This story is part of a partnership between Bethel University’s journalism program and ICT.
Lydia Gessner
Special to ICT
The basketball thudded against the holes in the red dirt as Lakota Beatty dribbled in her yard on Native land. Midnight turned to morning in Anadarko, Oklahoma, as the basketball passed from hand to hand — from sisters Ryan to Lakota to Ashley to Nichole, and back to their parents, Michelle and George.
Beatty couldn’t go far without finding a hoop in her house.
Her dad grew up in inner-city Oklahoma City with a metal hanger nailed to a tree and a 28-point average in his senior year at Mount St. Mary High School. He went on to become a Division I ball player at Oklahoma City University and an inspiration for his four daughters.Beatty grew up hearing she played just like her father.
When Beatty was in middle school, she remembers asking her dad, “Can you please pour me some concrete?” He told her the dirt would help her dribble better. So the red dirt remained, and to this day, the professional player credits her ball-handling skills to those holes in the earth.
She is now a Nike N7 athlete, and in 2024, she was inducted into the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame, not only for her record-setting basketball career but also for her efforts to serve “her Indigenous people with a blend of western, holistic, and traditional methodologies.”
But the full story of her success is one of Oklahoma goals, painted college floorboards and dribbling across the pond to play professionally overseas. It’s also a story of grief, Indigenous resilience and the power of basketball to pound hope into the red dirt.
Obsessed with basketball
Beatty is a citizen of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, and is also Dakota of Spirit Lake and Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the Assiniboine and Gros-Ventre tribes of Fort Belknap, Montana.
Her hometown of Anadarko is made up of 5,750, including seven different tribes, and an abiding love for basketball.
Despite her family’s lack of concrete,her dad always made sure they had a hoop. If it broke, they went to Walmart and got a new one. He installed lights on the court so they could play until the early morning hours. Her mom, who played in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics at Bismarck United Technical College, gave up on the no-dribbling-in-the-house rule and put up Nerf hoops in the kitchen and living room.
Beatty would run back and forth on the hardwood floors, running toward a high school state title and a collegiate career, then flying around the world to get paid to play a game she’d play for free on her home’s dusty court.
The dirt court she played on wasn’t the only thing that gave her an advantage — it was also the people passing the ball beside her. Her older sister, Ryan, was always a step ahead of her in the game, which made her follow at a faster pace.
“I remember being able to do between the legs when I was like 4 or 5, because she was … seven and working on that,” Beatty said.
The same phenomenon occurred with Beatty and her sister Ashley, who was two years younger.
“Me and Ashley, we were partners in everything,” Beatty said, in a 2022 Kyle Bell documentary called “Lakota” about her and her family. “We made each other better just because of how competitive we were. We were obsessed with it.”
Everyone in the Beatty family played basketball, including her aunts and uncles. She watched NCAA tournaments on TV, attended college games and, by age 10, started reading workout books her parents bought her.
When she learned that WNBA all-star and Olympic gold-medalist Chamique Holdsclaw woke up for 6 a.m. sprints, Beatty was soon outside at sunrise pounding her feet against the earth.
At age 12, she received her first Division I offer. She still couldn’t beat her parents.
“I think if I had another coach, it could have turned out differently,” Beatty said, about having their mom as a youth coach. “No one would have been as tough on us as she was, but because she was our mom, she could do that.”
Beatty remembers running after making mistakes, but also watching her parents play against each other in the yard. Their love for the game fueled her desire to play. When she was in elementary school, she wrote that she wanted to be a professional basketball player when she grew up.
The little girl she used to be is now her muse as she travels internationally, to the Netherlands, New Zealand and beyond to play professional basketball, and domestically, to various reservations and Indigenous communities. It is there — on hardwood floors like the Anadarko gyms where she got her start — she shows kids all the things she learned from her family.
They line up to dribble like she did on the kitchen floor. They shoot like she did in the lit-up backyard. And then they huddle up to hear about topics she wished she’d heard at their age, like nutrition and mental health.
And the whole time, the words “I love you sissy” are tattooed across her arm.
Focus on family
Beatty started out playing collegiate ball at Oklahoma State University, but transferred to Oral Roberts University to play with her sister, Ashley.
It was a cloudy day in June 2017 when Beatty, fresh out of undergrad at Oral Roberts and coming off back surgery, heard a pounding on her apartment door. Her coaches had arrived to deliver the news that Ashley had committed suicide.
Ashley had known she didn’t want to play professionally after college, so her post-collegiate dreams included raising a family and hosting basketball camps for Indigenous kids.
