The Ball

by John Fox

  For the Iroquois, Creek, Cherokee, and other tribes, lacrosse was a surrogate for war—“little brother of war” as some Indians called it—and shared much of the same symbolism. Lacrosse sticks and even players’ bodies were sometimes painted with red war paint before important games. In a Creek legend uncovered by historian Thomas Vennum, a father hands his son a war club and sends him into battle, saying, “Now you must play a ball game with your two elder brothers.” Ball games not only served as an important proving ground for young warriors training for battle, but, as lacrosse historian Donald Fisher points out, also provided a diplomatic means of building alliances and avoiding war with neighbors. Ceremonial games brought tribes together to mend political bonds and settle disputes, shoring up tribal confederacies that might otherwise have fallen apart over time. In this way, the Iroquois Confederacy used lacrosse to help establish itself as a dominant military power in the eastern United States and Canada in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

  Ball play of the Choctaw—Ball Up, 1846–50, George Catlin.

  In 1763, a group of Ojibwe and Sauk Indians staged a game for the British troops at Fort Michilimackinac in what is now the state of Michigan and succeeded in merging the sport almost seamlessly with war. With the defeat of the French in 1761, the outpost and trading depot had been handed over to the English, whose poor treatment of the Indians provoked the movement known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. In honor of the king’s birthday, the Indians offered to entertain the English with a game just outside the walls of the fort. The English were kicking back and enjoying the “savage” game, different as it was from their football or tennis, when one of the players fired the ball through the gates of the fort. The warriors rushed into the fort after the ball, traded their lacrosse sticks for weapons that their women had hidden under blankets, and proceeded to massacre the British troops inside. They seized the fort and held it for a year, using their position to extract demands from their new overseers.

  As bad as English occupation was for the Iroquois and other eastern Indians, the American Revolution proved to be even worse. The Americans, intent on controlling and expanding their young republic, drove many Iroquois off their lands and into Canada, dividing the Confederacy and initiating a long period of rapid cultural decline. But lacrosse, stripped of some of its religious meaning and importance, hung on and gathered new fans among Canadians and Americans alike. In the years following the revolution, games of lacrosse were recorded in Ontario, played between relocated Mohawk and Seneca groups in an effort to build new alliances. In the 1830s, George Catlin exhibited his romanticized paintings of the “vanishing” Indian, which included depictions of Choctaw Indians playing lacrosse in Oklahoma. In 1844, the first game recorded between Indians and whites took place in Montreal. And just 25 years later, a mere century after the massacre at Michilimackinac, it had been reinvented as the national game of Canada.

  Onondaga is the place, I was told. I’d called tribal representatives and the heads of lacrosse programs at several of the other Iroquois nations. If I wanted to learn about the roots of lacrosse, they all told me, the Onondaga Nation is the place to go. “Lacrosse is practically a religion up there,” according to one Oneida Indian I spoke with.

  Located just seven miles south of the Carrier Dome, home to the Syracuse Orange, 10-time NCAA Division One champions, Onondaga is a kind of spiritual center and pilgrimage site for anyone looking to worship at the altar of lacrosse. With a population of just 2,000 or so people, the nation has over the years contributed five players to the Canadian Hall of Fame and one to the U.S. Hall of Fame and has fielded more All-Americans per capita than any other community in North America.

  For a month or so I’d traded phone calls and emails with Freeman Bucktooth, coach of the Onondaga Redhawks, the nation’s team that competes in the Canadian-American box lacrosse association. Freeman played for Syracuse and was captain and lead scorer for the Redhawks for more than a decade. He’s also raised and trained four lacrosse-playing sons, including two-time Syracuse All-American Brett Bucktooth. When we spoke, he was gearing up for a trip to Manchester, England, to assistant coach the Iroquois Nationals at the World Lacrosse Championships. The Nationals, an all-Iroquois field lacrosse team that includes seven Onondaga players, was ranked fourth in the world. This, said Freeman, was their year to challenge the U.S. and Canadian national teams for the world title. I wished him luck and told him I’d help him celebrate in a few weeks once they’d returned to Onondaga.

