Tradition and Talent Through community and a storied pedigree, basketball in Lapwai and among the Nez Perce flourishes

 

Salmon nets and tennis balls

 The year was 1943, and Leroy Seth, a 7-year-old Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) boy, wanted to hone his basketball skills.

In that era, the unincorporated community of Spalding — where the Nez Perce National Historical Park now sits —  didn’t have much. There was a little school and some homes, but insufficient access to sporting infrastructure, in the methodical sense.

They had to do what they could. An age-old skill — a custom, really —  ended up making the difference.

Seth’s friend, Marcus “Roach” Wilson, regularly accompanied his father to Oregon. They often traveled to The Dalles to fish for salmon in the Columbia River, a traditional angling site for the Nimiipuu as well as several other indigenous Northwest peoples.

The late Wilson was taught to fish with a dip net and to use a gaff hook for support with some of the particularly heavy salmon. At a moderately young age, he had already become adept at fashioning these nets.

Seth and Wilson picked out a building, a good-sized structure with supports reminiscent of hoop posts. They brought with them coat hangers, which were disfigured to form a shape resemblant to a circle. Then, they fixed the salmon nets to the coat hangers and draped them on each side of the makeshift court.

Now, all they needed was a ball.

The hoops were too small for a customary basketball, so they got their hands on tennis balls and a resourceful game of basketball ensued.

“We could make swishes with those tennis balls,” said Seth, who is now a tribal elder and faculty-lecturer in anthropology and sociology at the University of Idaho. “That gave us a pretty good deadeye, so to speak.

“Once we got up to basketballs, it seemed like the hoop was gigantic. So that was a pretty good teaching tool that, at that time, we didn’t realize would make a difference.”

Seth molded his future in sport early and enterprisingly. He had also taken an interest in track, which he continued through college at Eastern Washington after finishing his collegiate basketball career at Lewis-Clark State. He’d find durable sticks and maybe a bamboo rod that he could balance on top, then, he’d leap over the crossbars into self-dug pits.

In 1946, the school at Spalding was annexed three miles south to a site known as Lapwai, “the place of the butterfly” — a river-bordering valley encircled by high-grade rolling hills and the present-day seat of the Nez Perce Tribe. The students merged to form what evolved into the institute of today, effectively stoking the fire of a long-running Nimiipuu — meaning, “the People” — basketball lineage.

“We were rivals (Spalding and Lapwai), but once we combined and started playing together we became a power,” Seth said. “Of course, we’re about better than everyone now … we got a pretty good record going, don’t we?”

Ten years later, after countless hours of practice at the tribal community building, the Pi-Nee-Waus, and surrounding courts, Seth and company headed the first state championship team in Lapwai history.

It all began over a decade earlier, with the drive and ingenuity of a few youths.

Through a lineage of talent, basketball has become self-instilled into the peoples’ culture. With a highly entertaining and long-extant style of play — known as rezball, a brand of basketball featuring up-tempo, quick-transition offenses and suffocating defense — they have made basketball theirs, consistently flourish in it, and routinely pack their 1,270-seat gym.

Lapwai’s population is just over 1,100 people.

The 1956 state championship foreshadowed perennial Wildcat dynasties of the future. Lapwai, thus far, has produced 19 state championships, countless stars, collegiate athletes and recognition throughout the Native American basketball circuit.

“There’s just generations of passion toward basketball so that history and background kind of resonates to the next generations,” said Bob Sobotta Jr.

Sobotta Jr. played for LCSC, works there as director of Native American/minority student services, is head coach of the Lapwai boys’ team and won the state title as a Wildcat guard in 1984.

“It definitely brings a community together, all aspects of the community. It can also create other opportunities, and I think right now is a good example in terms

of how many of our kids are playing at the college level.”

 

Identity and sport

The wounds the Nimiipuu unjustly suffered at the hands of a gluttonous American government were still fresh; in relation to the 12,000-plus years they’ve lived here, they still are. Their community and family dynamics were cruelly attacked, leaving behind still-remaining social lesions.

But, according to ethnographer Rodney Frey, basketball was, and still is, a new and beautiful way in which Native American peoples can retain their communal ties — it’s representative of a cohesive structure and cooperative mitigation for scars left by Western malice.

