Shoot Minnie Shoot The Story of the 1904 Fort Shaw Indian Girls Basketballs First World Champions (

by Happy Jack Feder

Paperback book, 2004.

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Jody Kyburz]

LOVED it. But of course, it IS historical fiction. The author, Happy Jack Feder, is the husband of one of my high school English teachers. I doubt he remembers much about me as he and his wife were better acquainted with my younger sister. Happy once owned a bakery in Missoula, Montana. This is my first time reading him.

I thought he did a great job as a writer. I thought his research was wonderful. I loved that he incorporated some names and references of people and places I know. Early in the story, he talks about Captain Heagy, a wagon driver. Fits my classmate to a tee! A ship is called Honore, the name of another friend's daughter.

I LOVED learning about the Fort Shaw Indian Girls Basketball Team (not sure WHAT to capitalize there). Their story is true, which makes for great historical fiction. I loved the author's note at the end which answered many of my questions. Still, I'm going to google him and email a few more. I'm wondering if my fifth graders would listen to this well. Not sure. Can't wait to share it!

[Melody]

This is the hugely compelling story of a group of Native American teen girls who became an unbeatable basketball team in 1904. They beat everyone- other high school teams, men's college teams, everyone they ever played. I don't even like basketball and I couldn't put this book down. It is a fictionalized version, and some of the odd additions didn't make sense to me (Teddy Roosevelt playing a game with them? Wild Bill Hickok watching a game in disguise?) and seemed gratuitous at best. The editing was abysmal, and the writing merely adequate, not to mention sweetly sentimental. The characters were pretty idealized. But the sheer power of the story transcended all of these problems for me.

I'd love to see a non-fiction version of the girls' story.

[Bonnie Joyce]

300 Native American children being forcibly taken away from families to Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School in Montana was a travesty, yet Happy Jack Feder totally sugarcoats it. The writing is simplistic, but it is the biased perspective that is so offensive. The fact that the school fielded the first World Champion Basketball Team at the 1904 World Fair is incredible! The story deserves to be told, but not in this patriarchal, white savior perspective.
"Had the author read “World Champions: The 1904 Girls’ Basketball Team from Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School,” by researchers Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, first printed in the Montana Magazine of Western History (Winter 2001), he could have avoided some glaring contradictions, misrepresentations of historical facts, false assumptions, and all-too-common stereotypes."
https://www.humanitiesmontana.org/wp-...

https://www.humanitiesmontana.org/wp-...

[Margy]

I "read" this book as an audible CD. This is a true story of a group of students that are attending the school created to help the American Indians become integrated into the world of the white people. When Minnie Ha Ha arrives she is invited to join the basketball team. It turns out that she has a special ability, as well as the other girls. Minnie Ha Ha feels she's been given five special missions in life and she very cleverly and successfully completes each one. A surprising one is that the girl's basketball team goes to the world's fair and from there they meet the national champion and defeat them. This is a very positive book about how the American Indians moved forward in the early 1900's. It is a delightful true story. I really enjoyed the "read."

[Eileen]

A friend loaned me this book after we saw our local college basketball team's game against badly-outmatched Northwest Indian College (will save the rest of that personal backstory for another time). "Minnie" is poorly written (& needed a good proof-reader & editor), but it's an interesting story & interesting history of the Ft. Shaw Indian girls' basketball team, crowned the first World Champions of Basketball at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.

[Leanne]

Excellent book and well told.