A still from 'Gigiigemin Baaga’adoweyang.'
Like any great film about team sports, Gigiigemin Baaga’adoweyang (We are Healed by Stickball) is about being part of something bigger than oneself, working together to overcome the odds. In this case those odds are a cultural identity that was forcibly taken away 100 years ago. Filmed in the Bad River community of northern Wisconsin, this 10-minute short tells the story of Ojibwe people of all ages who are revitalizing the Indigenous lacrosse-like game of stickball.
Gigiigemin Baaga’adoweyang will be shown April 6 at the Chazen Museum of Art as part of “Wisconsin’s Own Fire, Water, Stickball and Dinosaurs,” a group of documentaries focusing on the environment. Director Finn Ryan also has a second film in this screening, Return to Spur Lake: Bringing Back the Food that Grows on Water, about the effort to bring wild rice back to the region.
Ryan, who lives in Madison, has directed several films looking at Native American culture in the region and was contacted by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission to tell the story of the revival of stickball in film.
“Any time we can learn more about the communities around us and the land we all live on is a really positive experience,” says Ryan.
None of the players in the film or even their parents grew up with stickball, because, like other markers of Native culture, its practice was actively quashed in the 1920s and ’30s. At that time a majority of Native children were attending boarding schools that taught assimilation into Euro-American culture. But in recent years, members of the Ojibwe community are again learning to hand carve the sticks, sew the balls and organize traditional gift exchanges (in lieu of prizes) for stickball games.
There is a beautiful attention to detail in the film. Its score is by Bizhiki, a music group with two Ojibwe members that combines traditional powwow singing with contemporary sounds. As the stickball players gaze into the camera, their faces project the strength of athletes, but also the defiance of reclaiming something stolen.
Ryan grew up in Minneapolis where some of his classmates were Ojibwe, and first came to Madison to attend the university. “I used to go to the Wisconsin Film Festival as an undergrad and graduate student,” he says, “and I never thought, wow, someday maybe one of my films will be in the film fest.”
Not only that, Gigiigemin Baaga’adoweyang won one of this year’s Golden Badger Awards, a juried competition highlighting films shot largely in Wisconsin or made by people with Wisconsin ties. Judges praised the film for how it “expertly profiles the deep meaning the sport [of stickball] has for the community.”
See our other 2025 Wisconsin's Own profiles here.
