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LACROSSE ARTICLES
Lacrosse - Little Brother
of War
With Amanda
Smith Transcript from National
Radio, Australia Broadcast Corporation
5/7/2002
Guests on this program:
Thomas
Vennum - Historian/Author
(Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
- 1994 ISBN: 1-56098-302-7 )
Ed
Burman - Iroquios player
Oren Lyons - Faithkeeper
of the Onondaga, member of Lacrosse Hall of Fame
Doug Fox - former
captain of the Australian lacrosse team
Although it has a French name, LACROSSE is an
American Indian sport. And while its origins became
less and less known as the game was westernised
and formalised, lacrosse is now proudly reasserting
its heritage.
At the Lacrosse World Championships about to
get underway in Perth, a team of indigenous North
American players called the Iroquois Nationals
will compete under their own flag, in unique recognition
of the history and heritage of this sport. According
to chairman and founder of the Iroquois Nationals
Oren Lyons, it’s
a way of reclaiming their game, and asserting
an independent identity.
Amanda Smith:
The Sports Factor this week is all about lacrosse;
it’s a French name, but it’s actually
North America’s oldest sport, invented and
played for centuries, in fact way back into the
mists of time, by American Indians.
THEME
Amanda Smith:
The 2002 Lacrosse World Championship begins this
weekend. It’s being held in Perth, and runs
over ten days, with 16 countries participating.
But the very particular thing about the Lacrosse
World Championship is that one of the teams involved
is made up of indigenous North American players,
and they compete as an entirely separate nation
from the USA and Canada. This team is called the
Iroquois Nationals, and it’s the only indigenous
team that competes as a nation in its own right,
in any international sports event, because lacrosse
is a native American sport.
The game is called Gatciihkwae by the Iroquois.
The French called it lacrosse. For us it was first
a spiritual game, given to us by a game between
the animals and the birds. The ball is the medicine.
It’s always been the medicine, and it is
what determines which side wins or loses. It’s
a game that’s a legacy from our people to
yours.
Amanda Smith:
Now, probably the best way to describe lacrosse,
if you’re not familiar with it, is to say
that it’s a kind of ‘aerial hockey’.
The players run around with a curved stick, with
webbing attached to it, which is used to catch
and throw the ball.
Doug Fox: The
modern game is a field-based team game in its
mainstream form. A rectangular, defined field;
in the men’s game 10 players on the field,
in the women’s game 12; a fast-running game
in which the ball is transferred quickly between
team-mates, by passing the thing from the stick
to a player on your team, catching ball, moving
the ball quickly. Some people would say lacrosse
looks like hockey played in the air, only you’ve
got the full-blown physical contact with it. And
scores are made by getting the ball past the opponent
and into the goal, which is a net, which is positioned
on the field. And this is a bit of a curiosity
because play can go on behind the goal.
Steve: And one of the reasons lacrosse has grown
so dramatically in the States and abroad, is once
you see it, you love it, because it’s got
so many aspects of different sports. There is
some contact, although it’s not as strong
as American football, it’s very fast, it’s
very high scoring, it’s a lot of finesse,
it’s a team game but individuals can shine,
and it’s got something that no other sport
has, the heritage, the native American heritage,
centuries old.
Ed Burman: Ooh,
that was brutal! That’s called the buddy
pass, because the guy who passed that ball to
him, passed it to him without looking at who was
coming up in front of him. So basically, he was
trusting his man to have given him a pass and
he could turn in the open, but when he turned,
the fellow was waiting for him, and knocked him
square down. So, that’s called the buddy
pass.
Amanda Smith:
Some buddy! Well, that’s the modern game
of lacrosse. The American Indian history of the
game has been documented in a book by Thomas
Vennum. So just how old is it?