After Ashley’s passing, Beatty put down her basketball as well as her plans of using her final season of eligibility at ORU. Number 11 refused to play without number 23.
“I think what we were able to accomplish, it’s a testament of our hard work,” Beatty said in the documentary. “And man, how hard we worked.”
Bill Annan was the associate head coach at OSU when Beatty played there. He described her as a player who didn’t conform to who the coaches wanted her to be. She stuck to what made her a great player.
“She wasn’t in a little box,” Annan said. “Her game forced the box to get wider.”
While she didn’t always start, she could add a needed mid-game “spark” when she was put into a game. She could come back down the court after a turnover and pull up deep to sink a three-point shot. Annan would turn to watch the faces of the opposing team’s bench as they wondered where Beatty had been on the scouting report.
To this day, Annan, who now coaches at ORU, says Beatty made him a better coach.
He remembers her intelligence, dry sense of humor and strong family bonds. Annan said he had to be careful when talking to her because he knew she was “three or four pages” ahead of him. She was the team jokester, he remembered, and she knew how to break up the awkwardness to make sure everyone had fun.
And her emphasis on family was evident when, instead of bringing one or both of her parents like most recruits do, she brought her entire family on her visit. And it was evident in her decision to transfer to be with her sister again.
She played well at OSU, making lasting connections with her teammates, but Annan doesn’t think she was happy playing at a Power Five school without Ashley.
“So it took, to me, a lot of confidence [for her] to say goodbye to OSU,” Annan said. “If you ask Lakota, like, ‘What was your best time?’ It was playing here at ORU with her sister. That was the best time that she had.”
The two of them had a connection on the court that allowed them to play off of each other. It began in the Oklahoma red dirt and continued at ORU.
“Nationally, there’s hardly any Native girls playing Division I ball,” Michelle Beatty said in the “Lakota” documentary. “I have two. I had two girls playing, and that says a lot for Native women.”
Lakota took the next season off, but managed to remain in graduate school. She said she struggled mentally and physically with the loss, to the point that her parents and coach approached her. She needed something, not only to put her mind to work, but her feet and hands as well.
She wrote a letter to the NCAA to petition for a sixth year of eligibility. She played with the ball brushing against Ashley’s words on her arm in what would have been her sister’s senior year.
The statistics showed that season was Lakota’s best year as a ball player. She averaged 15 points per game, shot more than 43 percent from behind the 3-point line, and was named first team in the All-Summit Conference League.
Inside, however, she was ready to put down the ball and stop the game clock on her career.
Regaining her footing
In the midst of her grief, she helped at a camp teaching Native kids about basketball.
When Lakota arrived at the camp in Juneau, Alaska, one of the people that brought her to the clinic informed her that because of its location and lack of sunlight, the area had one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Before her hands touched the ball and her feet stepped onto the court, she was still lost in her own grief — the grief of losing her sister, and with her, the game they both loved.
“Then I just went and played ball with those little kids,” Beatty said. “There were so many people who had lost someone to suicide, but they still showed up to the camp and they were having such a great time.”
She found her footing again on those old painted-floor gymnasiums and in the words and lessons of a therapist, and along the way discovered a new calling in the classroom.
“When we first lost [Ashley], it was hard to get up,” her mother, Michelle, said in Bell’s documentary. “And we’ve come a long way, even my babies, like Lakota. She speaks, she helps, she wants to help people. She don’t want people walking down the road we walk. I wouldn’t wish this walk for anybody.”
At one point, Beatty saw a therapist four or more times a week. It represented a shift in her family’s style of coping. Therapy would never have been an option before her sister’s death, but after Ashley’s suicide, George Beatty walked into their home in Anadarko and threw a stack of papers on the table in front of Lakota and Nichole.
“‘Pick one,’” Beatty remembers him saying. “‘You girls are going to therapy.’”
When she and her sister pushed back, their parents dug their heels further into the dirt.
“And they … got kind of mad at us and they were like, ‘You guys have to go, you have to do something different,’” Beatty said.
She picked a young therapist who had come to the United States as a refugee from a country filled with war, hunger and generational trauma, a new term in Beatty’s vocabulary. She would come to realize this trauma was partially what had prevented her family from going to counseling in the past.
“I know the trauma that my parents experienced and the trauma that their parents experienced, like in boarding school, what that did is there’s just such a, ‘you-don’t-talk-about-your-feelings,’” she said. “If you do, you’re weak.”
What began with a stack of papers on the table led Beatty and her family on a journey of repairing the past.
“My parents have made that space for us to do that,” Beatty said. “And I make the space for myself to do that.”
