Beyond the reservation: Mya Fourstar dreams of playing college basketball
The journey won’t be easy
Adapted from s tory by The Washington Post’s Jesse Dougherty.
Fifteen-year-old Mya Fourstar has never scored fewer than 10 points in back-to-back games. Now here she was, fearing that could happen, her name echoing all around the Scobey gym.
“You got this, Mya!” shouted Frazer superintendent Melanie Blount-Cole from behind the scorer’s table.
“Get up on Mya!” yelled the Scobey coach, crouching into a defensive stance himself as Mya caught the ball behind the three-point line.
“Go Mya, go, go,” urged her Aunt Sasha after Mya grabbed a defensive rebound. “Go, go, go. Come on.”
Between plays, Mya glanced at the scoreboard before her eyes trailed to behind the baseline. That is where Sasha and Jewel Ackerman-Fourstar, Mya’s grandmother, sat as Mya looked to them for some sign that she was doing okay. Mya’s ponytail bounced against the back of her neck, her mouth seemed stuck in a straight line, her eyes boiled in frustration. Jewel and Sasha smiled at her, offered a few claps of encouragement, and pointed her attention back to the game.
The sophomore — a good shooter growing into her 5-foot-8 frame —dreams of becoming the first Division I basketball player to come out of Frazer School, where teenagers often stay put after high school.
She started looking beyond Frazer when she was 12 years old.
“Anywhere but here,” Mya said. “Anywhere but here.”
She already saw older kids trying drugs, drinking, starting families in high school, not even considering college as a possibility. She wanted more. She scored 50 points against Dodson as an eighth-grader, and her name spread. The University of Montana soon sent a recruiting letter, Montana State showed interest, too, and doubt and jealousy followed. Mya, slender and soft-spoken, set a goal of playing for Gonzaga in Spokane, Wash. But many Frazer natives describe the reservation as having the characteristics of a crab bucket, where people want to drag down whoever is closest to the top.
Frazer, Mont.
The reservation is home to the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine tribes. Frazer is home to about 400 people and no stoplights and is marked by two water towers that bear its name. There is a single gas pump that hasn’t offered oil for two years. There is a post office, a box-shaped general store, the Beer Mug for carryout and sit-down drinks, a three-room preschool and a high school that has 37 students this year. The nearest groceries are 19 miles away in Wolf Point. The nearest firetruck is 14 miles in the other direction.
“For a lot of kids, basketball is the only thing to do here,” said Sasha Fourstar, Mya’s 40-year-old aunt who played for the Frazer Lady Bearcubs in the 1990s. “When I was growing up, alcoholism was the problem. Now it’s drugs, meth. Basketball can keep you out of the addiction cycle and maybe get you out of here.”
Mya’s parents split up when she was a baby, and Jewel, who was raised by her grandmother, didn’t want Mya bouncing between homes. So Mya moved in when she was 7 years old and has since lived with her grandmother, who takes care of six grandchildren during the week and eight on the weekends. Mya sees her mom from time to time and will visit her dad in nearby Wolf Point on weekends when she doesn’t have games.
Jewel, who is Mya’s primary guardian, has been Frazer’s Head Start preschool teacher for 34 years and has watched the town cycle through addictions that have gripped her family and neighbors. She shields the kids from this as best she can, steering their attention to school work and keeping them inside after night falls. She tells the young ones to be like Mya, with her straight A’s and college plans.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census report, 9.8 percent of Frazer’s population is college educated and 32.8 percent unemployed.
Residents who work are often employed by the school, construction companies or the tribal government.
Barriers to success
As Mya inches further into her sophomore year, there are people who want her to succeed, fail, leave Frazer, stay put, be a leader, a follower, a dominant scorer, a teammate who shares the ball more. But some days, in an era and sport that overexpose successful young athletes, it seems like her biggest worry is not being seen at all.
“It’s really hard for anyone to get off the reservation. You don’t see it happen a lot,” Mya said. “I think about my future a lot more than you could imagine. I think about it all the time.”
For all of basketball’s importance in American Indian culture, reservation stars in the sport don’t often turn into Division I players. Coaches and professors pinpoint low academic standards and a lack of overall exposure as reasons for this, and there are also historic trends of American Indian kids returning home shortly after enrolling in college. Mya is a straight-A student and stresses over each assignment, knowing she will need a near-flawless transcript to attract Division I schools or, should she instead play Division II, qualify for academic scholarships.
The attention on her, compounded by challenges all Frazer teenagers face in trying to move away, leads to constant scrutiny. Sasha remembers one day during Mya’s eighth-grade year, after her niece strung together two high-scoring games over a weekend, in which Mya came up to her in tears. An adult in town told Mya she was a ball hog who thought she was too good for Frazer and, as Sasha recalls, “will just end up like everyone else.”
“It’s really hard for someone to see somebody else succeed,” Sasha said of what Mya faces. “I have heard adults bring her down. It happens a lot. I just think they may get so jealous that their life is so stuck in a rut, so it’s a, ‘If I’m going to be miserable, then you’re going to be miserable, too,’ type of attitude. It’s tough to be in the limelight around here, because then you have a target on your back.”
Mya’s prospects
Mya is Frazer’s second-tallest player and its main ballhandler, tasked with scoring and setting up the offense. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a mid-major college coach who has seen Mya play said she is a Division I talent and thinks Mya could be a spot-up shooter who also plays some point guard at the next level.
Frazer travels at least an hour for most road games, and it’s usually on these long drives when Mya plots her entire future on such a blank canvas: break Frazer’s all-time scoring record, play college basketball at Gonzaga, move somewhere where she can shop without driving hours to reach her favorite stores, earn a degree in sports medicine and come back to coach the Frazer girls’ basketball team when she’s older.
Her plan is written on a painting behind a propped-open closet door in her room at her grandmother’s house.
“Don’t forget where you came from,” the painting reads. “But never lose sight of where you are going.”
