Full-Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School, Basketball Champions of the World. By Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. xiv, 479 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-3973-9.)

Abstract

Based on a decade of painstaking research, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith's Full-Court Quest paints a vibrant and nuanced picture of the Fort Shaw Indian School and the young women whose basketball skills amazed and delighted crowds at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The beautifully constructed narrative weaves together a wide variety of subplots: the creation of the Fort Shaw Indian School in Montana's Sun River valley, the development of the game of basketball and its importance for women's team athletics at the turn of the twentieth century, the construction of the model Indian school at the St. Louis fairgrounds, and most importantly, the microhistories of ten young “world champions” who represented the Shoshone, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Piegan, Bannock, Ojibwe, and Cree nations. The story comprises events that resulted from a “confluence of cultures” (p. 343). One hundred years of native-nonnative interaction following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase coalesced by the end of the nineteenth century. The Fort Shaw girls came of age in a moment before the Indian School Service began to emphasize domestic and manual skills to the exclusion of academic, artistic, and athletic training. They also excelled at the fledgling game of basketball at a time when audiences—especially at international exhibitions—marveled at the women who were often barred from team competition because of their gender. The authors note that the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair was the last one to feature vast ethnographic displays that included model Indian schools and native villages, reflecting both the state of Americanist anthropology at the time and the general interest in indigenous peoples shown by an increasingly expansionist nation. The Fort Shaw team “seized that moment,” Smith and Peavy wrote, “and in doing so challenged the prevailing attitudes toward the athletic abilities of women and toward the abilities of Indian peoples” (p. 344).