Her therapist gave her books on generational trauma and genetics, and she dug in with the enthusiasm for learning her parents had cultivated in her and her sisters from a young age.
“The things that they did when I was little — like getting me a ball, getting me a goal, buying me books — has helped keep me sane in my adult life,” she said.
She began to wonder, however, about the risk of becoming another statistic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that in 2021, non-Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native people had a suicide rate 99 percent greater than the general population, with the highest rates among teenagers and young adults from ages 15–34.
But then Beatty picked up the ball alongside those kids at the camp.
“I called my counselor when I got done with that basketball camp,” she said. “And I switched my major to counseling.”
These days, at the age of 29, she is back balancing a ball in one hand and a book in the other, as a professional athlete and a graduate student finishing up her master’s in counseling at ORU.
Healing and hope
Beatty signed her first contract in 2022 to play professionally for the Tokomanawa Queens in Aotearoa, New Zealand, then returned to train for six or seven months before signing in 2023 to play for the Uitsmijters in the Netherlands for the 2023-2024 season.
Now, she is back in Oklahoma City waiting on a call from her agent , hosting basketball camps in Indigenous communities across the country and playing in a local league with former Division I athletes — many now pushing both fast breaks and strollers.
All the while, Beatty can be found curled up with anything from fiction books to books about nutrition and psychology. Her dreams include opening her own practice to serve the Indigenous community with a mix of western, traditional and holistic medicine. After she receives her master’s, she would like to get her doctorate degree in sports psychology and to one day be a clinician with a pro sports team.
When she’s having a hard day and struggling with her own mental health, Lakota heads to the court, and somewhere between the hardwood and the hoop, she finds healing and hope.
“Then I feel better,” she said.
Beatty was tapped for a Nike N7 Campaign called “Basketball is Medicine.” She connected with Sam McCracken, the man behind the Nike N7, when she signed her first professional contract. N7 refers to the seven-generation principle of Indigenous people who believe every decision of the present should take into consideration the seven generations to follow who will be affected by it. The money from N7 goes back to help Indigenous youth have greater access to athletics.
For Beatty, a ball passing from hand to hand and hand to hoop is so much more than just a sport.
“This is keeping me alive,” she said.
That is the message she brings to the children she works with, between chest passes and dribbling drills: even professional players aren’t immune to mental health struggles. What’s important is knowing there are tools to deal with it — deep breathing, reaching out and working toward better nutrition.
“A lot of people don’t know your gut is your second brain,” Beatty said.
She remembers eating plain chicken sandwiches from Sonic before high school games with her sister. Now, she buys organic and grass-fed food for herself, and her current favorite meal is ground beef, sweet potatoes and broccoli in her air fryer. But she knows not everyone can afford such a diet.
Her goal is not for kids to be organic, but mindful. She encourages them to put a protein, carbohydrate and fat on their plate with every meal. She believes healthy communities begin with the food they consume.
Beatty is interested in the connection between colonization and current Native nutrition. She would love to further explore how the disruption of their food systems changed the genetics of Indigenous populations, potentially in her thesis or dissertation. The oppression of her ancestors, she believes, has helped bring about the prevalence of diabetes, gluten intolerance and lactose sensitivity in Indigenous communities.
“And that’s definitely what I want to look into is … what we were eating and the health we had before colonization,” she said.
Moving forward
When things get hard, she thinks back on those ancestors — one, two or seven generations ago — who endured food deprivation, culture-stripping boarding schools and long, snowy treks across states like Montana. It’s the stories she has heard growing up; the oral traditions passed from one mouth to the next across the years.
“My parents have always told me those stories, so … that helps me when I’m on the court, or when I’m studying for a test or something,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Okay, they did this so I could do this.’”
In many senses of the word, one could say that Lakota has “made it.” Yet as she leaves her house in Oklahoma City to coach a camp for Indigenous youth, wearing N7 shoes and waiting on the next call from her agent, Lakota looks over at the neighbor boys shooting hoops from their concrete pad into a basketball goal.
And she remembers her muse — that little girl inside her — and the nights playing the game she loves under the lights of the court and the Oklahoma moon, with the ball passing from hand to hand and pounding into the packed red dirt.
As her N7 sneakers stride across the concrete, she realizes she would do anything to go back.
Lydia Gessner is an English major set to graduate in May 2024 with an emphasis in creative and professional writing from Bethel University She has spent four years at Bethel honing her skills as a writer and photographer working for her local newspapers and Bethel’s literary magazine, The Coeval. She hopes to publish a compilation of her prose and poetry after graduation.
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