Book review: Counting Coup, by Larry Colton

Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn

I read Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn as an Advance Reading Copy. I found it a hard slog in places, and yet – even these five years later – bits and pieces have stuck with me. And all this time later, the book that it most resembles in my mind is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That surely sounds odd if all you have to go on is the title, or the usual publisher’s blurbs, but this book is a sometimes-uncomfortable look at people in a pocket of culture that lives by its own rules, inside our country but to a large degree cut off from the wider world, laced with some dark and destructive crosscurrents. Again and again, I found myself cringing, wondering why these folks were opening up like this to a stranger, why they were in essence making me a peeping tom of sorts. This is a book with its share of bad language, lousy attitudes, despair - and yet it conveys a lot of heart, too, in places. It’s messy, I guess, like life can be messy.

Because of the occasional language issues and some of the subject matter, I wouldn’t ordinarily consider it for mention on this website, but for those of you trying to grip on life on American Indian reservations today, this book might be worth a look – with an understanding that this is about a group of Crows and their white neighbors, living in and around a small Montana town, over the course of one basketball season, and thus qualifies as a snapshot of one small part of a much larger picture. I wish I didn’t have to add the qualifications, but I’ve noticed that many people tend to lump all Indians together. The tribes do have their differences, and the members of those tribes are individuals. The media and the world at large forget that at times, I’m afraid.

As I said, I read this book in an ARC edition a long time ago. The final version might have wound up being an easier read - I haven't seen it and can't say. I found my copy a flawed and sometimes frustrating book, but one that gave me a look at the world that I haven’t found anywhere else, for what that’s worth. In other words, it wasn’t my cup of tea at all, but it was an eye-opener.

Counting Coup, by Larry Colton, is available new in trade paperback from Warner Books, 448 pp, ISBN 0446677558.

From the publisher’s write-up:

"In Native American tradition, "counting coup" meant literally touching one's enemy in battle and living to tell about it. Now it means playing winning hoops and dominating one's opponent. COUNTING COUP is the story of the girls' varsity basketball team of Hardin High School in Crow, Montana. The team is comprised of both Crow Indian and White girls, and is led by Sharon Laforge, a moody, undisciplined, yet talented Native American who hopes to be the first female player from Hardin to earn a basketball scholarship to college. Larry Colton shows readers the hardscrabble existence of a rural small town beset by racism, alcoholism, and domestic violence, and in so doing produces a touching, heartfelt, and beautifully written true story that will leave readers cheering for the girls they have come to know."