Indigenous Games

Traditionally, playing Indigenous games and activities were a daily occurrence and were embedded into a natural way of life. All games were known to develop and enhance the kinesthetic, physical, mental, social and emotional skills necessary for survival, but also as means for mastering their societies’ livelihood and well-being within their communities as well as within the universe and cosmos. Everything the Indigenous people did was for a purpose that contributed toward their community.

Today, we have a reclamation of the traditional Indigenous games and activities to embrace the cultural activities of our Indigenous forefathers of Southern Alberta, with many thanks to our local Blackfoot Elders who are recapturing the essence of the traditional ways.

Mary Ellen Little Mustache is an Elder that Building Brains Together has been working with to learn more about these cultural ways, activities, and games. We have documented some of the games which are now available on our website. Did you know these games also build executive functions? For example, Games of Dexterity of throwing to a target require:

• Attending to the target (stationary or moving)

• Working memory

• Monitoring to continually update the location of the player’s hand to the target and making accurate decisions about the timing for executing a throw toward the target.

Games of Intuition also require executive functions. For example, the Hand Game:

• Builds strong intuition by learning to decode non-verbal cues to draw inferences about others in various dispositions based on sequences of non-verbal cues.

• Learning intuitively requires strong attentional skills for an ability to filter out distractions and to focus on body language of deception and emotion.

All Games of Dexterity and Games of Intuition or chance have different levels of difficulty and executive function development. Check back to the Building Brains Together’s website for updates on these individual skill building games.