  A week later, seated in an airport lounge, I looked up at the TV and there was Freeman being interviewed on CNN. The caption scrolled across the set, “We’re lacrosse players, not terrorists.” The team had been prevented from boarding a plane at JFK bound for England because their Iroquois League–issued passports did not meet post-9/11 security and technology requirements. They’d been traveling on these passports without trouble since 1977. Times had changed.

  I shot an email to Freeman to show support. The response came back within minutes: “Thanks. It’s not looking good.”

  In the days that followed, the team made international headlines as they holed up in a Comfort Inn and played scrimmages with local New York City teams. Federation officials met behind closed doors with U.S. immigration officers. Film director James Cameron offered to donate $50,000 to help pay for extra travel expenses. Opposing teams already competing in Manchester expressed disappointment and outrage. “We’re playing their game,” commented the American coach of Team Germany in an interview. “And our politics denied them the ability to participate in their game. Just terrible.”

  At the 11th hour, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened to give the team a one-time travel waiver. But the British government refused entry. They missed the tournament and the United States went home with the gold.

  If you get distracted driving south on I-81 out of Syracuse, you can easily miss the exit for the 11-square-mile patch of land that constitutes the Onondaga Nation. One green-and-white exit sign hardly seems to do justice to an entire sovereign nation, but that’s what’s left after 200-plus years of failed or broken treaties and what the Onondaga describe as a history of “illegal takings” of land by New York State. Small as it is, however, the Onondaga Nation remains sovereign, independent, and proud. The “People of the Hills,” as their name translates, pay no state or federal income taxes, receive no subsidies or oversight from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, and recognize traditional Iroquois law, which predates and some say influenced the U.S. Constitution. One of the Six Nations along with the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora that make up the Iroquois League, the Onondaga are considered the “Keepers of the Fire” and the traditional center of the League.

  When I made the long drive to Onondaga, Aidan had just begun playing lacrosse for the first time. To me, it was still a foreign game and I was hungry to learn more about it. No one I grew up with ever played it, and only my friends who went to prep schools and elite northeastern colleges had any connection to the game. But watching Aidan and his team play was riveting and made me realize what I’d been missing out on. The tribal roots of the game were unmistakable as sticks clashed, helmets connected, and kids piled up in heaps on the ground: this was a warrior’s game.

  Just off the exit, the Onondaga lacrosse stadium looms large, by far the biggest structure on the nation. I slowed down in an attempt to scan the mouthful of a name that emblazons half the width of the building: TSHA’HON’NONYEN’DAKHWA’. It means “where they play games” in the Onondagan language. Literal, but fitting, I thought, for the site where they play the game they call deyhontsigwa’ehs, “they bump hips.” No ambiguity there, though I’ve watched enough lacrosse to know there’s a lot more than hips getting bumped. The $7 million, 2,000-seat stadium, built in 2001, is decorated in purple with two wampum belts: one represents the five original Iroquois nations, the other their peaceful coexistence with the non-Indian society around them. As I got up to the stadium, I found myself st
uck in a traffic jam. Was there an afternoon game, I wondered?

  The cars, it turned out, were filled with smokers dismally lined up to get their nicotine fix tax-free at the nation’s smoke shop—a necessary economic evil, perhaps, for a nation that has rejected casinos and gambling as sources of revenue. The stadium, on the other hand, is a symbol of unmistakable pride, part cultural center and part shrine to the Creator’s game (as they call lacrosse). Glass cases are lined with trophies, mementos, and photos dating back to the 1890s of Onondaga Athletic Club players grasping old-style wooden sticks and sporting striped jerseys with distinctive Os on their chests. Lacrosse moms were picking up their kids from practice, checking gear bags to be sure all the equipment they had come with was going home with them.

