Indigenous Brilliance: A Conversation with 'Creator's Game' Author Allan Downey

Allan Downey played lacrosse and studied history at Mercyhurst. When he graduated in 2007, he felt the pull of these parallel passions — the result of which is one of the most compelling and complete texts ever produced about the sport’s Native American heritage.

An award-winning author, filmmaker and historian, Downey wrote “The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood,” a critically acclaimed book published in 2018.

He spoke with USA Lacrosse Magazine about his research and his lacrosse experiences — and how the sport proved to be a powerful vehicle of self-discovery.

Let’s start with where you’re from and how you grew into what you’re doing today.

I am Dakelh from Nak’azdli Whut’en, in what is now central British Columbia. But I was born and raised in Waterloo, Ontario, just outside Toronto.

I grew up playing lacrosse. When I was 10 years old, a bunch of my buddies were playing hockey during the wintertime and lacrosse in the summertime — box lacrosse. I got introduced to the game through them.

As an Indigenous youth, I gravitated toward this idea of playing an Indigenous sport that solidified and supported my identity. I got to play Junior A for Kitchener-Waterloo and earned a scholarship to Mercyhurst.

My interest in lacrosse came with an interest within the discipline of history. How can I take my two interests and combine those things? I started examining the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities for my master’s degree at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo.

In 2007, when I graduated from Mercyhurst, I was drafted to play professionally in the National Lacrosse League for the now-defunct Arizona Sting. I had a cup of coffee in a couple of NLL training camps and continued to play Senior A box lacrosse in Canada but really shifted my focus to merging my passion for lacrosse as an athlete with my passion for history.

I ended up examining the history of lacrosse in Six Nations of the Grand River for my master's degree and then I turned that into a PhD project for six years. That ultimately became the book, “The Creator's Game,” which is a large survey of the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities across North America.

How connected were you to your Indigenous heritage growing up?

With my mom, who is Dakelh, we were very proud of our heritage and who we were as Dakelh people. But it was complicated. Even though I traveled back to my community during the summer, it was complicated by the fact that I was an urban Indigenous person. That identity of being Dakelh was complicated just by the distance.

Playing this sport solidified and supported my identity as an Indigenous person. It plugged me into Indigenous networks. It plugged me into Indigenous brilliance. I turned that into hosting youth lacrosse camps in my community and in Indigenous communities across North America — sharing my love and passion as an athlete for lacrosse with my love and passion for history and education.

What makes this game special?

What lacrosse has done and continues to do is create a stage for Indigenous youth, men and women to come together to illustrate, demonstrate and create Indigenous brilliance — a stage for them to thrive in a way the world rarely gets to see.

Do you still play?

A little bit. I got a little guy now, a son. I retired when I was 27. I’m 39 now. Once the book came out, I settled down. I still pick up a stick occasionally. I do a lot of Indigenous youth lacrosse camps. Anytime the community asks, I’ll do that work. But I’ve moved onto different projects.

Ironworkers, right?

I have shifted to studying ironworkers, yes. But there is a connection to lacrosse. I got into this project partly because many of the lacrosse players I interviewed from the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories did ironwork. I try to use stories of Indigenous history as a way to bring light to Indigenous nationhood, self-determination and sovereignty. I’ve done that with lacrosse and will continue to do that with future projects, including ironworking.

Do the Dakelh have a version of stickball that aligns with lacrosse?

Not that I’ve seen, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. People underestimate how widespread the game of lacrosse was before colonization and contact with non-Indigenous peoples. We know lacrosse existed in Nova Scotia among the Mi'kmaq all the way south to Florida among the Seminole Nation, west to the Pomo Nation in California, north to the Coast Salish territory in Washington State and British Columbia and all in between. Indigenous communities had variations of the game of lacrosse before contact.

Having graduated in 2007, you would have played in that wild and fluky NCAA championship game — the one against Le Moyne where the errant pass went in the goal for them to win it, right?

[Laughs.] Thanks for bringing that up. I was on the field for that goal. I chose Mercyhurst for a bunch of reasons. It was super close to my house and I was homesick. That was a big one. But also they had a stout Division II program. We ended up in the final four three of my four years there and then in the national championship game in 2007. I was the captain of that team. I played defensive midfield. And yeah, it was a wild game. It ended up 6-5 with a deflection for the winning goal with a couple seconds left. It was an incredible experience to play in front of 20,000 fans at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore.

Did you feel differently playing lacrosse the more you attached yourself to “The Creator’s Game” project?

