Itti’ Kapochcha To’li’—“Little Brother of War”—began with a deeply personal inheritance: the stickball sticks Addison Karl’s grandfather kept in his home in Arizona. Cast in iron to resemble wood and installed along Atlanta’s BeltLine, the sculpture makes a pair of six-foot sticks visible in a public corridor built on Muscogee homelands. Its turquoise patina carries the memory of those family sticks, while the work’s presence in Georgia reconnects the story to the Southeast, where stickball has long been carried among Native Nations as sport, medicine, diplomacy, teaching, and relationship.

The sculpture did not stop at representation. It became an opening for people to return to the practice itself. In collaboration with Atlanta BeltLine and Emory University, Addison helped organize the Southeast Woodlands Stickball Summit, bringing delegations together for play, conversation, public learning, and exchange. In 2022, Native Nations gathered on Muscogee land in Atlanta to play stickball there for the first time in more than two centuries. The lasting power of Itti’ Kapochcha To’li’ is not only that it remembers what was displaced; it helps create the conditions for living culture to be encountered again—through movement, gathering, teaching, and the presence of Native people in public space.