Montana: The Unlikely Fort Shaw Basketball Champions with Sharon McMahon

Sharon shares a story only the buffest of history buffs will know about Montana in this solo episode. In the early 1900s, Indigenous children were taken from their families to attend residential schools where they were assimilated into European culture - cutting their hair, learning new languages, and wearing European clothes. However, they wanted the women to get just enough physical activity at the Fort Shaw school, so they started a basketball program. The program exploded and became wildly popular, drawing crowds of hundreds of people per game. In this episode, Sharon will tell the story of how these women went from playing in a small gym to being named World Champions at the 1904 World’s Fair, to playing an exhibition game at the Olympics.

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