Toss toys date back to Ancient Greece. An all time favorite, Cup & Ball, was played with in Colonial America and is much easier than the similar Bilboquet, which has the ball landing on a pointed stick instead of inside a cup. Other “ring and pin” games have been found to exist in Native American cultures as well as in many other places of our world.
The Little Fish Toss Toy is an Inuit (Indigenous people of the Arctic) inspired Ring and Pin Game. Practicing with these types of toys helped young people to acquire skills like a sharp, observant eye and quick, precise wrist action necessary for hunting and fishing.
The object of the game is to toss a tethered object into the air and catch it on a stick or pin to which it is attached.
In Canada, this type of game is referred to a “Iyaga” and could be made of a a small cylindrical bone that is used as the pin and a larger hollowed out section of a bone as the tethered object to catch.
In the game of Pommawonga (which means to spear the fish), the player has to catch many rings on a stick before catching a final tethered object.
Practice swinging the tethered fish in the air and catching it on the stick. One might even imagine a competition where score is kept on how many fish are caught by each player.
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