It certainly shifted the meaning of it in several ways. I came to the understanding that this for Indigenous communities went well beyond sport. Working with Indigenous elders and storytellers to understand how it’s grounded in Indigenous communities, Indigenous brilliance, Indigenous governance, Indigenous languages and Indigenous history ultimately gave me a greater respect and appreciation for it.

At the same time, I admittedly say that I became kind of cynical of the way in which the modern game operates and how it has developed over time. Lacrosse has a very dark history in the sense that it was appropriated and taken from Indigenous communities. It was redefined to help establish the sport in Canada and the U.S. as national identities. And that became so powerful, so pervasive in the minds of Canadians and Americans that they actually introduced the game of lacrosse in residential schools and boarding schools to assimilate Indigenous youth.

And so on one side I have this great appreciation for Indigenous contributions to the game and its meaning, to see how Indigenous athletes, teams and organizers are thriving now. But certainly it’s balanced by this ultimately dark legacy of lacrosse in U.S. and Canadian history.

To hear lacrosse was used in residential schools as an assimilation tool — that seems especially wrong.

Famously, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918 in Carlisle, Pa.) introduced lacrosse to its students. Boarding schools targeted Indigenous youth and Indigenous communities in their attempted elimination of those communities and the identities of Indigenous youth. And they were using lacrosse to do it.

It’s hard to put into words the gravity of how many schools were doing this in Canada, specifically. It was used in almost every province as a tactic to assimilate Indigenous youth in the early 20th century. The legacy of these policies and the legacy of the way in which the game developed still has implications to this day.

But what I love about the story of lacrosse is Indigenous communities never go anywhere. Even though they were banned from lacrosse organizations, pushed out and generally not a part of lacrosse’s development in Canada and the U.S., Indigenous communities were never defined by their ability to play for, with or against non-Indigenous teams. Their ceremonies, their nationhood, their brilliance, their governance, their languages all continued using the game of lacrosse. It’s a powerful, incredible story.

You started working on the book at the precipice of an important decade for Indigenous lacrosse players. There was the 2010 passport dispute precluding the Haudenosaunee Nationals from traveling to the U.K. for the world championship, the rise of the Thompson brothers and now the Olympic movement.

If I can jump in, what doesn’t get a lot of attention is the Haudenosaunee women’s team. They’ve been denied access to the game on multiple occasions. What I see now is Indigenous girls looking up to them and having the seed planted that this is even a possibility because that team exists in the first place. That changed dramatically throughout my time working on the book. Don’t sleep on the Haudenosaunee Nationals women’s team and the impact they’re having in their communities. They represent a generational shift.

In your book, you write about experiencing racism as “the noble savage” and someone non-Indigenous teammates would regard as “their kind of Indian.” Can you touch on that experience and what we can learn from it?

Lacrosse does not develop in isolation of wider racism. Whether it’s boarding schools and residential schools or horrific U.S. and Canadian policies or just the widespread ignorance about Indigenous peoples produced through Western films and the media, lacrosse does not develop in isolation of those things.

Lacrosse has a long and deep-seated history of racism that continues to have implications to this day. There’s no easy checklist of things you can provide non-Indigenous people to say, “This is how you’d be less racist.” It only happens with heavy lifting.

In 2020, there was a complaint filed against the Ontario Lacrosse Association with the Human Rights Commission because of the treatment of Indigenous athletes at lacrosse tournaments. This summer alone, there was another incident where Indigenous teams were being targeted by non-Indigenous coaches who were screaming at 9-year-olds and calling them racist names. Why these things continue to be headlines in 2024 remains problematic.

There’s a lot of work to be done in recognizing how the legacy of racism in lacrosse continues to have real-world implications in the way in which the sport is organized. The cool thing about this story is there are people doing this work. We have brilliant role models, institutions and organizing bodies making the effort.

Who was the most influential person you collaborated with on the book?

I keep going back to the brilliance of Indigenous communities. It wasn’t one individual who was the keyholder to the knowledge of this game. It doesn’t work like that. We have individuals who can talk about lacrosse and Indigenous governance. We have individuals who can talk about lacrosse and Indigenous languages. We can talk about lacrosse and Indigenous history. We can talk about lacrosse and nationhood, self-determination and sovereignty. We can talk to stick makers about the connection between the soil and the game. I was able to work with all these layers of brilliance.

To experience the layers and levels in which this game is so deeply rooted in all aspects of Indigenous life has been the greatest experience of my life. Whatever I was able to do as an athlete, this trumped it all.