TRANSCRIPT

Stick Game Song, Part 1

Blood Indian Ceremonial Songs of the 1940s

Folklorist Ken Peacock worked on a project in the 1940s for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He hired Emil Wings on a 10 month research project to collect Blackfoot ceremonial songs. Wings wasn't paid for his work, so the translation and research was never passed on. The discs and rights to publish were transferred to the Fort Whoop-Up Interpretive Society in 2006.

and Game songs were developed and played in traditional times by adults and children alike, by adults as a gambling game. Items of great value such as horses, wagons and rifles were gambled for. The game could be played for amusement, or between clans competitively. Each clan also developed its own songs to play along with the game.

Simple games were created with pieces made from everyday objects such as stones, sticks, or in this case, with small buffalo bones, each 4 cm in length.

In the days of residential schools, games such as this were used by older children covertly, to teach younger children how to play and to sing traditional hand game songs. To be caught by the school officials playing these games was to risk severe punishment. The simple nature of the items, and their size usually resulted in the children being able to hide their possession of the game pieces.

Louis Soop of the Blood tribe described the games: "There's no real set rules on hand games. The way we used to play in the residential schools is we'd sit in the corner, two players or more."

"You start with ten sticks. We used to have knives at school that we would use to whittle caragana trees, and then we'd put a design on some of the sticks. Then there are wooden bones that you use for hiding."

"You have two bones that you put in your hand. One has a wrap around the middle. You try to guess which one doesn't have that wrap. And every time that you can guess that, you take one of the sticks. It keeps going until one side wins all ten sticks."

"Sometimes, we had people who knew how to sing hand game songs. They'd get a piece of stick and they'd just be drumming on the bench, on the floor, on anything. There's a certain beat for singing hand games; it's a real fast beat. The idea is to distract your opponent by singing these songs."