Men's Leisure Activities In late summer, there aren't many men in the village. While the weather is good, most of our men are off fishing, hunting, or perhaps travelling some distance to get raw materials like soapstone or high-quality flint. The men who remain behind are just taking it easy. One popular activity is smoking tobacco, which is valued for social, ritual, healing, and spiritual uses.  Each man has his own pouch of dried and crumbled tobacco leaves, worn either at the waist or around the neck. Some are made of mink, but more often they are made of squirrel.  As for tobacco pipes, they are made either of clay or steatite, a soft stone also called soapstone. The men in this scene have just played a game of chance called hubbub; you can see the gaming pieces in the bowl on the ground. As you can see from his smile, the man on the left (above) has won.  He'll take home the wagers that lie at his feet; the beaver skin, necklace of shell beads, and two hair combs.  The game of hubbub is relatively simple to play. There are five gaming pieces in the bowl on the ground, each painted black on one side and white on the other. One man tosses the pieces into the bowl and then receives a score. He gets two points if all five pieces turn up the same color, and one point if he gets four of a kind. Otherwise, he loses his turn to the next man.  The score is kept with gaming sticks like the one you see behind the ear of the man in the image above (at left). One stick is given for each point, and the game ends when one man holds all the sticks. Our men like to play this game for hours. Sometimes you can hear them some distance away when they get excited and shout, "Hub! Hub! Hub!" which gives the game it's name. Behind the Scenes with Museum Educator Trudie Lamb Richmond European colonists looked at Native gaming and what they saw was gambling, and that was a game of the devil, so they believed it was wrong. But it just wasn't understood. Gaming was for fun and entertainment, but gaming was also often part of ceremonies. Hubbub, for example, with it's two-sided gaming pieces, black and white. That represents a balance; not really of good and evil, but of negative and positive, and that's what life is, in a sense, is that gamble. It's a balance. Gaming is also about giving and taking. What colonists saw was that Native people were losing their beautiful possessions; their moccasins, sometimes literally the shirts off their backs, and they thought that was terrible. But what losing is teaching you is about not being so close to these material things that you can't give them up. If you win, well, that's great. If you lose, that's meant to be. In fact, you were supposed to bring things that you wouldn't like to lose, because giving was so important. Sharing was so important. This was just one example of the cultural differences between Native and European people.