A sport to honor the spirits

When Europeans first made contact with indigenous North Americans, they observed lacrosse played in many different styles. Among the Huron people in the early seventeenth century in what is now southern Ontario, different clans—Bear, Deer, Hawk, Porcupine, and Wolf—competed against each other, with sometimes sixty men playing all day. Painter George Catlin’s field notes and drawings of the Choctaw playing lacrosse in the 1830s in what is now eastern Oklahoma described hundreds of players on a field half a mile long. Team sports were uncommon in Europe at this time, and certainly there were no sports in which many players advanced a ball across a field with sticks made of wood and rawhide netting.

The foremost scholar of Native American lacrosse is Thomas Vennum Jr., author of American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War (1994) and Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans (2007). Before retiring in 2001, Vennum served as senior ethnomusicologist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, where he worked on a variety of projects—films, recordings, and Folklife Festival programs.

The American Indian program at the 1989 Festival explored how Native peoples are able to sustain their cultural traditions in spite of numerous obstacles. Participants from the Iroquois, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Tuscarora nations not only played lacrosse in a specially designed stadium on the National Mall, they also discussed ways in which lacrosse is linked to tribal identity, spiritual heritage, and cultural sustainability. Another topic of discussion was how plastic and nylon were overtaking wood and rawhide as the traditional materials for lacrosse sticks.

Today’s sticks are typically made from lightweight metals, such as aluminum, scandium, and titanium, but this stick—made of traditional materials by Frank and Owen Benedict from the Akwesasne Mohawk Reserve on the U.S.-Canadian border—reinforces lacrosse’s importance among Native Americans. According to Vennum, lacrosse was always much more than a game. Its primary purpose was “to honor or petition some god or spirit,” which is why the games were usually “timed to coincide with particular changes of season or the position of heavenly bodies.”