It's, Tricky.

And so it's all catching and pulling and turning your wrist over because it's such a small hoop.

And so that's how you can catch same thing if it's on the ground, you're capturing it and turning it over right around me.

Everybody come on in.

Well, there's a reason we've had this game.

Ojibwe people have had this game for.

I don't even know how long.

You know, before.

Before Europeans, we had this game.

And with that, interaction, we've lost contact, at least with it here, especially in my village at, you know, in Fort Lac, I know that there's no one around it that remembers the way where it was played.

There's, Tom Peacock as a story, though, the the ball field up on Rez Road before it was a baseball field was a lacrosse field, you know.

So one of these when this pandemic's over.

I'm making sticks partly for that.

Make a set of sticks and we're going to go have a game and sort of reclaim that space.

It's relatively new to me.

I haven't been doing this at that long.

It's still a learning, learning process.

I was really getting into it.

And then this pandemic happened.

It's really fun to play with people that know really well how to play.

Menominee is Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe is Lakota Dakota, and man is that fun just to play with like high level math?

There's another wager game.

Guys that play sometimes that I think has really cool sort of community values as everybody who's going to play that day bring something wet blanket, tobacco, whatever it is, beads, earrings, something.

And if you're going to play, you put your stuff in the pile and then you play.

And if I score, I get to go to that pile and I get to take anything I want, but I don't get to keep it.

I have to give it away to one of the spectators.

So it's that idea of being selfless.

11 years ago, when my twins were born, I was I was at a birch bark canoe making event out in fond du Lac.

And, Marvin DeFore said to me, hey, you got to make them babies.

A deck, a noggin.

And he's like, you guess you got to make two.

You know, he learned I was having twins.

I just love these.

And these.

I just finished with beeswax.

And so that's how I learned.

Got it really into steam bending wood.

With that.

And and so since I knew how to do that, this wasn't as much of a leap to get into.

And no one that I know of from final act makes them.

And that's sort of one of the big hurdles to people playing is just having sticks.

And so I figured, well, I'll start making sticks.

But when I picked one up and I actually played with it, I don't know how to explain it, but it's magical.

It belongs, it belongs.

It's probably part of, the way I see the world, I guess, as an Ojibwe person, is we've lost so many things, and to be able to reclaim and revitalize, the game play itself, but also the art of making them, just sort of appealed to me.

There's a lot of different stories of the origin of this game and where it comes from and what it's for, and that all differs depending on where people come from.

But there's a reason we have it, and I feel like there's a reason that we have it back again.

There's some reason to have like it spoke to me in that certain way.

I don't know how to explain that this is the grandest game, you know.

And the one thing that I think that it's more than a game is there's sort of three items that we have as Ojibwe people.

We have our war clubs, we have our drumsticks, and we have these sticks.

And I think we need that now more than ever, especially in that time where we're in a pandemic exposes our weaknesses.