“It’s a group effort, team sports…There’s a harmony with each generation there, retaining the core of the family and resisting the attempts at breaking it,” Frey said. “They didn’t lose that link to help their society…In the face of a whitewashed nation, identity can be retained through the sport.”

In 1957, The Dalles Dam was built on the Columbia River, effectively submerging the Celilo Falls and ending the ancient tradition of fishing there. Rebecca Miles, the executive director of the Nez Perce Tribe and 1989 state champion, said basketball and its many tournaments are means of socialization, considering the acute communal background of the people.

There are at least 20 Native American basketball tournaments around the Northwest annually.

“One major, major area, considered the Wall Street of the West, was the Celilo Falls. (It was a) major fishing site…That’s where everyone was coming, camping, you have children born there and all of this commerce and wealth,” Miles said. “Now that we don’t have those places we used to have, we don’t have the Celilo Falls and some of the gathering areas that we did, we socialize in other ways … We had ways of getting together, but it’s like our people found another way to be who we are.”

To Seth, a traditional element basketball can represent is the warrior mentality between tribes. The skirmishes are faceoffs between tribal dignitaries, or duels featuring the well-known.

“It’s like in the old days when warriors would come upon someone; they’d pray, not only for themselves, but for their enemies,” Seth said. “You’d hope you were worthy of the battle, and it’s the same way in basketball … It’s a togetherness aspect.”

According to Seth, basketball can be seen as a modern-day variation of these events. In the sport, and through history, Nimiipuu notables are prevalent. Seth, like his great grandfather, Peo peo Tholekt, is one of the luminaries.

Peo peo Tholekt (Bird Alighting) was a figure of his era, a notable whose history has passed the test of time. He was Chief Joseph’s nephew, a colleague of Yellow Wolf and was under the leadership of Looking Glass during the Nez Perce War of 1877, where he earned a great deal of his recognition through valiancy.

At the Battle of Big Hole (present-day Beaverhead County, Mont.) in August of that year, the cavalry drug in a howitzer gun and fired indiscriminately at men, women and children encamped at the site. Peo peo Tholekt footed it up the perilous hill, to where the cannon-like artillery was perched. He assisted in the overtaking and dismantling of the gun, distinguishing himself while doubtlessly saving countless lives in the process.

Just under 90 years later, Seth had recently finished graduate school at the University of Montana, where he earned his master’s degree in anthropology and Indian arts while furthering his basketball career through the copious Native American basketball tournaments he competed in.

He played with and against big names from around the country in these clashes, and set himself apart with a deadly post-up hookshot he patented before Lew Alcindor made it world-famous at UCLA.

Seth even edged Ralph Boston — an American Olympian and the first to break the 27-foot long jump barrier — in the high jump at the Small College National Finals while running track for Eastern Washington in the early-1960’s.

“He stepped wrong and I got a medal,” Seth laughed. “I beat an Olympian, so hey, that’s pretty cool.”

From high school to college athletics, Native American tournaments to semi-professional ball with the Idaho Rainiers and later, five gold medals in the senior Olympics, Seth has earned his recognition. He’s an athlete and a teacher, a basketball legend and a spiritual guide. He also regularly dances at pow-wows and often carries a bit of bitterroot in his pocket, a medicinal herb his people have been harvesting in the nearby mountains during spring for thousands of years.

 

 

A glimpse into the past

A glance into the history of the sport in Lapwai reveals a lineage — Sobotta, Miles, Taylor, Ellenwood — these are just some of the many recurring names in the Wildcat basketball ancestry. It’s also a reason why Miles wanted her sons to hyphenate their last names, so people would recognize them in relation to their predecessors on the “basketball trail.”

“People learn of each other,” Miles said. “You think almost of warrior times, pre-contact, and you’d say, ‘there’s Chief Looking Glass, there’s Chief Joseph, or, there’s his son,’ thinking of those kinds of lineages then, now you’re talking in a different way.”

Sonya Samuels-Allen, a 1989 state champion, chair on the school board and homebuyer educator for the Nez Perce Tribal Housing Authority, recalls one such event relating to her cousin, the late Littlefoot Ellenwood — a guard for the late-1980’s boys’ team’s 81-win streak — while she worked as an intern with the Oneida Tribe in Green Bay, Wisc. after finishing her studies at UI.

