PABLO — While you may know sports like football and basketball, tribes in Western Montana are reviving traditional games that might not be on your radar.
Traditional games are unique sports played long before the introduction of what we know today, shedding light on their cultural significance.
These games were used to build skills for hunting, coordination, or to just have some fun while children watched from camp.
Watch to learn more about traditional Native American games:
DeeAnna Brady-Leader with International Traditional Games Society, said she began reseraching these games as a young educator in Browning.
Her research — along with the help of other tribes — have helped reimplement the introduction of traditonal games today.
"The cultures across Montana have lost a lot of the children’s games during the boarding school era," Brady-Leader said.
She brought the fun to Salish Kootenai College on Thursday, to gift the school many traditional game materials.
"All of these years we really trusted the language and the history and the elders to work together to bring the culture under the rules of the game," Brady-Leader said.
Games like "Shinny" — which is played with two cedar sticks, shaped like what we know as hockey sticks, where people and run and scream in a game of endurance.
"What that requires is students to take the biggest breath they can and run and scream," Mali Matt, a cultural educator at Salish Kootenai College, said.
"The endurance it takes to keep running, moving your body," Matt said, "how far the winner is the one that makes it the farthest."
Matt says these games also build connections.
"It's a really important thing that we want to bring back in our culture is traditional games," Matt said, "and I'm really excited to be part of it and that we're gonna do that."
Matt explained the movements are more than a game; it starts with the connection to the land, when gathering materials like cedar sticks to make the materials for the game.
"There's so much involved when we go out in the land and the tribal values that we use," Matt said, "and we work with ancestral ways in our land to go get those materials to work with them and make them into the game."
