Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame 2013 Inductee
In the early 1900s, the game of basketball was being introduced across the nation. The Indian boys and girls at the government Industrial Indian School in Fort Shaw, Montana, took up the game and Indian basketball was born!
In 1902, a group of young women from Indian reservations in Montana and Idaho began playing the fledgling sport while attending school at Fort Shaw Government Boarding School in Montana’s Sun River Valley. During 1903, the team, coached by Superintendent Fred Campbell traveled the state, playing before capacity crowds drawn in by reports of their lightning-quick play and superb teamwork. The team routinely defeated college as well as high school teams and became undisputed Montana state champions.
In the summer of 1904, they took their game to the next level by boarding a train bound for the St. Louis World’s Fair where they spent five months as students at the Model Indian School, the centerpiece of the government’s anthropological exhibit of indigenous people. During their five months in St. Louis, the mandolin concerts, recitations, and dances performed by the girls drew as much attention and praise as did their exhibition basketball games. Due to their Fort Shaw education they could now do anything and everything that educated non-Indian women could do, which was, of course, exactly the point being made by the living exhibition at the “Model Indian School.” However, interviews with descendants of the team would suggest that this was a point that did not go unnoticed by these bright young women, all of whom were highly motivated participants in the government’s game of “Show and Tell.” The government’s goal of demonstrating the effectiveness of its programs of acculturation and assimilation and the team’s goal of making the most of this unprecedented opportunity to see the country were not mutually exclusive. This early-day girls’ basketball team from Fort Shaw provided their peers and future generations of Indian youth a vivid example of the ways in which Indian students were able to use boarding school experiences to their own advantage. This is a great part of the legacy of this team.
A century later, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith shared the team’s story in their 2008 published work, Playing for the World. They credited the descendants and tribal kin who treasured and saved the family memories and memorabilia, thus ensuring their story survived.
The team was awarded a Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame Legacy award in 2013 and they were featured at the Montana History Conference in 2024. A mural and historical marker dedicated to commemorate the Fort Shaw Girls Basketball Team can be seen in Fort Benton, Montana.