FOND DU LAC RESERVATION — The sound of thwacking sticks echoes in the air on a warm August morning as players pass a hand-stitched leather ball across a ballfield on the reservation of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

Players deftly catch the ball in the small basket at the end of their sticks as they sprint up and down the field, flinging the ball at goal posts on either end to score.

“This makes me really happy,” says Thomas Howes, 53, as he stands among the crowd following the action from the sideline.

For the past eight years, Howes and others on the Fond du Lac Reservation and other tribal communities have worked to revive the game of Baaga’adowewin, the Ojibwe version of lacrosse that once was a vital community-building tradition around the Great Lakes — but then vi

See Full Page