The ancient world is blessed by a myriad collection of sports now largely lost to modern society. It would seem that, in our rush to globalization, we have reduced our experience down to only a few of these, survivors in a world of abandoned variety.
Thus, driven by advertising and commercial profiteering, we have the global phenomena of football, cricket and golf. Many other sports exist in their own niches, but many more have been lost. And there is much to learn from the sports at the fringe of human experience.
Perhaps the only single uniting feature of all modern sport is the gender divide. Almost every sport in the modern world is played by men, or women, but rarely do both compete at the same time.
But this is not entirely the case. In the ancient ball game played by the Miwok on their game field known as the Poscoi A We’a, these Native Americans found a way to make the sport about gender, and to play to the advantages of both.
Miwok Sports
First, it should be noted that Miwok sports are not so ancient as all that. The Miwok are still here, for a start, comprising four Native American groups who continue to inhabit an area of northern California. Much like the Maya, they never went extinct, they were merely overrun.
These groups, united by a shared group of languages, have been subsumed into modern life but much of their traditional culture has been preserved. This includes their pre-Columbian way of life, and that way of life included something akin to football.
Such ball games are not unique to the ancient Americas. Mesoamerica in particular had such games, used by the Maya in competitions to decided political authority, or just for fun, between the competing city states. The Miwok sport however, is unique in its gender roles.
Played on a Poscoi A We’a, a field roughly 110 yards (100 m) long, there were several Miwok games which involved a single gender. Women would play a game where they carried baskets and tried to use them to throw a ball through goal posts, which likely led to the modern game of lacrosse.
The men, however, played a game known as po’sko, where they would kick one of two balls into the opponent’s goal, a clear precursor to football (or soccer if, like the Miwok, you come from the United States). Most intriguingly however was the game played on this pitch which involved both men and women.
In this game, elements of the other two games were combined. The men were still attempting to score a goal by kicking the ball through the other team’s goalposts. Women, however, had more flexibility in their roles.
While the men could only use their feet and legs to control the ball, the women could use any part of their body. This meant that Miwok women could pick up the ball and run with it, offering them at a stroke an advantage over the often stronger and faster men.
Of course, there were no rules to stop the men tackling the women bodily once they had the ball. Were the ball to be freed, then the men could continue to kick it towards the goal as before, until a woman reclaimed it.
But this also led to one final quirk of the game. Why not tackle your own female team-mate while she held the ball? A woman could hold the ball while a man, holding that woman, charged at the goal carrying her.
There were a few ways to play this game, it would seem. Perhaps a little more such inventiveness, diversity and inclusion in our modern sports would be a good thing.
Top Image: Traditional Miwok dress: the Miwok found a way to bring gender roles, and gender differences, into their sport. Source: Miwok / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
By Joseph Green
References