Thomas Vennum:
We really don’t know. The earliest written
mention of it is in the Jesuit relations, written
by French missionaries in the area occupied by
Huron Indians at that point, sort of south-eastern
Ontario. 1637 I think is the earliest actual use
of that word to describe a game, although it’s
fairly clear that the game was quite ancient even
by that point, and so we have no written records
earlier than that to document it, so I would assume
maybe a couple of centuries before the 17th century
at least, if not longer.
MUSIC
Thomas Vennum:
Now there were a number of Indian stick ball games
that went by different names and played by different
tribes. But I think the real telling criteria
for whether something is lacrosse or not: No.1
the stick that is used to propel the ball has
to have some sort of a net or webbing on it to
convey the ball, or to pick it up, and that there
is usually the cardinal rule that the ball may
not be touched by human hands. And that then cuts
your list down and gets rid of a lot of similar
games, such as field hockey and so on, where sticks
and balls are used. But there are three principal
varieties that I was able to discern. One which
is probably known to most non-Indian people who
play lacrosse, or have an interest in it, is sort
of the Iroquoian variety of lacrosse, which was
being played certainly up and down the St Lawrence
Valley at the time Europeans were settling there,
and it’s kept alive principally by Iroquoian
tribes today.
Amanda Smith:
The Iroquois, also known as the Six Nations, are
a confederacy of six American Indian tribes whose
lands covered what’s now New York State,
Southern Quebec, and Ontario. Chief Oren
Lyons is a faithkeeper of the Onondaga,
one of those tribes, and a member of the Lacrosse
Hall of Fame.
Oren Lyons: Yes,
I think that lacrosse is sort of the fabric of
our peoples. It’s interwoven in our culture
very strongly, it’s in the spiritual side
of things. When we have our series of thanksgivings,
which goes around the lunar clock, lacrosse is
involved, particularly in the large midwinter
ceremony when there is a specific and special
place for it. And we know for instance, that all
players eventually are captains, and we say this
because after you pass on from this world into
the second world, on the very day that you make
that transition, your name will be announced on
the other side as captain for that day’s
game. So all players are captains.
Amanda Smith:
Now of course, this game wasn’t called lacrosse
by native Americans; they had all sorts of different
names for it. So how did it come to be given the
name ‘lacrosse’? Doug
Fox was the captain of the Australian lacrosse
team from 1968 to 1974, and he’s now the
Australian Lacrosse Council’s historian.
Doug Fox: French
in name I think, French, certainly not in origin
but French settlers in Canada watched the game
and likened it to other ball games with a stick,
‘le jeu de la crosse’ and the cross,
or the stick appeared similar to the crosier carried
by a bishop, and they made that connection, and
the games carried the name. So named by the French,
not until recent years played by the French. But
they’re starting to play now.
Amanda Smith:
So to French-Canadian settlers, the curved stick,
with the netting at the end looked like a bishop’s
crosier, the Christian symbol of the shepherd’s
crook. For native Americans, though, the traditional
wooden stick with deer skin netting carries a
different spiritual meaning. The wood symbolises
all the trees of the world, the netting all of
the animals.
For Iroquois player, Ed
Burman, who’s based in San Francisco,
this spiritual value combines with a game that’s
great sport.
Ed Burman: It’s
a game that someone who’s really fast and
quick and very skilled with their stick can more
than over-compensate for someone who weighs 220
lbs and then has a lot of muscle. So it is a game
that you have certain advantage to by being fast,
being quick, being skilled. And you can continue
to improve your understanding, your knowledge
of the game, then you can continue to be reimbursed
by the spiritual value of the game. So it has
a lot to it. As the game has evolved and become
more Westernised, the game has been concentrated
more on strategies than are relevant or prevalent
in other Western games, such as defence, hitting,
this sort of thing. Not to say that there are
reported deaths during games, in there’s
tribes against tribes, and there certainly would
be probably some violence, but as in any other
indigenous sort of confrontational activity, violence
was not the emphasis.