“One big, stern Indian guy would come in all the time, and he’d sometimes ask me questions. One day he came in and said, ‘I heard you’re Nez Perce, you know Littlefoot?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my cousin.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, we definitely know Littlefoot over here.’…Littlefoot earned a lot of respect with his ball-playing, nationwide.”

Littlefoot’s father, Kub Ellenwood, also enjoyed illustriousness from playing in Native American tournaments around the region. He netted 64 points during a men’s 40-and-over tournament in Oregon, earning himself the nickname, “The Nez Perce Legend” among the Umatilla.

 

The Year of the Wildcats

 With just over two minutes left in the 1987 A-3 state championship game, Lapwai was up big-time, but Greg Jose, a senior and standout post — although he could play every position, standing at an imposing 6-foot-4 (like the majority of his teammates) — was not quite yet filled with euphoria.

He had made a promise to himself: get a dunk in every game.

“Coach was starting to sub players in and I thought, ‘oh, shoot,’” said Jose, who now resides in Clarkston. “I hadn’t had my dunk yet, and it was like, ‘oh, no,’ because it was the last game I’d play there.”

The game clock was winding, along with Jose’s time left as a Wildcat. Up 20-plus points on nemesis Malad, a near-Utah school which had knocked Lapwai out of the playoffs in the last two years, Jose decided it was now or never.

A Malad guard brought it up, and as per-custom in rezball, Jose suffocated him, poked the ball away to a teammate, and buzzed down the floor, hand in air, calling for ball.

He controlled a high-arching pass, took a power-dribble, and slammed it home with two hands, making certain it went in. He landed, faced his bench, smiled and put two pointer fingers in the air; he could finally relax, he had his dunk and the Lapwai boys were state champions for the third time in school history.

When the horn sounded, the lot of Wildcats lifted their jerseys, so the full-house audience at the Cowan Spectrum in Moscow could see it: “The Year of the Wildcats” was printed on their undershirts.

It wasn’t just one year, though. Lapwai had been notable since the mid-1950’s, but this was the start of a dynasty, literally unmatched in terms of Idaho high school basketball.

The boys’ team finished ‘87 at 26-0, and they didn’t lose again until after the 1989 season, an incredible 81-0 stretch anchored by Jose in ‘87, who would go on to become Lewis-Clark State’s No. 1 scorer in school history and the only men’s basketball player in the LCSC Hall of Fame; and Ellenwood, a subsequent ace at the College of Southern Idaho who started during all three undefeated seasons. Many considered the late Ellenwood — a relative of both Idaho’s Trevon Allen and WNBA legend Shoni Schimmel — to be one of the best athletes to ever come out of Lapwai.

That 1987 team was honored between games at last season’s state championship playoffs in Boise; each member of the team was handed medals that read: “Legends of the Game.”

“We went to Boise thinking, ‘those younger people won’t know our team.’ I mean, who’s going to know who Lapwai ‘87 is?” Jose said. “But it was awesome, they gave us a standing ovation. They respected us enough to stand up and clap and I don’t think most of them were even born at the time.

“It’s nice to be remembered. Especially in Boise, you wouldn’t think they’d even know where Lapwai is.”

The girls’ teams of the late-1980’s weren’t far behind, and neither team has experienced a substantial or chronic lag throughout the historic tradition that is Lapwai basketball.

Now a 1AD1 school, the second smallest division in Idaho prep sports, Lapwai has racked up a whopping 19 state championships: nine for the girls’ teams and 10 for the boys.

In 1988, when the boys were in the heart of their historic run, Good Morning America came knocking. A segment was compiled by former ABC correspondent and Nez Perce tribal member Hattie Kauffman, detailing in fuzzy color the inner workings of an all-around basketball-minded community.

Just months after its airing, the boys and girls of Wildcat basketball had to clear some additional space in an already-crowded and wide trophy case; both were 1989 state champions.

Nowadays, it’s a lot of the same. It’s an “anything you can do, I can do better” dynamic, in a sense. The boys will cruise to a win one year, the girls the next. At this point, though, one thing seems certain: one team will, at the very least, be a state competitor.

It’s because of the athletes, that lineage of basketball superiority and the year-round struggle to be great and to prove worth to a community which has begun to expect a certain level of success every year.

“Winning is expected of Lapwai, from our fans,” said Miles, who was head coach of the boys’ team from 2014 to 2016. “Let’s say a team hasn’t been in the state tournament in 10 or 20 years, that team will probably just be happy to be there, but winning it is a whole different thing. For Lapwai, it’s winning it every year. There’s no other goal.”

