Discusses the history and importance in everyday life of ball games (especially lacrosse), running, archery, swimming, snow snake, hoop-and-pole, and games of chance. This title describes the apex of Indian sports during the first three decades of the twentieth century and chronicles the decline since.

Indians gained nationwide visibility as athletes in baseball and football; the teams at boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were especially famous. Oxendine describes the apex of Indian sports during the first three decades of the twentieth century and chronicles the decline since. He looks at the career of the legendary Jim Thorpe and provides brief biographies of other Indian athletes before and after 1930. Joseph B. Oxendine, a Lumbee who grew up in a segregated Indian community in North Carolina, played professional baseball for three years prior to completing his doctoral degree at Boston University.He is chancellor of Pembroke State University and has published extensively in the fields of motor learning and sport psychology. Oxendine has provided a new afterword for this Bison Books edition.