Iroquois shedding light on roots of lacrosse

Brett Bucktooth of the Iroquois Nationals is jumped by a Canadian player at the indoor worlds in May. (PAUL DARROW/REUTERS)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - The name came later, courtesy of French missionaries, but Native Americans played lacrosse long before white men planted a flag on this continent. Like other tribes, the Iroquois, who lived throughout upstate New York into Canada, played the game to teach young men about life, compete tribe against tribe, and seek a spiritual connection with their creator. And now that their game has become an international phenomenon and a multi-billion dollar business, the Iroquois want it back.

"When everybody was fighting in the rest of the world, there were nations playing [lacrosse] as teams for the purpose of settling arguments," said Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation of Iroquois. "We are the grandfathers of this game, there's no doubt about it."

Lyons, 77, was once a world-class goaltender for Syracuse. Now, besides serving as an activist for a slew of Native American causes, he is honorary chairman of Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse, which competes as its own country at international tournaments. At the World Indoor Championships in May, they lost in overtime to Canada in the final, the team's best finish. Lyons spent a recent Saturday here - in the center of the old Iroquois territory - with other Iroquois officials to meet with representatives from Nike and Johns Hopkins University. Their aim is to craft a plan that will make sure every child who picks up a lacrosse stick will know the game wasn't born in Northeast prep schools.

"We want to show our ownership of lacrosse to the world," said Dave Bray, once an All-American midfielder at Cornell, now a board member for the Nationals and the main liaison between the Iroquois and Nike. "It's our game, and now we have the voice to tell the world."

The voice is sporting behemoth Nike, which plans to use its resources to turn the Nationals into a brand, selling their black and gold uniforms everywhere from Iroquois reservations to Japan. Nike, as an avenue to enter the lacrosse business, took an interest in the Iroquois as the game's founders, which major manufacturers like Brine and Warrior Lacrosse hadn't tapped into.

"When you learn about lacrosse and you learn about the other brands, the fact that none of them are embedded within the history of the game seems amiss, and it seems like a natural starting point," said Ziba Cranmer, who helped pilot the Iroquois Nationals initiative at Nike, and is a former lacrosse player herself.

In working with Johns Hopkins, the Iroquois are developing a curriculum to teach lacrosse with a native emphasis at camps, clinics, and schools. Combined, it's an opportunity for the Iroquois to spread their history of the game and generate revenue that will provide top-notch lacrosse equipment and health care to their people, through Nike's involvement with Indian Health Services. A preliminary business plan projected $9 million in revenue - from apparel, ticket sales, and sports camp tuition fees - by 2011, an estimate Bray called conservative.

Still, hurdles remain. Iroquois leaders are developing the business as a co-op (like the Green Bay Packers, a franchise owned entirely by community residents). They aren't playing by normal rules. "My community has to understand in how we want to generate revenue and how we want to share revenue," Bray said. "When you do economic development in native communities, it's a different type of economic development." And to the Iroquois, lacrosse is a different type of game.

A special connection

According to Iroquois belief, lacrosse was passed down from the Creator as a form of entertainment and a lesson about good behavior. Lacrosse fables - including one story in which a dirty player is flung headfirst into a tree by the referee, and is stuck there until he learns his lesson - abound in oral histories. Early descriptions of lacrosse from colonial writers report a variety of styles of lacrosse played throughout the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. Some games had hundreds to a side and occasionally turned violent.

Yet lacrosse traditionally has been known as "the medicine game," as the Iroquois - the blanket term for five tribes that formed a peaceful confederacy before European contact, later adding a sixth - believe it has a healing effect on communities. Special medicine games are organized on occasion, in which men of all ages participate, and are believed to enhance the power of medicines to heal the community. "There is something a little different about lacrosse than football, basketball, or any other thing," Lyons said. "The spirit that is there."

But that spirit is largely absent from the modern game. The first problem is the stick. Boys play with wooden lacrosse sticks now about as often as they shoot hoops with peach baskets. But to the Iroquois, the wooden stick represents a connection with the earth that modern plastic sticks - "Tupperware," as Lyons calls them - do not have. Some Nationals players still play with wooden sticks, though they are on the verge of being banned by the International Lacrosse Federation.

