Dribbling on a dirt court
Lakota Beatty lived and trained with her sister Ashley before grief thrust her into a calling that goes beyond the game of basketball.
By Lydia Gessner | reporter, poet, motivational speaker
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 Beatty 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 the inner city Oklahoma City with a metal hanger nailed to a tree and a 28-point average at Mount St. Mary High School his senior year. From there, he became a Division I ball player at Oklahoma City University and an inspiration for his four daughters down the line. He was still playing in Native tournaments when Beatty was born. She 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. To this day, the professional player credits her ball-handling skills to those holes in the earth.
Beatty’s story 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.
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 seven different tribes, 5,750 people and a love for basketball.
Despite her family’s lack of concrete, Beatty’s 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, March Madness and 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 Beatty 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 Beatty follow at a faster pace.
“Me and Ashley, I mean we were partners in everything. We made each other better just because of how competitive we were. We were obsessed with it.” — Lakota Beatty, unsigned professional basketball player and Nike N7 athlete
“I remember being able to do between the legs when I was like 4 or 5, because she was like, gosh, yeah, 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, I mean we were partners in everything,” Beatty said in a 2022 Kyle Bell documentary called “Lakota” made about her and the family. “We made each other better just because of how competitive we were. We were obsessed with it.”
Everyone in Beatty’s family played basketball, including her aunts and uncles. She watched NCAA tournaments on TV, attended college games and, at age 10, started reading workout books her parents bought her. WNBA all-star and Olympic gold-medalist Chamique Holdsclaw, described getting up for 6 a.m. sprints in her book, Chamique: On Family, Focus, and Basketball. Soon Beatty was 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 Little League 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.
Now this little girl is her muse as she travels internationally, to the Netherlands, New Zealand and beyond to play 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 Ryan and her parents.
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 scrawled upon her arm in permanent ink.
It was a cloudy day in June of 2017. Beatty was fresh out of undergrad at Oral Roberts University and coming off back surgery when her coaches pounded on her apartment door. Beatty opened it to hear the news — her little sister Ashley had committed suicide.
Ashley knew 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 like her and Beatty.
After Ashley’s passing, Beatty put down her basketball and her plans of using her final season of eligibility at ORU — where she had transferred from Oklahoma State to share the court with her sister again. But 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 Beatty as a player who played outside the box and didn’t conform to who the coaches wanted her to be. She stuck to what made her a great player.
“She wasn’t like 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 got put in. She could come back down the court after a turnover and pull up deep to sink a three. Annan would turn to watch the faces of the opposing team’s bench as they wondered where Beatty was in 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.
“I think nationally there’s hardly any Native girls playing Division 1 ball. I have two. I had two girls playing, and that says a lot for Native women.” — Michelle Beatty, Lakota’s mom
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.
“Where I’m from, well, I mean not just where I’m from, I think nationally there’s hardly any Native girls playing Division I ball,” Michelle said in the “Lakota” documentary. “I have two. I had two girls playing, and that says a lot for Native women.”
Beatty 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, 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 Beatty’s best year as a ball player. She averaged 15 points per game and shot more than 43 percent from behind the 3-point line and was named first team in the All-Summit Conference League. But inside, she was ready to put down the ball and stop the game clock on her career.
In the midst of her grief, she helped at a camp teaching Native kids about basketball.
When Beatty arrived 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. But before her hands touched the ball and her feet stepped on that reservation 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.”
Beatty found her footing again in those old painted-floor gymnasiums, the words and lessons of therapists and a new calling in the classroom.
“You know 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 Beatty 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.
Beatty picked a young therapist who came to the United States as a refugee from a country filled with war, hunger and generational trauma, a new term in Beatty’s vocabulary. Beatty 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,’” Beatty said. “Like if you do, you’re weak.”
“The things that they did when I was little — like getting me a ball, getting me a goal, like buying me books — has helped me keep me sane in my adult life” — Lakota Beatty, unsigned professional basketball player and Nike N7 athlete
What began with a stack of papers on the table led Beatty and her family on a journey of repairing the past and the things done to their people.
“I think now 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. Beatty 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, like buying me books — has helped me keep me sane in my adult life,” Beatty said.
From her learning, Beatty set those books down and wondered, “Are we all destined to be statistics?” 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 beside 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.
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. She said it is common for overseas contracts to only last for one season before transitioning to the next team.
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, Beatty heads to the court, and somewhere between the hardwood and the hoop, she finds healing and hope.
“This is my honest truth and like, you know, if I didn’t feel like being here, I would at least go die in a workout and then I feel better,” Beatty said.
Beatty’s campaign for Nike’s N7 Campaign is called “Basketball is Medicine.” She connected with Sam McCracken of N7 when she signed her first pro 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,” Beatty said.
This is the message she brings to these kids 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.
Beatty 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 this 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 has brought about things like the prevalence of diabetes, gluten intolerance and lactose sensitivity among Indigenous communities.
“And that’s definitely what I want to look into is … what we were eating and the health we had before colonization,” Beatty said.
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, I’m like, ‘Okay, they did this so I could do this,’” Beatty said. “I get to do this.”
In many senses of the word, one could say that Beatty 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, Beatty 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 of her — and the nights playing the game she loved under the lights of the court and the Oklahoma moon; the ball passing from hand to hand and pounding into the packed red dirt.
And as her N7 sneakers stride across the concrete, she thinks she would do anything to go back.
Lydia Gessner, an English major with an emphasis in creative and professional writing, graduates in May from Bethel University, where she has spent four years honing her skills as a writer and photographer working for her local newspapers, editing and having her work published in Bethel’s literary magazine The Coeval and compiling some of her prose and poetry into a manuscript she hopes to publish post-graduation.
