James Walkingstick remembers the first time he stepped inside Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in the fall of 2017.
“I felt kind of sick because I saw stickball sticks on display, but it was fully past tense,” the Harvard graduate said.
Behind glass were items used to play the Native American game called stickball. Walkingstick grew up in, and remains connected to, Cherokee Nation, so he was familiar with stickball — and not just as an ancient tradition.
He’s crafted those same sticks where he grew up in Oklahoma with his brother.
“We were making the sticks and carving them out and sanding them down,” he said. “And I think that process, it’s deeper than words.”
With some of the sticks he made in hand, Walkingstick started playing with other Harvard community members and students last spring. They scrimmage around Harvard’s campus, mostly in Harvard Yard.
Sticks and other artifacts are also on display at the Peabody.
Walkingstick, now the museum’s academic engagement coordinator, said the collection shows the history and current influence of the game. The point of the group and the exhibit, he said, is to share culture and bring together people who feel connected to the game
“ I think we all find comfort in little things that remind us of home,” he said. “This is one of those things for many people and I think it’s really important that we give it the light of day for those students.”
‘Friday Night Lights culture’
Stickball is considered one of the oldest team sports in the country and is known as the “Peace Game” and the “Little Brother of War,” according to Terry Scott Ketchum, director of Native American Studies at East Central University in Oklahoma. Ketchum is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, also called the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and has studied the sport’s history extensively.
There are many versions of the game. In the iteration played at Harvard, players use two sticks to pass and catch a small ball. The two-stick game was commonly played in the southern U.S.
Another version uses one stick to pass and score; it’s the basis for modern-day lacrosse.
The game is traditionally played during religious ceremonies or to settle diplomatic disputes — like determining water or land rights. By playing, communities avoided war.
“You may not be in the same clan or a blood relative, but now you have these extended, we’re on the same team, right? We’re playing together,” Ketchum said.
Different communities have different origin stories and rules for play. For example, tribes have different names for the sport in their own languages. And some games could only be played with men. Legends tell of games that lasted days with hundreds of players. It also was known to get very physical, often violent. Over the centuries, it became a cornerstone for many tribes.
“I often talk about it as the originator of the Friday Night Lights culture in America,” Ketchum said.
But the strong community tradition was also perceived as a threat to those trying to assimilate or convert Native Americans.
“That moniker to ‘kill the Indian to save the man,’ I often talk about to ‘kill the game, you know, to save the man’ in a way,” Ketchum said. “They were trying to end this game because it was such an influence.”
As the U.S. government moved Native communities from their ancestral lands and missionaries tried to tamp down their culture, some people stopped playing. Games were discouraged and even banned in some areas in the early 1900s.
“Unfortunately, we lost so much information about it,” Ketchum said.
‘That first step of healing’
Despite these efforts, some play continued even in secret, to avoid detection, said Ketchum, sharing a story from his tribe.
“There are stories of them playing games at night,” Ketchum said. “They don’t really have any lights and then all of a sudden you hear somebody score and everybody starts clinking their sticks, clapping when somebody scores.”
The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma began revitalization efforts in the mid-1970s. The first World Series of Stickball, also called the Choctaw Stickball tournament, was held in 1975. And Ketchum said, within the last two decades, more and more youth teams have formed to play the sport. Like the one at Harvard.
“Stickball itself has a really deep and powerful root with many Indigenous communities in the United States,” Walkingstick said. “And it’s nice to give these people a space where they can play and show this art of diplomacy.”
When the weather’s warm, Walkingstick and others get together to play.
Yaa Baker, a Harvard graduate student, is new to stickball.
She said her dad recently discovered that he descends from Choctaw Freedmen, people who had been enslaved by the Choctaw Nation until the Civil War. He encouraged her to learn more about her ancestry, and the current fight for recognition.
“It’s been great to get to know a new community and a new culture that’s also my own and take ownership of that,” Baker said.
Kabl Wilkerson, who teaches at Harvard and is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma, said they’ve been playing stickball for a decade. They said it helps them feel connected to their culture today.
“You don’t need much. You just need sticks, balls, and, you know, people who are willing enough to kind of get down and dirty. And that’s something we’ve always done,” they said.
For Rodrigo Cordova Rosado, a citizen of Osage Nation who also has Puerto Rican ancestry, the game is about building community. The postdoctoral fellow said getting connected with the university’s Native American Program and playing stickball with the group has strengthened his relationship with his tribe.
“It led to having now a really like great relationship with my community back on the reservation, going back every summer and having great conversations about how it is that we move tribal nations forward in the 21st century,” Rosado said.
For Ketchum, the reconnection to his culture at Harvard is special and an act of resistance. He said in the past, education had been “used as a weapon against a lot of Native people” particularly through the work of missionaries. But today, he said, that’s changing.
“ It’s becoming a liberating space for Native people,” he said. “And so the ability to step on an academic university … and not have any fear to play that game. That’s how we start that first step of healing.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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