Playing the Game: Sport, Gender, and the Haskell Indian Boarding School, 1890–1930

Abstract:In this article, I argue that Native women who attended Haskell Institute, an off-reservation federal Indian boarding school, participated in athletic programs as a means to further their own cultural sporting traditions and resist colonial expectations about Native women’s bodies. I also argue that Native women’s participation in Western sports such as basketball provides a new and necessary approach to the study of women’s sport history as it showcases the fraught relationship between sport, empire, and the production of normative femininity. This article, then, is both a history of women’s basketball and gender production at the turn of the twentieth century. Importantly, my focus on sport illuminates how athletic participation and physical culture created and changed ideologies of femininity and race, rather than just serving as a representation of gender norms within this particular historical context.