The subject of games will be treated here only as one aspect of the sociologic interpretation of Indian life. Not to mention games would be to ignore an important element of youthful training and of adult life in every pueblo. Yet the subject is difficult to make vivid, unless one has watched the special sport described. Mr. Stewart Culin, to whom we owe most of our knowledge of Indian games, and to whose work I wish here to acknowledge great indebtedness, has given us a monograph profusely illustrated. To it,[247] and to the many museum collections of the implements employed in Indian sports, the especially interested reader must go for more than a superficial acquaintance with them.

All Indians are so devoted to games and gaming that the familiar sobriquet of “inveterate gambler” is well deserved. But the sport to which they are most addicted is not, as is popularly supposed, the playing of cards. That is a vice which the Indian has learned from his white conquerors and which has proved so baneful that it is now forbidden under rather heavy penalties by the agents on all the reservations. It so happens that cards and “nine-men’s morris” are two of the very few games the Indian ever borrowed from the white man. These are well balanced by lacrosse and racket, which are the gifts of the Indian to the white man. Games of all kinds, often quite trivial in appearance, are played persistently by both men and women, apparently as a mere pastime, regardless of the wager involved; but one can be pretty certain that there is hardly any daily pursuit whose enjoyment for the Indian is not enhanced by some stake. Also it is not to be forgotten that to every individual of the race, the underlying religious significance of almost all the games he plays constitutes an important factor in his development, and practically all of them, when carefully studied, are found to be so intimately interwoven with religious beliefs and practices that Indian games may be said generally to possess a devotional significance. It is probable that some of the games have a divinatory meaning. Consequently, though betting is the commonest detail of every day, the Indian’s real absorption is usually in the game itself rather than in the stake involved.

Since, in general, the great games are played ceremonially to secure fertility, to give life and prolong it, to expel demons, or to cure sickness, these are all sure to come at the seasonal periods of planting and of harvest, or in especial times of disaster to individuals or communities.

Such races as those still run at Ácoma and at Zuñi are visible proof that the physical vigor characteristic of the Pueblo tribes in days of old has not vanished. The invading Spaniards were not seldom amazed by the indomitable courage of the Indians in facing hardships and their endurance of cruel suffering without blenching. The stoicism with which they bear wounds with no outcry is not achieved without much discipline, and the Indian from his childhood is no stranger to pain. The early morning programme of an Indian of one of the northern tribes may be taken as typical of all:

Games to develop the muscles, to strengthen the whole frame, and inure it to arrow wounds are the constant occupation of the growing lad, and when he kills his first rabbit or catches a woodpecker with his hands, his father will proudly celebrate the event by a “smoke” or a feast. Until a boy is admitted to the hunt, and later to the rank of warrior, there is no cessation to the disciplinary training, even though much of it is given under the guise of play.

The normal routine of a youth, in the process of hardening himself to become even as skilful and as strong as the average of his companions, seems to us an extraordinary procedure. Withdrawal to the silences of the woods or the cliffs for a more or less variable length of time was, and still may be, exacted at the age of puberty, with fasting and continence also rigidly enjoined. Fasting, learned by degrees, makes the long fasts required later for ritual purposes more easy, and it has developed the capacity of the desert tribes to live for long periods upon an incredibly meagre diet in seasons of drought and the failure of crops. Young men who seek to gain power and to win the highest reward within the gift of their tribe, office in the esoteric priesthoods, add to the ordinary discipline rigors of which we can have little comprehension. They whip themselves into states of ecstasy, seeing visions in consequence, and receiving aid from supernatural powers to counteract the mischief-working beings who live, as they believe, in plants or beasts, or even in certain men and women. Then they return to the pueblo with the far-away gaze in their eyes of those who see not as other men see, and it is understood by all that they have been favored of the gods and are “not as other men are.”

Culin divides all Indian games, including racing, into the two classes of games of chance and games of dexterity. Games requiring the kind of intellectual calculation and skill that chess demands seem never to occur. The aboriginal legend tells us that Iyatiko, the Mother, invented all games, and that many of them, such as the one called “chuck-away-grains,” were brought from Si-pa-pu, in the first migration. Culin also believes that all Indian games are native to these people and contain no modifications due to white influence other than the common degeneration which characterizes all Indian institutions tainted from the same source. Again, he emphasizes

Culin says that the implements used in games are almost universally derived from the symbolic weapons of the mythic Twins: for example, the various sticks used in stick games are either miniature bows, or arrows, and the painted tubes used in guessing games are arrow shafts. Racket may be referred to the netted shield of the war gods, and is played only by men.

The games of chance are of two sorts: those in which the implements are either something in the nature of disks thrown at random to determine a number or numbers, with the count kept either by pebbles, or by sticks, or upon a counting board, the gain or loss depending upon the priority in which the players arrived at a definite goal; and those where the players guess in which of two or more places a particularly marked lot is concealed, success or failure resulting in the loss or gain of counters.

