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thehistoryoftheworld · 1 year

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Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team becomes World Champions at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904.

The seven members of the original team included Genie Butch, Belle Johnson, Nettie Wirth, Minnie Burton, Emma Rose Sansaver, Josephine Langely, and Delia Gebeau.

Native American boarding schools, such as Fort Shaw, were integral to the United States' policy of cultural genocide for American Indians. World's Fairs also played a key role in affirming white supremacy and presenting American Indians as an uncivilized artifact of the past.

Recommended reading:

Brownell, Susan, The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Parezo, Nancy J. and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Peavy, Linda; Smith, Ursula (2001). "World champions: The 1904 girls' basketball team from Fort Shaw Indian boarding school". The Magazine of Western History 51 (4): 2–25.

Rydell, Robert W., All the World's a Fair. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

#Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team #Fort Shaw #St. Louis World's Fair #Louisiana Purchase Exposition #1904 World's Fair #native american history #Genie Butch #Belle Johnson #Nettie Wirth #Minnie Burton #Emma Rose Sansaver #Josephine Langely #Delia Gebeau #history #american history #basketball #native american #american indian #women's history

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skruffie · 6 years

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Over the course of five months, more than three million fair-goers gaped at Indian students demonstrating their skills in domestic and industrial arts, drama, and music. However, the almost all-white audience devoted most of its fascination to ten Indian girls playing basketball and, between games, reciting Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” in distinctive buckskin dresses. Standing (from left) are Nettie Wirth, Genevieve Healy, Josephine Langley, Belle Johnson, Minnie Burton, Sarah Mitchell, and kneeling (from left) are Emma Sansaver, Gertrude LaRance, and Rose LaRose.

From this link. When I was diving into my family history and realized that my 2nd great-grandmother was at Fort Shaw, it flipped my entire perspective of the world and of my family on it’s head. I was trying to find as much as I could on Fort Shaw and most of the links I had been able to find were about the all-girls basketball teams. Since I was still really new to researching this part of my family, I didn’t realize the significance of basketball for the indigenous kids at the time nor did I realize I had a cousin who was on one of the teams.

The girl on the bottom row in the middle is Gertrude Larance, who’d be my dad and I’s first cousin. I mistakenly referred to her as an auntie at first because sometimes it’s damn hard to keep track of all these older ancestors and relations. The website at the link refers to how life was hard at Fort Shaw with some of the pupils losing sisters to infectious diseases, and Gertrude was one of them. Her sisters Ursula and Annie died from meningitis in 1908, being 15 and 4 years old at the times of their death.

Being able to have access to photos like this blows my mind but the larger cultural significance is lost to me because my direct ancestor’s heritage had been buried upon graduation from Fort Shaw. She shared very little, if much at all, with her descendants. On one hand, I’m sad that I have to learn about my family through the internet instead of all of this knowledge having been passed down naturally, but on the other hand it is a great privilege to be able to learn about my family this way, you know? Because their descendants still survived. I wouldn’t be here without that. And besides, someday I can travel and meet living descendants who maybe know a little more and walk on the grounds of Fort Shaw and say hello.

#Métis #family ancestry #montana

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