MUSIC
Thomas Vennum:
Well it’s fairly clear that Indian people
considered it more than just a game. There’s
so much ritual surrounding the game, ceremonial
aspects to it. Even today there are tribes in
the United State that play lacrosse, not as a
game so much as a means of honouring the great
spirit. Lacrosse is sometimes played to honour
a famous lacrosse player, now dead, or particularly
it had curing functions, and if someone were sick,
a game would be played on his behalf and the belief
was that by playing the game, the players were
given back to the great spirit who gave them the
game in the first place; they were doing this
to please him, that some sort of efficacy would
lie in the actual performance of the game itself.
Amanda Smith:
But has this ritual and healing element disappeared
from modern lacrosse?
Ed Burman: I don’t
think it’s disappeared. I think it’s
probably disappeared at an obvious level for the
kids right here, and I think they get home and
the mothers see how much they’re bruised,
and their fathers whacked up and cut, then they
probably don’t think that it’s doing
much for their physical nature, but it’s
doing a lot for their spirits, it’s doing
a lot for their spiritual nature and I think that
that’s where it still does a lot for our
people. I mean we’re able to compete on an
international level with powerful countries, and
stand out in the field and throw our whacks. Of
course we don’t usually win the games against
the larger players, but we’re out there playing,
and that’s what’s important, so that
part of our culture is still surviving and it’s
still being kept carried out by the seventh generation
which is the seventh generation from our ancestors,
and we’ll have a seventh generation that
will continue to play the game from our point
of view. So that’s what’s important,
that’s the healing part of the game, and
there are still medicine games as part of the
condolence ceremony which is a mourning period
I guess you would call it in this way, like the
time when you’re recognising someone’s
death.
Amanda Smith:
And what is this medicinal and healing part of
American Indian lacrosse?
Thomas Vennum:
Well there’s still a residue of strong belief
in the medicinal properties or the medical properties,
potency, of the game, in that games are still
played for people who are ailing. Along those
lines, I was interested in reading the history
of Iroquoian tribes, and Handsome Lake who was
the great Seneca prophet, was dying in 1814, I
believe, at Onondaga in upstate New York, and
it was said that the people around him put together
a lacrosse game and brought him out on his bed
so he could see it and the kind of perception
there was that it was something to cheer him up,
and I interpret it that it was a desperate attempt
to save his life.
Amanda Smith:
But there wasn’t only a healing aspect to
this game. Thomas Vennum’s
book is called ‘American Indian Lacrosse
– Little Brother of War’, and ‘Little
Brother of War’ is a translation of one of
the Iroquois names for lacrosse. It’s a pointer
to its other traditional purpose.
Thomas Vennum:
Well the more I began to research this, the more
it was evident to me that particularly with many
of the south-eastern tribes, that the preparations
for getting into a game involved many of the same
rituals with incantations, and taboos and all
sort of prescriptions given to the players, that
were almost identical to the preparations for
the war path, particularly among the Cherokee.
There are some superb manuscripts dating from
the 18th century that describe war parties going
out and in terms of the types of things that they
carried, amulets and so forth, these all found
their way into the ball game as well. And in some
of those tribes the colloquial terms for lacrosse,
or the ball game, stick ball game, means ‘Little
brother of war’, or ‘Little war’
and in some slang expressions, informants were
said that certain teams were going to have a little
warfare or something. So it’s tied into the
language as well.
Amanda Smith:
So does that mean it’s a surrogate for war,
or it is an actual enactment of a battle?
Thomas Vennum:
Well I see it as a surrogate for warfare. There
certainly is evidence enough to suggest that Indian
people, particularly when tribe was against tribe
in territorial disputes, very often settled these
by playing a game rather than actually going to
battle. So that it mattered not whether it was
a large parcel of territory, or whether it might
be just some pond where the beaver were particularly
populous, but they’d be fighting over territories
and would send delegates to arrange for a lacrosse
game to play instead of actually becoming combative.
Amanda Smith:
And sport has often been typified as a substitute
for battle, as in George Orwell’s famous
line, ‘Sport is war minus the shooting’.
