This article, as told to Matt Hamilton, appears in the April edition of US Lacrosse Magazine, which includes a special 10-page section featuring faces and voices of the Native American lacrosse community. Don’t get the mag? Join US Lacrosse today to start your subscription.

I lived up at the Seneca Indian Reservation. I’m actually Oneida, but I lived with the Senecas in the Wolf Clan. In our society and in our culture, lacrosse is a mainstay. Over the years, it went from a game that was given to us by the Creator and then eventually played for his amusement.

Just down the street from my house is our lacrosse box. From a young age, you’re given a lacrosse stick and you carry it around all the time. When my son was born, I gave him a cradle stick. When he was old enough to run around outside, I gave him a real wooden stick.

I’d given my son a cradle stick and it’s a distinction saying that that’s his game. It’s going to be his way of life. When he gets older and he gets his own stick, he’ll learn the pride and the history and the background and the culture of what it means to be a Haudenosaunee. It’s an honorable thing to receive a stick from someone.

You don’t just leave the stick laying around. That stick is made of wood or made of some element that carries some type of energy or life within it. You don’t throw it in the trunk of the car or anything. You bring it in, hang it up and keep it oiled and make sure it’s well taken care of. It’s a sacred instrument of a game that we still play today.

It just makes you feel good playing for the Creator, but you’re also playing with a good heart. You hope that everyone else is doing the same. The public at large is not educated on our customs and beliefs and the origins of the historic game. We begin to become unified nations through lacrosse.

Those rituals and spirituality have never left the game, which is prominent when you see the Thompson Brothers playing. They continue to wear their hair long because of the honorable traditions of long ago. When somebody sees that and they mock and disrespect it, they not only disrespect the individuals, but they’re also looking at the countless faces of the indigenous people.

When we used to go up to Canada to play, a lot of the non-Indigenous teams that we would play against would, when you’re in play, will say derogatory statements toward you — about whether our hair was long or the color of our skin or just who we were. There were a lot of different things they would say to us.


It’s not just the players. I coached from 1993-2009 and I’ve played in Canada and the U.S. On our way to provincials, a lot of even the coaches would say derogatory stuff — not only to our kids but to our parents in the audience. You get that a lot. It’s just from ignorance and not understanding.

We can get out and educate this lacrosse world of the origins of the game. Even when the guys went to Australia [for the 2002 FIL World Championship], they were mocking some of them because they were doing a small ritual outside the arena. They don’t understand that the game stems from the indigenous people. They are only following their own traditions.

Even when they give out the Tewaaraton Award. When the Thompson brothers both received the award, they went up there with their traditional regalia on. Some of the people in the back were mocking what they were wearing. That’s our identity and that’s who we are. We need to have a better understanding of these things.