Angelo Reese, second from left, uses a stick on Friday to guess the location of a hidden marble during a round of Moccasin Game at Cass Lake-Bena High School. (Jordan Shearer | Bemidji Pioneer)

Mariah Ortiz shows a handful of marbles on Friday during a round of Moccasin Game at Cass Lake-Bena High School. (Jordan Shearer | Bemidji Pioneer)

BEMIDJI—As his teammate drummed, a Cass Lake-Bena High Schooler used a long stick to confidently flick aside a cloth square.

Underneath? A green marble—the wrong marble. The student grudgingly tossed a handful of sticks to his opponent.

They were playing Moccasin Game, a traditional American Indian pastime that easily predates Columbus. The school drew a few dozen competitors to its second annual Moccasin Game tournament Friday.

The tournament encouraged students there to practice their sportsmanship and their focus, but it also aimed to sustain a longstanding cultural tradition, said organizer Charles Grolla, a retired Red Lake law enforcement officer who teaches Ojibwe language and culture at the high school.

"I wanted to teach and pass on what I knew about the language and culture," Grolla said. "When I was a kid in Red Lake, I needed to know a little bit of Ojibwe to get by. Whereas now you don't hear it as much anywhere."

Students play regular pickup Moccasin Games on Fridays, Grolla said. The tournament was a way to earn bragging rights that could last through the summer.

The game itself is intricate and often intense. At its core: teams of 2-5 players sit across a blanket from one another. On the blanket are pieces of cloth—moccasins, traditionally—and teams alternately attempt to hide or uncover a specially marked marble amidst three unmarked ones underneath the cloth pieces. More rules and strategies cascade from there.

Successfully finding or hiding the right marble can earn a team sticks, which they use to keep score. Twenty sticks nets a "soldier"—a shorter, fatter scorekeeping stick. Five soldiers is a win.

It took senior Saige Humphrey about two years to fully understand the game, he said.

"I just had to jump in and play," Humphrey explained. Players hide the marbles one at a time under the oven mitt-like pieces of cloth, and a slight twitch of their eye might give away that they've stashed the marked marble.

"It sounds easy, and I think people already have an inherent thought that our games, traditional games, are really easy," he said. "It's complex, just like the language."

Grolla also impressed upon his students the game's cultural significance. He put together a sort-of textbook that explains the rules, the game mechanics, and the legend of its creation. He taught students there the Ojibwe and Dakota versions of Moccasin Game.

"Makwa, the bear, gave us the game," he said. Humphrey explained that the thumping of drums during the game corresponds to the bear's heartbeat; the sticks players use to its claws; the pieces of cloth to its paws. Grolla declined to tell the full legend without snow on the ground.

"During the winter the students learn the legend and present it back to the class so it burns into their memory," he said. "And then they're responsible for passing this on, also, as I was."