Little brother of war ‘ishtaboli’ lives on with new generation of warriors on the field

For over 1,000 years, Native Americans have been playing a game involving one or two sticks and a small ball. The sport has many different names among many different tribes. For the Choctaw, that sport is ishtaboli, or stickball.

On the surface, the game itself seems simple. You’re trying to hit a 12-foot tall, 4-inch diameter goalpost with a ball. That’s where the simplicities stop.

Players can’t touch the ball with their hands. Instead, they have two sticks. One stick, the male stick, is slightly larger and used to catch the ball or towa. The other, the female stick, is used to throw the towa. Each team has its own goalpost or fabvssa at either end of the roughly 100-yard field that players are trying to hit with the ball.

Currently, ishtaboli is played with 30-person teams, but there were no limits to team size in the past, sometimes reaching into the hundreds of players with fields over a mile long.

Ishtaboli, also called the little brother war, was often used as just that, an alternative to war. Communities and tribes would come together to settle disputes and disagreements with games of ishtaboli.
There was no padding, no groomed field and very few rules. In the late 1800s, American Anthropologist James Mooney said, “Almost everything short of murder is allowable.”

Ishtaboli was common in Oklahoma until the early 1900s when a semi-annual game between the Choctaw and Chickasaw got a little out of hand and had to be broken up by U.S. Marshalls and Choctaw Lighthorsemen. After that, games between the two tribes were abolished.

Today, the game has been modernized, largely for the safety of the players. Jared Tom, a cultural educator with the Choctaw Nation, said, “We’re not playing in that war mindset or that disagreement format. We’re playing pretty much for bragging rights, whether it’s tribe versus tribe or community versus community.”

Some current rules include no slamming or clothes-lining, no swinging sticks at other players, no hitting below the knees, and tackling is only allowed against the person with the ball. Being able to walk away from your weekend sport is important. “A lot of us playing now have families to go to; we have to work Monday through Friday,” said Tom with a laugh.

For something with such a long history of being rooted in the Choctaw culture, it’s not surprising that it has a deeper meaning for many beyond being just a game. “The game itself is an extension of us, our family, our loved ones that played before us. And the generations and generations of players that put their heart and soul into it back when it was a little brother of war,” said Beckah Boykin, a player on the Tvshkahomma Ohoyo team.

Tvshkahomma Ohoyo is a women’s stickball team that started in 2017. In 2021, the women got their first win and advanced to the semi-finals, where they played against the Bok Chito women’s team. Since then, the team has advanced to the Semi-Finals of the World Series of Stickball four years in a row and played in the championship game against Koni Hata Ohoyo in 2023. Koni Hata Ohoyo would go on to win that game, but Tvshkahomma Ohoyo held them to only two points.

After their successes at the World Series, the women’s team is getting some much-deserved respect. Boykin said it’s humbling to be seen as serious competitors when they go to the World Series and play teams with many more years of experience playing together. “There’s nothing that feels more like we’ve earned our spot and our place than seeing them believe in us like that,” said Boykin.

Choctaw Stickball continues to flourish in many communities throughout the reservation. There are regular local games and yearly tournaments like the Choctaw Labor Day Festival Stickball Tournament, the Kullihoma Stickball Tournament, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation and the Mississippi World Series of Stickball.

There are also several exhibition games across the country to educate audiences about the game’s history and Youth Summer Stickball Camp to try and keep that history alive.

While the exhibition games are a good way to put ishtaboli in front of a large audience, a recent episode of Marvel’s Echo on Disney+ also put Choctaw ishtaboli in thousands of living rooms across the world. Echo is the story of Maya Lopez, a Choctaw character played by Alaqua Cox of the Menominee and Mohican nation who must reconnect with her culture and embrace the meaning of family and community.

With the role that ishtaboli has served, not just as a sport but also as a way of teaching traditional social structure and family values, using it to illustrate family and community is fitting. Boykin was impressed with how the game and tribe were represented on the screen. “It was incredible to see something of that scale take our culture, values and traditions and come to a common place to where it would be okay to share with the public,” said Boykin.

Tom also liked the way the tribe and ishtaboli were represented. “I thought it was pretty neat…It hits all that we kind of expected it to look like when we imagined it, and I think they brought that creation to life,” Tom said.

If you’re attending the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival, there will be plenty of opportunities to watch and learn about ishtaboli. The tournament will kick off on Friday, August 30, with games on Friday and Saturday nights starting at 5:00 p.m. The championship games on Sunday will begin with the women’s game at 6:30 p.m., followed by the men’s game at 7:45 p.m.

You can learn more about the sport and see how sticks are made in the Choctaw Village at 1:30 p.m. Friday, August 30 and 1:00 p.m. Saturday, August 31 at 1:00 p.m. There will also be an exhibition game on Sunday, September 1, at 2:00 p.m. on the Capitol Lawn.