Aboriginal sportswomen81games were major recreational activities in Native American cultures and sometimes carried religious significance, when the ball symbolized the Earth, the Sun or the Moon (Greenberg 1997: 20; Oxendine 1995: 25). Alyce Taylor Cheska describes shinny, a game resembling field hockey or ice hockey, which was played mostly by women and children in almost all the regions of North America; and double ball, a game resembling lacrosse, was also considered to be a woman game (Cheska 1976: 43), as were football, juggling and tossed ball. Women played all types of ball games that were regarded as men games, too �hand ball, hand-and-fott ball, racket ball, lacrosse, and kick ball race (Cheska 1976: 39). They also played, sometimes together with men, a game that resembled modern basketball, and they were known to play at keeping a small ball in the air by hitting it with their hands (Greenberg 1997: 20). Writing about sports and leisure in the nineteenth-century fur trade in the Canadian northwest, Greg Thomas (1990: 15) describes how women from the Cree tribe played a ball game called ishesvy��translated as pair of stones�or esticles� Two stuffed leather balls, attached together by a thong about six to ten inches long, were tossed from person to person and caught by means of sticks thirty or more inches in length. The object of the game was to carry these balls or throw them through the opposition goal (similar to lacrosse). As these goals could be as far as one mile apart, it produced fine, robust class of women� Sports and the learning of lifestyle skills frequently occurred simultaneously. All Plains Indians, girls and boys, were able to ride by the age of 5. Pakes (1990: 27�8) tells us that: Children could ride bareback or double as the need arose, all based upon real life necessities that sometimes occurred. Games were devised on horseback all of which had to do with skill and maneuvering at all seasons in warfare. This is where such actions as the verhang� in which a rider hung under the neck of his galloping horse and shot at the enemy, were taught and practised. For Canadian Indians and Inuits, there was no organized separation of life, work and play. Activities were linked to the seasons, to nature, outside life and everyday existence. For example, the object of a game called now snakes� common on the Alberta plains, which was usually played by women, was to see how far they could throw willow sticks across the ice. The sticks were often tipped with the horns of buffalo calves (Pakes 1990: 30). Running races and canoe races were popular among Native Canadian women and in the winter, girls and boys played sliding games and would toboggan together. Pakes (1990: 31) explains that, esides simply riding downhill on sleds, the boys often followed or chased the girls on theirs. The girls were the uffalo� and the boys