Still, the Nationals' way of playing the game has had an unquestioned influence on lacrosse at the international level. Lyons helped organize the first exhibitions for the Nationals in 1983, including one against his alma mater, Syracuse. "We got killed," Lyons said. "But the guys liked it."

Before long the Iroquois were competing against the US, Canada, Australia, and England, then the four members of the ILF. The Iroquois initially encountered resistance when attempting to become the fifth. "They told us, 'You're not a nation,' " Lyons said. "We said, 'We were a nation long before you were.' " In 1990 the Iroquois were admitted to the ILF, which now boasts 22 nations. They have been instructing opponents about the history and spirit of the game ever since. "There's a certain reverence for the Indian side of it," Lyons said. "They know a little bit vaguely about it, but they want to know more and they are very respectful every time."

Positive reactions

At the 1998 World Outdoor Championship, Iroquois spiritual elder Leon Shenandoah conducted a tobacco burning ceremony on the field before the first game. As the other nations lined up to watch, Shenandoah, speaking in the language of the Iroquois, welcomed the other teams and gave thanks for life's blessings as he dropped tobacco leaves into a small fire, the smoke billowing skyward, lifting the message to the Creator. Since then, the ceremony has become a fixture at every international tournament, and the reaction from the other teams has been overwhelmingly positive.

"They feel like they're more connected to the game now that that know the history," said Gewas Schindler, who has played with the Nationals' men's team since 1994, and is Shenandoah's grandson. "And they were honored to be a part of that blessing and ceremony."

But the meeting in Syracuse exposed internal debate about such ceremonies. In developing a curriculum to teach the world about Iroquois lacrosse, its leaders deliberated where to draw the line on how much of their sacred rituals should be shared.

"I knew going into that discussion that it was coming," Bray said of a topic that brought spirited debate, though never turned contentious. "It's something that we have to address because some stuff is sacred. It's a ritual. The outside community is not going to fully understand some of that stuff."

The issue will be further tackled by a committee of Iroquois elders and spiritual leaders intent on protecting the spirit of the community.

"Indian ceremonies have been usurped and have been stolen. They've been misused," said Lyons, who will have a large influence on what is ultimately shared. "So we protect that part of it, but I think a good deal of it is available."

Lyons said the specific instructions to players in the tobacco burning ceremony will remain internal knowledge, as well as the details of the medicine game. Yet the curriculum's importance lies in spreading the values behind lacrosse. It's not the words that are vital so much as their message.

"This game is important," Bray said. "We look at sport differently, obviously. So how can we share that with other people to understand how we view the sport?"

Home front a key

An important component of that education comes on the home front, making sure all Iroquois children grow up knowing about the history and spirituality of the game. Jim Barnes, a former player on the Nationals' Under-19 team, had little connection with that tradition when growing up on an Iroquois reservation.

"It was just a fun game to play," said Barnes, who now coaches a high school lacrosse team that draws many players from a reservation on the Canadian border. "At the beginning, growing up, you just pick up a stick and you play."

Lyons hopes to counter that trend in this generation. "They don't have to be like Jim," Lyons said. "They should be learning."

In addition to a spiritual connection, the game also serves as a pathway to college, out of reservations where drugs, alcohol, and poverty are recurring problems.

"Our young players are affected by Nike, them sponsoring our team, and they're going to strive to get their grades up," said Schindler, who coaches the U-16 Iroquois team and will play for the Boston Blazers - an indoor expansion team in the National Lacrosse League that will debut in January. "It's a very bright future for our youngsters."

Through teaching and marketing their version of lacrosse, the Iroquois hope to make a brighter future for their game and their people. They hope players like Brett Bucktooth, a star midfielder for the Nationals and the Boston Cannons of Major League Lacrosse, can become role models to spread the message of how lacrosse should be played.

"You play the game with passion and intensity, and also with a good mind," Bucktooth said. "You play with good intentions to play hard and fierce, and to play fairly and cleanly."

Just the way its creators intended.