M Minnie Burton, Genie Butch, Genevieve Healy, Belle Johnson, Nettie Wirth, Emma Sansaver, Katie Snell – outside the USA, the names of the seven young women who became basketball world champions in 1904 are hardly known. Well, that’s not entirely true, because the birth names of these players are also unknown there.
The girls competed at the World Championship as the team of the “Fort Shaw Indian School”, one of the many boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly assimilated. This included that they received new English names under which they were thereafter registered with the authorities, they were not allowed to speak their languages and to maintain their traditions.
The schools were oriented toward the culture of the majority society, which included forced Christianization. And the corporal punishment, as common in all educational institutions as washing the mouth with soap, was also everyday here—in many boarding schools for Indigenous children there were also cases of more severe abuse.
The children and youths were taught in the mornings in the classic school subjects such as English, arithmetic, and history; in the afternoons, for the girls, courses like cooking, sewing, housekeeping, and needlework were on the program. For the boys, the curriculum included craft instruction designed to prepare them for work as blacksmiths, carpenters, joiners, or farmers.
Unfair Sports Program
Sports were also part of the program: while the boys played basketball and football and engaged in track and field, for the girls initially only “physical culture” was offered. This changed in 1897 when the Indigenous staff member Josephine Langley began indoor basketball training during the winter in the fort’s dance hall.
None of the girls, aged about 16 to 18 in 1902, had previously played basketball, but they were not unused to Shinney and Double Ball, two Indigenous sports. They now played, as the boys did, 20 minutes without a break on the full court.
Soon the seven who would later become world champions became the regular players at Fort Shaw; in the 1902/03 season they won nine of eleven games against other schools. The following year this proved to be a hindrance, because they could hardly find opponents anymore—and they showcased their ball skills instead in shows, where they also gave mandolin concerts and recited poems.
In 1904 the World’s Fair in St. Louis took place, where not only new technical achievements were presented, but also old racism: as part of so-called anthropological days, people were exhibited, supposedly to demonstrate the evolution of humanity from “savages” to “barbarians” to “civilization.”
All Games Won
The Fort Shaw team played games during the exposition against teams from all over the country—and won them all. The fast passing, the precise shots, and the striking discipline impressed. In the final they faced the favored St. Louis All-Stars. Fort Shaw won decisively and was subsequently honored as the “World Champion Girls Basketball Team.” For the Indigenous communities from which the players came, the victory was ambivalent: on one hand there was pride in how well they mastered the new sport, on the other hand their victories were part of the assimilation concept.
Thereafter, their story faded from memory until it was retold in 2008 in the book “Full Court Quest” by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith. The true names of the players could not be determined by the authors either.
