And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
At a time when pro basketball has failed its
fans, young men in a small gym on an Indian
reservation in far northern Minnesota engage
in battle. For the game. For their future. For
their culture.
http://www.usaweekend.com/99_issues/990214/990214warriors.html
By Frank Clancy
B asketball is the great American vernacular. Visit any high school gym
and you will encounter the same symbolic language - the same baggy shorts,
the same assortment of high-priced basketball shoes, the same buzz cuts
and flat tops and fades.
Players perform the same drills, the same rituals. They run similar plays.
But for Delwyn Holthusen, Gerald Kingbird and their
teammates at Red Lake High School in the far reaches
of northern Minnesota, basketball also is different. The
school is on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, 250
miles north and west of Minneapolis; every one of the
team's players is Native American. Or, as Red Lakers
say, "Indian."
The team's nickname is, not surprisingly, the Warriors.
As if to distinguish these Warriors from the cartoon
mascots of so many other teams, a magnificent painting
of a regal warrior in battle dress hangs in the team's
gym. On their jerseys, these descendants of true
warriors wear the team nickname in the tribe's native
language, Ojibwe: "Ogichidag."
These Ogichidag have a mission. In mid-January, Red
Lake had a record of 11-1 and was ranked first among
small Minnesota high schools (those with fewer than
226 students). The Warriors hope to become the first
all-Indian team ever to win a Minnesota state basketball
title.
But that's only part of the equation. Across the
sprawling, flat reservation, adults express hope that
Kingbird and Holthusen, the team's senior co-captains,
will use their success in basketball, and the lessons they
learned on the court, as a springboard to college,
inspiring younger children to continue their education.
Those adults hope, in effect, that basketball will help
uplift the tribe.
"They have to be able to go to school and be
somebody, then bring it home," says Victoria Irons
Graves, the mother of junior forward Byron Graves,
the team's third captain. "That would complete the
circle." Head coach Doug Desjarlait - everyone calls
him Jack - agrees. "That would really lead the way" for
younger kids, he says. "That would give them the hope
that they could do it, too."
It's not a well-traveled road; last year, fewer than 20
percent of Red Lake eighth-graders passed a
state-mandated standard test. Of the 35 or so students
who graduate each year, only a handful continue their
education, fewer still at a four-year college. In
Desjarlait's 712 seasons as coach, apparently only one
player has gone to college; he left without playing a
single basketball game. Last fall, he enrolled at a
two-year junior college - and began playing basketball
again.
"I really want to go to college and be a teacher at Red
Lake," Gerald Kingbird says. "I want to be a role model
for kids coming up. Red Lake needs more male Indian
teachers."
Whether he, Holthusen or any of the other players
succeed is, of course, uncertain. What's clear is that the
emotional and intellectual leap from reservation to
college is difficult for many Indians. Not only must they
become full-fledged adults while confronting greater
academic challenges, but they also must leave lifelong
friends and a large extended family, must move from
an extraordinarily close-knit community to a faceless
one, from a rural life to, at the very least, a larger town.
There's also an inherent tension between white and
Indian culture: One values the individual above all else;
the other, the tribe. To go away to college means
largely to forgo what is good about reservation life: the
land, the hunting and fishing, the ceremony, the ties to
family, community and history. It means forgoing, at
least temporarily, much of what you have learned is the
very essence of Indian life. Indian students must, in
short, find a way to remain Indian in a place and a
culture that emphatically are not.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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