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Stickball can also refer to a baseball-like game. See Stickball.

Choctaw Stickball 1830s painted by G. Catlin.

Stickball (also called toli or kapucha toli) has been called "Native American Basketball," and the analogy is appropriate. The equipment consists of a ball (called the towa, a rock wrapped in cloth then laced with leather cord) and a tall stick, typically ranging from ten to twenty feet tall. An item is placed on the top of the stick, often a cow skull; however, this is not always the case. Some tribes, like the Choctaw and Cherokee had goals similar to American football goals. The object of the game is to strike the skull, a portion of the pole, or the top of the stick with the ball. Hitting the skull is worth more points than the stick. The exact point values vary with the players. The field may have been anywhere from a few hundred yards to a few miles.

The game is full-contact. A player holding the ball is a target for every player on the other team, who will body-slam, tackle, trip, or otherwise attempt to regain the ball. The player's own team will, in turn, attempt to hurl the other team away from the thrower so he may aim carefully.

In premodern times, these games could result in serious injury, maiming or death; its nickname, "the little brother of war," was apt as it was often a way to resolve intra- or inter-group hostilities with a lower death rate than outright combat. Even when played today, it can result in broken bones or lacerations.

This game was used as part of a strategy, by the allied tribes, in 1764 to gain entrance to Fort Mackinaw.^[1]

Stickball rackets by tribe: a. Iroquois b. Passamaquoddy c. Chippewa d. Cherokee.

A variant form of the game, historically often played by women, used no stick and was played with the hands. This game was called shinny, and in the western part of North America it was more popular than stickball.^[2]

Among the northern tribes, a single racket was used, but in the south each player used two, and could grasp the ball, by cupping them together.^[3]

The game is still played on a large scale on the Choctaw reservation in Mississippi and in the Cherokee Nation in both Oklahoma^[4] and North Carolina. Also, the game is played at large gatherings of the Boy Scout Order of the Arrow, where the ball is a tennis ball wrapped in duct tape.

Related games are played, or have been played, by indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.

Stickball is similar to the Canadian, and increasingly-popular American, sport Lacrosse, whose name comes from the French term for the "stick" (crosse) used in the game as a club and to pass the ball.

• Encyclopedia of North American Indians