Counting sticks (or pointing sticks) are used to keep score in hand games, the earliest of American Indian gaming traditions. Players or teams take turns guessing at which hand holds a hidden object, and counting sticks are used to keep track of the number of right and wrong guesses.

Counting sticks are always kept and handled with great respect and reverence. They originated as invitational sticks for the Cheyenne Medicine lodge, and their association with the ceremony gave them sacred or blessed powers.

A Cheyenne woman named Elk Woman once said the hand-game tent opens toward the east, and the “magpie people” sit at the left of the entrance and the “crow people” at the right. The teams are identified by crow or magpie feathers on counting sticks. The red sticks represent day and the black represent night. Some hand games are played from sunset to sunrise.

Several families throughout Cheyenne and Arapaho communities still keep hand-game sticks that have been handed down from generation to generation. Today, the Cheyenne invite the Crows from Montana to an annual hand-game tournament in western Oklahoma. It is one of the largest hand-game tournaments held in the United States.

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