The Oglala Lakota—also known as the Oglala Sioux—consider South Dakota’s Black Hills to be their spiritual homeland, and on a Tuesday in mid-December, a record snowfall had turned their pine-covered peaks white. In the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, in nearby Rapid City, a former tribal president named Bryan Brewer stood on a hardwood court and told a few hundred teen-agers the origin story of the basketball tournament they would play in over the next four days, the thirty-ninth Lakota Nation Invitational. Brewer wore a turquoise vest, a yellow beaded bolo tie, and black Nikes. The kids sat in their warmup suits and ate Pizza Hut in the bleachers.

“After Wounded Knee, no one wanted to play us,” Brewer said. He was referring to the occupation of the town of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement, in 1973, when Brewer was a basketball coach at Pine Ridge School. The A.I.M. wanted the U.S. government to reëxamine scores of treaties, which, they believed, had been broken. The occupation, which included the site of the 1890 massacre, set off an intense dispute between A.I.M. supporters and a private paramilitary group funded by the existing tribal leadership, whom the A.I.M. had accused of corruption. In the three years following the seventy-one-day occupation, stabbings, shootings, and beatings related to the conflict became common, and by 1975, the impoverished Pine Ridge reservation, roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, had the highest murder rate in the United States. Athletic directors from school districts across South Dakota refused to let their athletes play ball there.

Brewer, unable to schedule a full slate of games for his team, got on the phone and pleaded with coaches from native schools as far away as Kansas to play in a tournament on Pine Ridge. Seven schools signed on, and the first all-Indian tournament was a success. The tournament moved to Rapid City in 1979, its third year, and became the Lakota Nation Invitational; since then it has evolved into one of the premier showcases for “rez ball,” the run-and-gun, offense-first style of play that first caught on at reservation high schools in the nineteen-eighties. Over the years, the L.N.I. has widened its scope to become a winter homecoming of sorts for Native Americans all across the Dakotas, and a vital platform for fostering Lakota culture.

“This tournament started because of racism,” Brewer told the kids. “We wanted to work on reconciliation. What we’ve got now is something that’s much more than basketball.