Answer:
Agility, strength, balance, reflexes, hand-eye coordination, accuracy, strategy, intuition, and patience. These are skills Indigenous hunters and fishermen relied on to feed their communities. And those skills were learned at an early age through games and maintained throughout adulthood through play.
Indigenous Peoples, prior to colonization, led full, rich, balanced lives. Their lives were not, as often depicted in history books, an endless round of day-to-day struggle for survival. Generally, there was plenty of time for reinforcing, adapting and growing their cultures and recreational activities such as working on protocols, songs, dances, storytelling, carving, weaving, making drums and rattles, visiting, and playing games. Some cultures, for example on the northwest coast, did this for months and months in potlatches.
Geoclimatic regions influenced the types of games. Games in the Arctic developed the mental and physical strength necessary to survive in a harsh climate with extended periods of darkness. Great physical strength is required to harvest large sea mammals so games involved feats of strength, endurance, balance, focus, reflexes, flexibility, and patience. During the long, dark winter months games kept children busy physically and mentally and kept adults in top physical form.
Traditional Indigenous games taught valuable skills but also combined mental and physical well-being. Run and Scream is a great example. Children would line up, take a big breath, and start running fast while screaming until they ran out of breath. The spot where they had to draw their next breath was marked. With each turn, they tried to better their own distance and pass the marks of others. To an outside observer, it would look like a bunch of kids having fun running and screaming. But, in reality, it was a bunch of kids having fun running while building muscles, increasing the lung capacity necessary for fitness and to hold the long notes in songs, burning off extra energy, and releasing any stress.
Line tag, traditionally a Blackfoot game, involved children holding hands in a line and the person at the front of the line had to tag the person at the end of the line without the line breaking. A simple game that developed hand strength, balance, cooperation, and speed.