Someone asked on Facebook what the origin story is for the game of dingball.
“This is what I was taught…”
Dingball actually has a rather embarassing backstory for the Mohawk nation. It started as a women’s game.
Long ago, a Wyandot woman fell in love with a Mohawk man but they lived in villages far, far apart. They had to walk for an entire day just to see one another. But the Mohawk man would make the journey, for he was in love.
One day the Wyandot woman decided she would travel to the Mohawk village to surprise her man. So she got up real early, ground some roasted dry corn and boiled her man a fresh cornbread loaf with berries in it. She was so excited to see her love but when she got to the village, lo and behold she found her Mohawk man messing around with some [expletive] from another village.
“You [expletive]! Get away from my man!!!” she shouted. She was hollering real loud and all the Mohawks came out of their long houses just to see what in the heck was going on.
“What in the heck is going on?” they asked.
“That guy got caught cheating on her with some [expletive] from another village,” they answered.
The Wyandot girl wound up and hit that [expletive] right in the face with the fresh cornbread she made for her man.
Everybody in the village was just staring at them going, “Mmm…cornbread.”
The Mohawk man then became very afraid and embarrassed so he began to run away, for he knew he too was about due for a whoopin.
But the Wyandot girl was fast, for she was a long back and had no bum fat to slow her down.
She caught up to her Mohawk man as he was running away, and grabbed him by the fringe of his breech cloth.
She pantsed him in front of everyone. The whole village started to laugh as the Wyandot girl grabbed her Mohawk man by his scrotum with both hands and began to pull, stretching him in two directions so his skin was real thin and shouting, “I made cornbread for you!!!”
Then she took that cornbread and threw it real hard into the bush and it perfectly hit a tree.
Everybody in the village was laughing. For weeks people were talking about it. All the women in the village were saying she should have thrown his balls against the tree.
The Mohawk man never lived it down. And the women of the village wanted to make sure their man wouldn’t cheat. So one of those Mohawk women sewed two balls with a piece of stretched out deer hide joining the two as an emblem or reminder to her man that if he ever cheated she would yank off his nuts and throw them against a tree just like that Wyandot girl threw her cornbread.
They would start to hold gatherings where all the men of the village had to watch as the women would toss that “dingball” back and forth to one another and every so often whip it against a tree as a reminder to their men that if they ever cheated, they would be punished.