But in the case of American Indian lacrosse, winning
or losing this ‘little war’ was beside
the point.
Thomas Vennum:
It didn’t really matter what the score was,
and even today on the Iroquois reservations where
you find perhaps the long house playing against
the mud house, it doesn’t matter how many
people are on each side or what the score is.
The efficacy is in the actual playing of it, going
out there and doing it.
Amanda Smith:
And does anything of this philosophy remain in
the modern game of lacrosse? And how was the game
changed? Iroquois player, Ed
Burman.
Ed Burman: Obviously
the technology of the game has changed quite a
bit from wooden sticks and no equipment to plastic
pads and wooden or aluminium shafts, helmets,
face-guards, shoulder pads, elbow pads, gloves,
and the goalie wearing a chest protector, all
those are this state-of-the-art technology from
year to year that the two major lacrosse manufacturers
keep bringing in to the game. So that’s the
large difference. The other difference I think
is the emphasis on it being a win or lose game,
as opposed to it being just played for either
the medicine of the game or the two tribes coming
together to settle whatever differences they had
by playing it. So it’s more of a competition
in this way in many regards.
MUSIC
Ed Burman: I grew
up playing this game, I didn’t grow up playing
the same game as my grandfather played, or he
didn’t grow up playing the same game that
his grandfather played, and I think that you can’t
fix any sort of game or society in one place in
history. I think it evolves, I just think this
game has evolved. And how much credit we give
for the game all in all, that’s the controversial
part. I mean half these kids playing don’t
know where this game originated. So that’s
problematic, I mean there should hopefully, will
be, a better education on where the game came
from so that they would understand some of the
more philosophical and deeper meanings of the
game besides it being you score more goals, you
win.
Amanda Smith:
Well, in the history of lacrosse, how did the
game transfer from American Indians to European
settlers? Thomas Vennum
says it happened in the 1850s and 1860s, and a
key figure in the appropriation of the game was
a Montreal dentist by the name of George Beers.
Thomas Vennum:
And it was literally taken over wholesale in Montreal,
that’s really where the whites got the sport,
principally from watching Mohawk Indians play
it over the years in nearby reservations; the
three Mohawk reservations are very close to Montreal,
and George Beers is sometimes called the Father
of Lacrosse and wrote the first book on lacrosse
as a young man, even though he was a dentist,
he became I think the Dean of the Dental College
in Canada, certainly the Editor of the first Dental
Journal. But George Beers and his friends, who
were all part of the whole amateur athletic movement
going on in Canada and England and the States
to some degree at that point, they simply took
over what they had seen the Indians playing and
wanted to make some order out of it, so they wrote
a series of rules, certainly the first ones that
had ever been codified and published and put down.
And those really formed the basis for the non-Indian
game to start with.
Amanda Smith:
It’s interesting that modern lacrosse is
seen as I think quite a middle-class sport. I’m
interested in that migration from American Indian
communities into elite white institutions, the
Ivy League colleges in the United States and English
girls’ schools.
Thomas Vennum:
I think it has an awful lot to do with what was
going on in Canada at that time. Whether lacrosse
would have started in the United States I’m
not sure, because that was a period during the
Civil War, and it really didn’t get a foothold
in this country until after the Civil War was
over. But we find that lacrosse was picked up
by gentlemen professionals who formed the Montreal
Amateur Athletic Association, and was simply added
to the list of other activities which were quite
distinctly native in origin, such as sledding
and tobogganing and snow-shoeing, which were listed
as sports, and these were being picked up by the
upper classes in Montreal as sort of elite amateur
things. Now they had a strong feeling that they
were civilising these things. Now I don’t
want to get too far into that, but they really
not only civilised lacrosse, they deliberately
wrote rules into it to prevent Indians from partaking
in it as far as international competition goes,
all the way up until recently.
Amanda Smith:
But how were the indigenous players excluded from
the game they’d invented? Chief Oren
Lyons.
