, the Rez Game

I’ve not followed professional basketball—or even college basketball—much over the past few years. The “posting up” business is boring, and the spectacle of who might be the most athletically talented individuals in the world running up and down a court that seems too small for them, dunking basketballs in a hoop that seems too low for them, just didn’t stir me.

Mary Stewart of Nixyaawii Golden Eagles (credit: East Oregonian)

But I have watched a lot of high school basketball, where the size of the court and the height of the rim seem to be in proper proportion. And this year I’ve taken special interest with my freshman grandson playing at Joseph High School. One of the treats has been watching Nixyaawii Community School, the boys and girls teams from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation. Both beat Joseph handily, with great ball control and great three-point shooting, and both went on to take third place in the state small schools tournament. It was fun watching the shooting, passing, and ball control—“they’ve been playing together since elementary school,” we were told. And, when we played at Nixyaawii, it was fun sitting in a small gym with the parents, and the grandpas and grandmas, aunties and uncles, watching the game, soaking up the joy, pride and community.

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As a sports junkie since my own playing days who doesn’t watch much of it on TV, basketball interest started growing this year with my grandson playing and news stories about the Golden State Warriors and a new kind of pro basketball. So I watched some pro ball, including almost all of that last Golden State game, when Steph Curry and the Warrior crew tore up the record books. The way that Golden State moved the ball, and the long threes that opened up alley-oop dunks was different from a big man posting up and backing down another Goliath. And it looked like the whole team and coaching staff—and the fans of course—were having fun as they wrote their way into the record books—for most wins, most three pointers, most most most. It was, I thought, a bigger version of Nixyaawii.

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I ran across another basketball piece in the New York Times this week. It was about Baron Davis and a documentary film—The Drew: No Excuse, Just Produce—the former NBA all-star made about this thing that has been going on in South Central Los Angeles since the 70s called the “Drew League.” In the heart of the ghetto, where Davis grew up, and started playing at the age of 13, a bunch of hoopsters from high school and up play basketball for the camaraderie and the love of it.

Yes, most of the young black players in the Drew League want do be like Davis, go from Drew to UCLA to the NBA, But the Drew also catches players like Davis after they’ve been to the top and, with injury stopping careers, still need the game. It catches players on the way up and the way down, makes a place for high school and college players, old pros and aspiring ones to play the game for gain—and for the love of it. Right there on the “home court” in South Central.

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Not many rez players make it to the NBA—or the WNBA, but if you hang around tribal people at all, you know that basketball is the rez game. When you sit in the stands at Nixyaawii, you hear pride in the next generation and stories of uncles and cousins who played the game well. You get a sense of community that spreads across ages and genders, pride when a full scholarship to Stanford is announced for one of the girls. You know that the people on the court, on the bench and in the stands all love the game that’s brought them together that night.

Schimmel sisters at Louisville (Indian Country Today)

Which reminds me that the Schimmel sisters, Shoni and Jude, started on the Umatilla. I remember watching the 2013 NCAA women’s final when the Schimmels and Louisville took on Connecticut—hoops were rattling and nets swishing into early morning hours on the rez—and probably on rezes across the country—that day in 2013.   They lost—Connecticut has been almost unbeatable for years—but they lost well, and Shoni played her way into professional basketball.

Googling “Native American professional basketball” players will only get you a handful, but you’ll also be introduced to “Indian Country Today,” and some great stories of basketball in Indian Country, where, like the Drew, there are aspirations for the college and pro games, and a whole bunch of love for the game.

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It’s Martin Luther King Day

So take courage!

Friends here in Northeast Oregon are upset with the goings on in neighboring Burns. One group “occupied” a local Oregon Wildlife Refuge one evening with binoculars and beer. Most of “my” friends would like to see the government stand up and oust the anti-government gaggle; they’d like the Paiutes to have the biggest say in their ancestral lands. But I understand that some of my neighbors are sending food to the occupiers as well.

In America today, divisiveness is everywhere and hate sells. I needn’t list the shootings and the rancor over guns, the suspicion and hate over color, language and faith; the police conflicts, border walls, the hate speeches of Donald Trump, and the hatred of government that brings wronged ranchers, anti-Semites, anti-Islamists, and other antis swaggering with guns to a bird refuge in Oregon to state their cases and causes.

Many things are discouraging today. In the Middle East, where I lived and worked 50 years ago, I watch cities and places I love fall into chaos—Aleppo, Syria, one of the world’s oldest and grandest cities, is in shambles; Diyarbakir, Turkey, where I went to market and walked the city’s ancient walls, is a place of “urban warfare,” with the Turkish Army fighting Kurdish factions and civilians dying in the middle.

The Kurds, Turks, Arabs; Sunnis, Shiites, believers of one strain and another of Islam, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, people who lived side by side when I was there, are now killing each other in Iraq and Syria. And millions are fleeing war, trying to find asylum in Germany and Sweden. So Europe swells with immigrants, and fear follows them and divides societies as good people seek to help.

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And then—and then, Iran makes nice, releases US troops whose boats have strayed and releases prisoners they’ve held for years, destroys nuclear centrifuges and asks to join the world again. Cuba too is off the bad list, and someone is cleaning up Old Man and the Sea writer Ernest Hemingway’s house for visitors.

It’s Martin Luther King Day,

And I am reminded that I was in Washington D.C. in 1967 and 68, when thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese were being killed and maimed in a faraway land and our country was in turmoil. I marched on the Pentagon as helicopters flew over protesters and men with guns and binoculars walked atop high buildings keeping track. I was there when King was murdered in Memphis and D.C. exploded in riots and fire. And when Bobbie Kennedy, running for the Presidency that saw his brother killed, was murdered too.

In 1969, American Indians, emboldened by the Civil Rights Movement, seized Alcatraz, and they would soon occupy the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, and face off with the FBI at Pine Ridge. Alvin Josephy documented these events and stood by the Indians in a wonderful NYT piece in 1973, in the heat of it all (and before I knew him and his Indian mission).

America is not a calm place now, nor was it a calm place in 1967 and 1968 and 1973. It wasn’t calm in 1929, when the Depression robbed peoples’ savings and sent them off to join the Communists and the anarchists, the fascists and the religious fanatics. Not calm when Roosevelt closed the banks and told the people the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.

So the bad water in Flint, Michigan and the tuberculosis in Alabama are real; some ranchers have real gripes with government agencies; some police forces are racist or running scared; and our country’s military misadventures, which didn’t start in Iraq—or even Vietnam—go on.

And almost a century of mistrust in Iran, going back to the 1953 CIA overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddegh, the 1979 revolution and taking of American hostages, and its war with a US supported Iraq, will not go away in a day. There will be bumps in the Cuban road as well.

But on this Martin Luther King Day, it is important to remember that good people with strong will make differences. The New York Times sends its readers today to the contemporary obituaries of MLK, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and many more who have done so.

And although I, like many, have been frustrated with our first Black President on several counts, I applaud him today for Iran, for Cuba, for coming close on health care, coming close on Guantanamo, for fighting against gun violence and for very quietly strengthening tribal courts, autonomy, and education, and thus being the best President for Indian country since Nixon!

And, on MLK Day, I remember Alvin too, one of the good guys who stood up with and for Indians when the country didn’t much care.

Remember friends, and take courage!

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