  Freeman was sitting patiently at a table in the arena’s Fast Break Café working on his roster for upcoming games. He’s widely known as “Boss,” a nickname he got pegged with as a kid because he was big for his age and had a reputation for throwing his weight around. He’s still a big guy, with shoulder-length black hair and a hoop earring. As he smiled and said hello in a gentle voice that didn’t seem to match his frame, all I could think was how devastating his hip check must have been back in the day.

  Onondaga lacrosse team, ca. 1902

  He went to the counter, ordered a couple of sandwiches for us and then sat down. I told him again how sorry I was that his team had missed out on the World Championships. “How are your guys taking it now that they’re back?” I asked.

  “I’ve been really impressed by how well they handled it all along, even some of the younger guys,” he answered without pause. “They worked hard for that chance. But you know what? We’re stronger as a team because of it.”

  His proudest moment, he recalled, was when a CNN reporter asked for a show of hands of players who would be willing to travel on U.S. passports to England in order to make the game. “Not one hand was raised. No one even flinched or looked around. Why would we travel on another nation’s passport? Not just any nation, but the one we were planning to face in the finals?!”

  After lunch and a quick tour of the stadium, we jumped in Freeman’s car and headed toward his house. A mile down the road we passed a kid walking along with a lacrosse stick in hand, practicing his cradling. “See that?” he laughed. “Everyone plays lacrosse here. When a boy’s born, he has a stick put in his crib. When he dies as an old man, his favorite stick gets buried with him. It’s the circle of life.”

  “What if you don’t like lacrosse?” I asked, half kidding.

  He looked at me as if there might be something seriously wrong with me. “Mostly you learn to like it. But hey, we got kids who play basketball and do pretty well. Baseball too. We invented that too you know.”

  “Baseball?” I responded skeptically.

  “Yeah, we call it longball but it’s pretty much the same game. Only we were playing it long before the whites came along.”

  Farther down the road he spotted a guy on a building site scraping and cleaning up a 40-foot iron girder. He pulled up and the man leaned into the car. “Hey, Boss, what’s up?”

  “That for the new place?” Freeman inquired. The two began to discuss the plans for the home he was helping his son build. Freeman offered some muscle and equipment to help haul free timbers that he’d heard were available. One of the downsides—or not, given the recent national epidemic of foreclosures—of being a sovereign nation is that banks won’t underwrite mortgages for homeowners, because if they don’t pay, the bank can’t come onto the nation to seize their property. As a result, people chip in to help each other build their own homes.

  “You be sure to give those Braves a beating tonight!” the man called as we drove off.

  The Braves were the Tonawanda Braves, a Seneca Indian team from near Buffalo that was coming down to play Onondaga in a three-game playoff series.

  Freeman took me up to his home, a stately log cabin built on a couple of hundred acres of hillside forest. “No spikes, no nails,” he pointed out, proudly running his hands along the huge timbers. “The guys on my team and my own boys helped cut them down and drag them here.” He chuckled and cupped his hand over his mouth like he was sharing a secret, “I just told them it was part of preseason training!”

  No one, Indian or white, has ever gotten rich from lacrosse. But when the sport first spread beyond the reservation, there was money to be made with traveling Indian shows. In 1878, a group of Mohawk and Onondaga Indians—faces streaked with war paint for full effect—arrived in New York City with a brass band in a four-horse wagon covered with advertisements for a lacrosse tournament to be held in what would later become Madison Square Garden. Custer had made his last stand just two years earlier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was just getting going, and elites in eastern cities were enthralled with the romantic image of the “vanishing” Indian.