There is somewhat of a pedestal, or presupposition, Miles said. She still hears scorn toward the late-80’s/early-90’s girls’ teams, of which she was a part of, helping it to a championship as a sophomore in 1989.

“‘There goes that group of girls, they were supposed to win four state titles.’ Well, we won one. And that was just said a couple of weeks ago,” Miles said.

 

But a detailed examination of junior college, NAIA and some Division I ball-club rosters discloses an important reality — Lapwai athletes make it. A lot.

Both of Miles’s sons play college ball. Ivory Miles-Williams, her youngest and a 2017 Lapwai graduate, is a freshman on a College of Idaho team which made an appearance this year in the NAIA Final Four. Tommy Miles-Williams just wrapped up his second year at United Tribes Technical College.

Athletic director David Kronemann hypothesized that maybe five or six basketball players go on to play at the next level on a yearly basis. Two years ago, he said, more than 10 athletes in one class were scooped up to play college sports. Miles supposed about 15 or so former Lapwai graduates are playing college sports right now.

Lapwai High School has approximately 120 students.

And there are more to come, not only from Lapwai High School but products of the community,  tribal members who have pursued academic and exposure opportunities at larger nearby schools.

Ashlyn Wallace, a Lapwai product, recently kicked off her preps career at Clarkston. At age 14, she’s only a freshman, but a starter on the Bantams’ basketball team.

She also has already received about 20 scholarship offers from colleges including Eastern Washington and Oregon State.

And then there is, of course, Trevon Allen, who also played at Clarkston, partially because of exposure issues in Lapwai, partially because of academic incentives a larger school can offer, according to his mother, Samuels-Allen.

“My mindset’s always been Lapwai,” Samuels-Allen said. “As a Lapwai mom, it was so hard for me to let him go, but I started to do my research…I thought, ‘is it more advantageous for him, for opportunities, to be at a Washington school?’”

The same can be said for Tisha Phillips, a Lapwai-native who went to Clarkston High School instead of in her hometown. She earned a scholarship to play with Eastern Washington, where she excelled for four years, earning all-Big Sky honors before graduating in 2017. In March, she inked a professional contract deal with the Liffey Celtics in Ireland, one of the finest professional women’s teams in Europe.

“You think about Clarkston and Tisha Phillips, and all these kids. They won state titles because they were all Lapwai athletes at one time. They all technically came from here, which just shows that they can play at any level,” Miles said.

The list goes on, so much so, that noting everyone would be impractical. Athletes with at least a connection to Lapwai are in abundance on college rosters and excelling in post-graduate occupations, oftentimes with the tribe.

Since the 1980’s, it’s only enlarged.

The boys’ team is coming off consecutive titles, dominant ones at that, and the girls’ team has won the state championship in three of the last four years.

In the last week of 2017, at the Avista Holiday Tournament in Lewiston, the Lapwai boys were the smallest team invited.

“‘Small school’ doesn’t mean everything,” said Emmit Taylor III, a senior at Lapwai. “Big or small, we all shoot the same way, so whoever we’re playing, we’re not scared.”

Taylor III, a McDonald’s All-American nominee and Idaho 1AD1 MVP, led the Wildcats past Moscow High School and North Central from Spokane. In the third round, Ferris High School nipped Lapwai by one point.

Ferris, a Greater Spokane League team, boasts about 2,000 students.

 

“Play in Your Moccasins”

At the intersection of Main Street and Agency Road, a small Pepsi-sponsored building sits, with the phrase “Pi-Nee-Waus” painted on a sign hanging above its entrance. Just outside, a faint noise of basketballs bouncing and shoes squeaking can be heard.

It is neighbored on one side by Lapwai High School and Nimiipuu Health — the Nez Perce Tribe’s health service — the Bureau of Indian Affairs faces it from across the street, and several tribal offices overlook it opposite the school.

Pi-Nee-Waus translates literally to “place of gathering.” It’s the tribal community center, and perhaps most importantly, a gym where young players regularly develop.

It’s where up-and-comers test their skill against local legends, generally their community heroes who they had watched as children. Because basketball is a year-round tradition in Lapwai, the Pi-Nee-Waus functions as an offseason gathering hub — and an in-season practice arena.

