Next Wednesday, the 13th of December, the Lakota Nation Invitational basketball tournament kicks off for the 19th time. I was an assistant basketball coach for Little Wound High School during the 2000-2001 season and experienced the LNI from courtside. It's one of the great sporting events that exists, a single elimination basketball tournament during the Christmas season that gathers all of the Lakota high schools in the state of South Dakota to the Rapid City Civic Center to do battle for the honor and pride of their home communities. It's something between the NCAA tournament and an old tribal summer gathering, when the kids used to compete at riding, shooting, getting girls...

Writing about Lekshi John the other day reminded me that LNI is just around the corner. I remember begging my friend Ezra, who worked for HBO at the time, to come out and do a story on the tournament. It never happened, but the story is still out there, it's there every year. How do I explain the energy around LNI?

The first thing to realize is when you grow up on the Rez, there's never really anything to do. You live way out in the country and there are no theaters, no malls, literally nowhere to go to hang out in public except the grocery store. Add to that the Lakota are generally pretty reserved people in public, not hyper social, and you grow up with a bunch of cousins and brothers and sisters who usually form your inner circle of friends. You don't really get to be around strangers socially the way you do if you grow up in the city. The second thing to realize is that everyone, girls and boys, plays basketball all year long, outside in the summer and inside in the winter. Basketball is as big on the Rez as it is in Southern Indiana, and in the same way. Everybody in town always knows the entire high school varsity line-up and if the team, or a player, is really good, then they are like local celebrities. Combine the two elements, a socially sanctioned cure for boredom and basketball fever and you've got the makings for a good event.

But there's more to LNI than that. There is a real mythological consciousness on the Rez, that's sad as hell by the way, that life gets worse after you graduate high school. Those are supposed to be your best years, your immortal years, the years when you really are like everyone else in America. After that you drop-out of college, have kids, and start scraping by. Tragedies come one by one, like enemies in the night, you start drinking, lose your shape, and before you know it you're old at forty. The community worships its high school kids, they are the hope of a new generation, and their hope is nurtured manically by the older people. The young people are aware of the dynamic and preserve a kind of suspension of disbelief, a double-consciousness. On the one hand they know what's coming after high school and they also know that they're lives aren't that great in high school, on the other hand they take on the mantle of being the beautiful ones in their community. They strut like peacocks. The male basketball players strut the most. They look good, feel good, and play good, and they don't have a care in the whole world. LNI is there chance at immortality. At least for a year. They can have all the natives all over the state talking about them.

The last thing to know about LNI is that it is a tribal gathering. Natives from all over the state converge on Rapid City for a weekend, filling up the hotels, streets, malls, restaurants. South Dakota is an empty state and many of these people are relatives who are separated during the year by hundreds of miles of state highways. This is the time everyone gets together, old and young. If you wake up early and go to a diner, you are likely to see the elders from different Rez's gathered in a booth talking shop. Late at night you will see the young people hollering at each other from hotel balconies. For one weekend, Rapid City, the heart of the Black Hills, belongs to the Lakota again.