  Accompanying the Indians was promoter and Montreal-born dentist William George Beers, the man often called “the father of modern lacrosse.” As a young member of the Montreal Lacrosse Club, which provided opportunities for middle-class residents to play games with nearby Mohawks, Beers became passionate about the game and determined to expand its popularity. At the age of 17, while working as a dental apprentice, Beers published the first pamphlet of rules, defining the length of sticks, field of play, size of goals, and so on. He was determined to bring “science” to the game and tame its more primitive elements. Though he admired the Indians’ athletic prowess, he argued that “the fact that they may beat the pale-face, is more a proof of their superior physical nature, than any evidence of their superior science.” Shorter fields, as historian Donald Fisher has put it, helped advance a game “in which ‘civilized’ team play and finesse replaced ‘savage’ mass play and brute force.”

  Ironically, just as Beers and other early supporters brought lacrosse to the forefront and saved it from obscurity or worse, they also systematically excluded Indians from participating in the revival. Take this excerpt from Beers’s first full set of rules published in 1869, which were adopted widely as the holy scripture of organized lacrosse for years to come:

  Sec. 5.—Either side may claim at least five minutes’ rest, and not more than ten, between games.

  Sec. 6.—No Indian must play in a match for a white club, unless previously agreed upon.

  Sec. 7—After each game, the players must change sides.

  There, nestled innocuously between other how-tos, was one of many rules—some written, some just understood—that would be used to effectively bar Indians from competing internationally for decades. Indians were barred from play, at first, because they were better and stronger players than their white counterparts. When white teams played Indian teams the Indians would field fewer players to allow for an even match. Indian “ringers” would be hired and paid to play on amateur teams filled with middle-class whites, who regarded the game as recreation. This gave Indians from poor reservations a source of income but led them to be labeled “professionals” and therefore barred from all national and international amateur competitions.

  A nationalist with a grand vision, Beers began to spread the gospel of lacrosse as the new national game of Canada. By invigorating Canadians with his newly conceived sport that “employs the greatest combination of physical and mental activity white men can sustain in recreation,” lacrosse could forge a unique national character and identity distinct from England and the United States. In Beers’s view, the noble “sons of the forest,” as he often referred to the Indians, would be remembered through lacrosse “long after their sun sinks in the west to rise no more.”

  “We don’t give up easily,” said Freeman’s brother, Chief Shannon Booth. He had just returned from a meeting of the Grand Council, the traditional 50-seat governing body of the Iroquois League, which had been called to address the recent passport issues. “We felt the pain of 9/11. We understand and respect security needs as much as anyone,” complained Shannon. “But security doesn’t t
rump sovereignty.”

  If I had even a vague stereotype in mind of what a modern Iroquois chief would look like, Shannon quickly shattered it. A boyish 35-year-old with a wispy mustache, faded trucker cap, T-shirt, and sneakers, Shannon is a chief of the Eel Clan, one of 14 chiefs representing the Onondaga in the Grand Council. Naively, I asked him how someone as young as he managed to get elected.

  “No such thing as elections in our government,” he responded. “You can’t campaign your way into this job. The clan mothers watch all of us closely as kids, and when a chief dies and it’s time to appoint a new one, they get together and decide who has the right qualities. You’re chosen to play your part.”

  The topic shifted back to lacrosse as we pulled up to “the box,” the outdoor rink that has been the heart of the game on the reservation for decades. A group of teens was applying a fresh coat of paint to the poke-checked and weather-beaten boards. “Be sure to paint the Visitors bench pink!” called out Shannon, laughing. On the other end of the patchy grass-and-dirt rink, three boys took turns practicing their 2-on-1 offense in the crease.

  Box lacrosse is a faster, rougher, and, as most Iroquois will tell you, just plain better version of the game. Popular in Canada, and typically played on a cement surface in a defrosted hockey rink, “box” is a six-person game that lacks the verdant setting, loping grace, and exciting breakaways of field lacrosse but makes up for it with bullet-fast action, tight stick work, hot dog moves, and a 30-second-shot clock that keeps the pace frenetic. It’s been called the fastest game played on two feet, though its field-loving detractors call it a degraded, “hack-and-whack” version of the sport.