Oren Lyons: Well
that occurred after the game had developed into
a league, in Canada, the Iroquois were fielding
very strong teams, Mohawks in particular, and
at one point somewhere around 1890, the Mohawks
were trying to raise funds for travel and so they
put on an exhibition match and charged entrance
fee to help raise funds and quickly Canada said
That is commercialism, and professionalism, and
therefore you cannot play any more. And I’m
not sure whether that was the total reason for
it, probably one of the other reasons is it just
couldn’t beat the native peoples at this
particular game. But nevertheless, we were more
or less put the side in the international championship
games, but we played inter-nation all the time
amongst ourselves, so if lacrosse were to disappear
in the whole world, the Six Nations would be playing
fiercely yet.
Ed Burman: The
downfall of Iroquois lacrosse around the 1800s
is when we were becoming less a part of the players.
I think that it’s kind of ironic that the
game has probably survived through the league
institutions. The English kept it alive through
very elite women’s organisations playing
women’s lacrosse; the teams that were around
when my grandfather played were Johns Hopkins,
Syracuse University, Harvard, Princeton, all elite
academic institutions in this country that kept
the game alive.
Amanda Smith:
Nevertheless, American Indians have reclaimed
their game. At the Lacrosse World Championships,
which open tonight in Perth, the Iroquois Nationals
are playing under their own flag and anthem, as
they’ve done at World Championships since
1990. The resurgence began in the 1980s, when
it was proposed that an indigenous team be formed
for an exhibition match against Canada. Oren
Lyons was playing an indoor form of lacrosse
at Syracuse University at the time, and he was
largely responsible for the formation of the Iroquois
Nationals.
Oren Lyons: So
I said, Let me ask the boys, so I did, and they
said Well that’ll be interesting, we’ve
been playing box lacrosse, which is the inside
version of lacrosse and very tough, fast, rough
game, and highly skilled. But we hadn’t been
on the field for some time. So they agreed, and
so we fielded a team, took it down and in 1983
the Iroquois Nationals which were sanctioned by
the Grand Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee,
played our first game as an international team
again. And we were roundly defeated by Canada,
as we were with several of the other teams, but
the boys liked the game. They said, Hey, hey,
let’s get back to this and let’s take
our name back.
Amanda Smith:
And the Iroquois Nationals first competed in the
Lacrosse World Championships in 1990, which were
held, as they are being held this year, in Perth.
What has competing at this level as a distinct
nation meant to you?
Oren Lyons: It’s
meant a great deal. The players were inspired,
the nations were inspired. As I said, we had the
sanction of the Confederacy Chiefs, the Grand
Council of Chiefs have sanctioned the Iroquois
Nationals as our national team, and of course
it’s then an inspiration to all the young
people, and everybody’s hopeful that the
boys will perform in good style, and we, for our
part, are the grandfathers of this game. It’s
our invention, it’s old beyond old, and yet
probably to the best of my knowledge, the first
team sport in the world, and I think that says
a lot for a society and for a people, a culture,
to be the first team sport and the idea of playing
as a team. There’s a certain mystique to
lacrosse that isn’t in any other game, and
I think that particular aspect of it is held respectfully
by teams that just have kind of an idea about
it, don’t really understand what it is, but
they do have the utmost respect for that side
of it.
Amanda Smith:
So what has it meant for the sport of lacrosse,
internationally, to have this Iroquois team among
its competing nations? How important has its inclusion
in world championships since 1990 been to lacrosse
in general? Doug Fox,
from the Australian Lacrosse Council.
Doug Fox: I think
very important. What it did for lacrosse, it was
a decision made the International Lacrosse Federation
to allow the American Indian tribal groups if
you like, to play at an international level in
the game that they gave to the world. And that
had great significance. Over the world championships,
it cast a new mantle. It said This game, beyond
having international appeal for the countries
playing it, has an historical significance about
ball games and their place in recreation, substitutes
for warfare, international relations, in a way
that is exactly the same way that the Indians
used the game. I think that many of the native
American people have had great elevation in a
modern world through lacrosse. They get Ivy League
sports scholarships in America because lacrosse
is part of their upbringing and they’re good
at it. I think it was a very significant thing.