Games of dexterity include many modifications of archery, sliding javelins or darts upon the hard ground or ice, shooting at a moving target formed of a netted wheel or ring; ball, in several highly complicated forms, and racing games more or less related to and complicated with ball games.

A game known as the ball race appears only among the Indians of the Southwest, including Mexico and California, and is in season only from March until May, as an appeal for rain. In this sport the ball may be of stone or of wood. At Ácoma it is a game between the war captains, and, as among other Keres tribes, it is not played with balls but with two billets of wood.[248] The winning stick is buried in a cornfield. At Zuñi[249] the ball race is the great tribal game, which, since it comes when the men have finished the planting, has also the ceremonial character of a prayer for rain to fertilize the freshly sown fields. There is no more exciting event in the whole year at Zuñi. Starting upon the pueblo, the men race across to To-a-ya-lana (Thunder Mountain), their holiest shrine, then for two miles or more along its base and back to the pueblo. Often the racers are followed by as many as two or three hundred persons on horseback closely watching to see whether they are losing or gaining the stakes they have ventured. These wagers have been known to include all the possessions of a man, even his wife; for that matter, the women become as excited as the men and their betting is quite as heavy. Shinny, which may be played only in the autumn, is commonly played by women only, and this is also true of double-ball. The writer saw the girls of Taos playing at this latter game most gracefully and tirelessly upon the upper terraces of the north pueblo. Every writer speaks of the Indian as the most graceful loser in the world, so he at once enlists our sympathetic attention. Ácoma’s great spectacular game is the Gallo Race on San Juan’s Day, June 24. Some form of this game is found everywhere in New Mexico, among the people of Spanish descent, as well as among the Indians, but the two races play it with a difference.

Lummis,[250] who makes a picturesque story of it as seen at Ácoma, says that he has

At Ácoma, the starting-point is at the foot of the great mesa. Two old men go out to a level spot at the foot of one of the buttes and plant a cock in the sand so that only his head and perhaps two inches of neck can be seen. In 1922, I was told that an unusual number of entries were made, and that men started on the top of the Rock in a foot-race and mounted the horses at the bottom, while running full speed, to catch the fowl and carry it off—“a great race,” said my Indian informant, laughing immoderately at the recollection. The victor is pursued by all the others, who tear off bits of feathers and claws or whatever they can secure. The struggle often lasts as much as four hours, the tireless horses and riders, of surpassing agility and endurance, tearing over “the broad plain, hither and yon through rock-walled passes, up and over steep ridges of knee-deep sand, rider and horse alike unrecognizable for foam and dust in their wild career.”

Among the games of dexterity played at Ácoma, Culin mentions the shooting of arrows at bundles of tied-up grass as the only variety of archery pursued.

A specialty of the Ácomas which they regard as their original possession, though it is also played at Zuñi, is a game called bish-i. The tradition is that the greatest of all legendary gamblers, Gau-pot, played this game against the sun, was defeated, and became blind. The implements are four pieces of hollow cane split longitudinally, each five or six inches long. Before the canes are thrown, the players breathe upon them, and so great is the sacredness of the game that no women may ever touch the canes. The playing of this game is confined to the winter season in the kivas, where a society called Bish-i is devoted to its cult.

As has been said in another connection, the adult Indian appears seldom to do anything purely for fun. Almost the only games indulged in for mere amusement, as we play them, are the simple ones of the children, who, like children everywhere, play at the occupations of their elders. Imitative warfare, however, is not confined to these men of smaller growth, with their bows and arrows.[251] Cat’s cradle, which we think of as a childish amusement but which is played by adults the world around, is regarded by most authorities as being without religious significance. But, as Culin says,[252] it is known by “every tribe of whom direct enquiry was made,” and the Zuñis believe that this string-game was taught by the Spider Woman to the war gods for their netted shields. The distinguished English anthropologist, Dr. Alfred Haddon, and his daughter collected several hundred forms of cat’s cradle among the South Sea Islanders, and on their way back to England lingered in Arizona, where, with Dr. Alfred Tozzer’s help, they identified more than a dozen varieties of the game among the Navajos, some of which appeared to have a ritualistic significance. Mr. Culin was told by Dr. Bernard Haile of St. Michael, Arizona, that the Navajos have a legend to the effect that the holy spiders taught them how to make the numerous figures of stars, bears, coyotes, snakes, and so forth, on the solemn condition that the game should be played in winter only, because then snakes and spiders are asleep and cannot see them. Certain death was sure to overtake anyone playing at any other season. But Dr. Haile could not discover any deeper religious use or meaning.

To conclude: games, like every other aspect and detail of the Indian community, are socio-religious in essence, and hark back in many tribes to their origin myths. Here we find the description of a