“The younger ones go to the Pi-Nee-Waus and play against some of these older guys that they hear about or the ones who have titles,” Sobotta Jr. said.

“I played my whole life. I grew up going to the Pi-Nee-Waus,” Ellenwood said, a 1968 Lapwai grad and yet another former LCSC player. “It’s just a positive tradition now, to play basketball in every family. It’s really grown into a nice thing.”

Sobotta and Ellenwood were two of many role models for generations succeeding them. Jose, for example, consistently squared off against Sobotta at the Pi-Nee-Waus, surrounding courts or wherever there was an opening for a pickup game. When Jose was barely a teenager, he faced teams composed of older players, particularly from the 1984 state championship team, which Sobotta fronted as point guard.

“They’d kill us, but you’d just take your beatings, and think, ‘I can’t wait until I get there.’ It got you hungry because you couldn’t wait until you could do that to kids.” Jose laughed. “You play against older people, not really against people your age. That’s probably a reason why Lapwai is good too, we played up.”

One reason, according to Jose, Miles and Sobotta, why the people of Lapwai and the larger surrounding community have grasped basketball, is the accessible nature of the sport — hoops are all over the place.

Jose said most people were underprivileged while growing up in Lapwai. Reservation issues of unemployment and poverty limited material possessions, so basketball was the outlet. It’s improved somewhat since then, though the problems have not disappeared.

According to Seth, the overall wealth of the community has increased, but this does not mean the attachment to the sport has depreciated.

Like the old Nike slogan, basketball simply never stops in Lapwai. Whereas kids from surrounding schools commonly take a break from the sport to focus solely on other athletic ventures, many Lapwai people maintain play year-round — even while competing in other sports — and continue to play in Native American tournaments until old age sets in, and their bodies can no longer take the physical strain of the sport.

The tournaments are about as far-reaching as can be, especially in the Northwest. Sometimes they attract upwards of 100 teams. Even decades back, Lapwai athletes would pile in vans and head to Seattle or Yakama, or wherever they could manage. To play in one of these large-scale tournaments meant competing for renown and one of the coveted Pendleton, leather-sleeved championship jackets, which Miles called, “the cream of the crop.”

Nowadays, the tournaments are a staple. Kids even fly out to Anaheim or Phoenix, for example, to compete with some of the more preeminent teams in front of a myriad of college scouts. They’ve become more widespread, giving people ranging from ages below 10 to over 40 extensive opportunities to continue play with their long-standing teammates.

“Indians don’t stop playing basketball,” Miles said. “When you’re done, let’s say you’re not going to college, or if you’re done with college ball, you’re still going to play basketball the rest of your life.”

In late-March, Miles’s son, Ivory, had just finished up his first season at the College of Idaho, where he assisted the ‘Yotes to the NAIA Final Four. He was on spring break after a long but successful season. So, what’d he do? Relax?

Nope.

He traveled over to Chiloquin, Ore., where he competed in, and won, the 65th annual All-Indian World Championship Basketball Tournament. Immediately after, he headed south to Yakama territory in Washington and competed in “The Big Tournament,” a competition featuring eight of the best Native American teams in the region.

These tournaments are the real deal. The talent levels and stamina of competitors are through the roof, as well as the devotion of the supporters.

“His coach couldn’t believe it,” Miles said. “What’s everybody else do? ‘I don’t want to see another basketball,’ but Ivory takes off for these tournaments and he tells his coach, ‘I probably have a tournament to play in every week now, at least until school’s out.’

Seven years ago, tribal member Dr. Angela Picard decided to create such a tournament to be held in Lapwai. She coined it, the “Play in Your Moccasins” youth hoops tournament. Its original intent was to fund trips for Nimiipuu teams to compete in the Native American Basketball Invitational in Phoenix, or, “the huge one, for all the bragging rights,” as Miles called it.

In its first year in 2011, it attracted so much attention that every hotel in Lewiston was sold out, full with anywhere between 60 to 80 teams from around the nation.

On any common weekday, Main Street appears breathless, but in the last week of April, when the “Mocassins” tournament is underway, basketball players and fanatics galore line the streets and fill the town’s four gyms.

“She’s branded it as a tournament that people put on their calendars each year…Everyone’s always lining up their teams now, ‘hey, who’s going to be on your Mocassins team this year?’” Miles said. “That all just encompasses Lapwai basketball, Indian basketball.”