Ed Burman: Lacrosse
is an entire community at home, everyone’s
involved. The women are involved in a certain
aspect, the children are involved, I mean everyone
goes to the game, everyone participates at a certain
level. Great lacrosse players in a family means
a lot of prestige for your family. It brings to
you a lot more than financial reward, it brings
you respect from the community, it brings to you
admiration from other large families, so the game
is larger than They won by this many goals sort
of orientation, it has a lot of influence on how
our communities develop.
Amanda Smith:
But in international competition, the three most
successful nations are the USA, Canada, and Australia,
not the Iroquois. Oren
Lyons, the Chairman of Iroquois Nationals
Lacrosse, says it’s a slow process of rebuilding.
Oren Lyons: Our
player pools are quite small compared to the other
player pools of the world. Nevertheless the quality
of our players are very high. And that just comes
from playing the game for so long, and constantly,
you know. We have at any one of our Indian nations,
children starting at the age of four, and from
what we call peanuts on up, you know, each age
level playing their own brand and style. So by
the time that a kid is 16 years old, he’s
had 12 years of experience at competition, and
pretty rough and tumble all the way. So the quality
of their play is quite high, and also I should
say that the cultural side of it is kept as a
very integral part of our whole persona of Iroquois
Nationals.
Amanda Smith:
Do the Iroquois Nationals play with a different
spirit from, say, the US, or Canadian or Australian
lacrosse teams?
Oren Lyons: There’s
no doubt about that, because we have a depth of
understanding of the game. We go much beyond how
other teams relate to the sport. And again, it’s
not really a sport. When we use it in the medicine
side of it, spiritual side of it, it’s much
beyond that.
Amanda Smith:
Has establishing this Iroquois Nationals lacrosse
team been at all controversial? I mean is having
your own national lacrosse team emblematic of
a kind of wider, political, separatist statement?
Oren Lyons: People
put it that way. We’ve never really looked
at it in that context, because we’ve always
been who we are, so we’ve never thought of
ourselves as anything but who we are. But I think,
to answer your question, in the eyes of other
nations and other people, that kind of surprises
them.
Ed Burman: Yes
it has a galvanising effect because it becomes
a way for the Iroquois National team competing
in the world games, travelling abroad, to assert
the sovereignty of the Haudenosaunee and the Iroquois
people, which is a non-confrontational political
statement, asserting one nation’s sovereignty.
And it’s been recognised by other nations,
the passports have been stamped and recognised
by other nations, so the game sort of epitomises
the sovereignty of the Iroquois and the different
nations that make up the Iroquois, and so at that
point the game galvanises, but also becomes larger
than life, it becomes political, in a sense, it
becomes a statement. And as I say without any
kind of confrontation, no tanks on the borders,
no police, no gunfire, it’s just a bunch
of young men playing a game that our great-great-great-great-grandparents
have played from time immemorial, to now.
MUSIC
Amanda Smith:
And the 2002 Lacrosse World Championships begin
tonight in Perth with the traditional opening
ceremony; and competition gets underway tomorrow,
including the Iroquois Nationals.
The Sports Factor is produced by Maria Tickle;
Paul Penton is the technical producer; and I’m
Amanda Smith.
Guests on this program:
Thomas Vennum -
Historian
Ed Burman - Iroquios
player
Oren Lyons - Faithkeeper
of the Onondaga, member of Lacrosse Hall of Fame
Doug Fox - former
captain of the Australian lacrosse team
Musical Items:
Winnebago - Buffalo Feast Song
Composer: Traditional
Copyright: Folkways Record and Services Corp
Publications:
Lacrosse - Little Brother of War
Author: Thomas Vennum
Jr
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution - 1994
ISBN: 1-56098-302-7
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Maria Tickle
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