Indian Games : an historical research — A Closer Reading

Lacrosse as Political Theater and Medical Ritual

Davis presents lacrosse not as a sport but as a multipurpose ceremony. In 1667, Nicolas Perrot witnessed a game staged by the Miamis as a formal entertainment for a French agent, with over two thousand participants. The description emphasizes noise and movement: “a constant movement of all these crosses which made a noise like that of arms.” Davis also recounts the 1763 use of a lacrosse game at Fort Michilimackinac as a cover for Pontiac’s attack—a detail that underscores the strategic dimension of these events. Earlier, Father Brebeuf had reported that a game of cross could be ordered by a medicine man to cure a fever or even a whole village’s illness. Davis lets these accounts stand without moral commentary, letting the reader see how deeply game and governance were entangled.

The Straw Game: Rules, Chance, and Confusion

Davis devotes careful attention to the straw game, which he considers the most elaborate in construction among northern tribes. Yet he repeatedly flags the inadequacy of his sources: “the unfortunate confusion which prevails throughout Perrot’s description of the method of counting” prevents any clear analysis. He speculates that the rules were “arbitrary and not based upon any calculations of the laws of chance,” contrasting this with the simpler version described by Lawson, where dexterity in counting thrown reeds was paramount. Davis also notes California variants where sticks were tossed and players guessed odd or even, with an umpire keeping tally. Throughout, he resists filling gaps with conjecture, instead pointing to what remains unknown—a methodological restraint that gives the research its scholarly tone.

Chunkee: A Southern Game with Northern Echoes

Davis traces chunkee, or hoop-and-pole, primarily among southern tribes, citing Iberville’s officer who observed Bayagoulas and Mougoulachas “playing in this place with great sticks which they throw after a little stone.” Father Gravier in 1700 saw young men at the Houmas village chasing a flat stone thrown across a square, trying to make it fall on two cylinders. Adair called it “Running hard labour.” Davis tentatively links this to the Iroquois javelin game described by Morgan, but he is careful to say “unless we should classify” it as a modified form. The section exemplifies his comparative method: he assembles disparate observations across time and region, notes similarities, but avoids forcing a unified narrative. The reader is left with a sense of the game’s antiquity and geographic spread, but also of the limits of the record.

Davis’s study is best read as a collection of historical fragments held together by a skeptical intelligence. He does not attempt to reconstruct how the games were played in any definitive sense; instead, he shows how European observers—missionaries, traders, explorers—shaped what we know. Readers interested in the games themselves may need to consult ethnographic sources, but for those curious about how colonial documentation works, this text offers a revealing case study in the gaps between observation and understanding.

Reading about the gambling woven through those lacrosse matches, I remembered how my grandfather lost his farm at cards, and how That Last Waif; or, Social Quarantine — Text and Context once made me feel that same strange ache—rules shaping lives long after the game is over.