How one Six Nations kid is reclaiming lacrosse
Power, prowess & politics: How one Six Nations kid is reclaiming lacrosse
VILLAGE OF OHSWEKEN, SIX NATIONS OF THE GRAND RIVER
• The braid isn’t the first thing you notice watching him play.
Tehoka Nanticoke is big — more than six feet tall and 230 pounds — but moves lightly on his feet; darting in diagonals, flinging behind-the-back-passes, attracting defenders like ants to a sugar cube, only to somehow spin free.
That speed and talent is why lacrosse experts use terms like “mind-boggling,” “spectacular” and “wizard” when describing him. It’s why Tehoka has grabbed the attention of Sports Illustrated. It’s also why, after USA Today posted a goal he scored by firing the ball between his legs, it immediately went viral.
This fall, the focus on the 19-yearold will intensify at the University at Albany, where the standout from the Six Nations of the Grand River will be a freshman on one of the top college lacrosse teams in the United States. And, yes, there is the braid. Hanging down his back, swinging as he runs, signalling — and not by accident — that he is Mohawk.
“Our hair is part of our identity,” Tehoka says. “So I decided to grow mine out.”
Tehoka is from a family of activists. His grandparents were faith keepers — stewards of Mohawk culture, history and religion. His mother works with native women in distress. In his own way, Tehoka is just as political: He is reclaiming lacrosse from the rich white college boys who have dominated it for so long — and his future from all the obstacles young guys face on the Rez.
And while a gesture of Mohawk patriotism at a lacrosse game doesn’t have the reach of #takeaknee, Tehoka is aware he’s being watched. He knows failure isn’t an option.
He operates by a simple creed, he says, smiling, “Don’t f--k up.”
These days, kids from Six Nations can play at the 3,000-seat Iroquois Lacrosse Arena. Photographs of native stars — Andy “Chief ” Martin, Cecil “Stonewall” Van Every — are displayed on the walls. A sports store sells handcrafted, traditional wooden sticks for $250.
But growing up, Tehoka mostly played in his driveway. “That’s new,” he says, pointing to the garage of his childhood home. “Our door had holes in it.”
The game he played was straightforward. His brother Chancey, a decade older, would fire balls at his head. Tehoka had three options: get hit in the face, catch the ball or catch heck from his mother for missing it and leaving another mark on the garage.
Tehoka’s mother clearly doesn’t mind the game itself, though. His name — pronounced Dayho-ga — means “fast” in Mohawk. On weekends, she ferried him to tournaments all over southern Ontario and the United States.
“My brother taught me the skill,” says Tehoka. “But my mom was the one who got me to the games and the practices. She paid for everything. She took care of me.”
It wasn’t easy. Catherine Nanticoke describes her personal life as a “soap opera.” She’s been married twice. Her first husband died of cirrhosis. Tehoka’s father walked out when he was 3.
Money was tight — Catherine worked shifts as a relief counsellor at the native women’s shelter in the village — but she did what she could as a single mom, and made sure all her boys played lacrosse.
The Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois (Six Nations is made up of Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga and Tuscarora), regard lacrosse as a gift from the Creator and a powerful medicine. Matches were traditionally played to bring people together, toughen young warriors’ bodies, settle disputes, celebrate festivals, heal the sick and, above all, please the Creator.
Seventeenth-century French missionaries disapproved of the game, bound as it was to native spirituality. But the French colonists couldn’t resist it. Lacrosse was fast, graceful — and rough. George Beers, a Montreal dentist, set down some rules in 1860. Within a decade, The New York Times was touting lacrosse as “Canada’s National Game.” It wasn’t too many years later that Indigenous teams were barred from playing against whites, who claimed they played for money and were professionals.
The truth is they were too good to beat.
Arguably, they still are. It’s telling that the arena in Six Nations — a largely rural community of 12,000 outside Hamilton, Ont. — seats thousands. And the game the French missionaries frowned upon remains central to Haudenosaunee identity. The arena is a place to play, but also to learn. There is a Mohawk language elementary school housed in the building; instilling a sense of national pride is among the lessons.
The Haudenosaunee have their own passports, their own capital — on Onondaga Nation, just south of Syracuse, New York — and their own cultural landmarks. When Catherine travels to the United States, she refers to it as crossing “the river.” (Technically, she means the Niagara River.)
“We have no borders,” she says.
It is a prickly position, not without controversy. The Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team — the Haudenosaunee compete as a nation at world championships — were denied entry into the United Kingdom for the 2010 tournament in Manchester, and wound up forfeiting in protest.
“We fought a battle that was bigger than lacrosse,” Marty Ward, a 25-year-old goalie with the team, told The New York Times.
The Nationals may have to fight that battle all over again next year. The 2018 worlds are in Israel. Whether they play or not, though, lacrosse is an expression of native power.
Oliver “Cap” Bomberry, a member of the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame, has been involved with lacrosse his entire life. He can remember medicine games to help the sick, where players would get their sticks blessed and play hard, with joy and purpose.
“Our community is full of lacrosse. It is what we do. It is like getting up in the morning here,” the 78-year-old says. “This game don’t belong to Canada. When did we ever give it to you?”
Catherine gave her sons miniature lacrosse sticks when they were born, an Iroquois tradition. The stick, often made of hickory, contains the spirit of the tree, binding the newborn that holds it to Mother Earth. Some elders ask to be buried with their wooden sticks, when their day comes.
Catherine’s eldest child, Vernon, 20 years older than her “baby,” was the family’s first lacrosse star. There wasn’t a faceoff man in Ontario who could beat him as a youngster. Now, Vernon is pushing 40 and his mother says he struggles with alcohol.
Distressing statistics — higher rates of unemployment, lower rates of education, higher incidence of alcohol and drug abuse, shorter life expectancy — persist in Indigenous communities. Being born with a lacrosse stick in hand is easy. Breaking a bad cycle is not.
Her middle son, Chancey, was another almost-star. He had talent. There was talk of him playing at the university level, maybe in Florida. But he got a girl pregnant and had some of his own struggles with alcohol, before straightening out his life. Today, he’s an ironworker like his grandfather, a skilled trade long associated with the Mohawk.
So yes, Catherine is watchful of Tehoka. She’s a fixture at summer league games with the Six Nations Arrows. She sits in the front row across from the players’ benches, wearing an orange Arrows T-shirt with Tehoka’s name and number 56 on the back. But her ambitions for her son go beyond lacrosse.
One of her favourite stories involves his hair. Tehoka was 10 when he announced he was growing it out. It was not so much an act of rebellion as one of budding awareness. Among the humiliating rituals Indigenous children underwent at residential schools was having their braids cut off. To save the man, the old saying went, you had to kill the Indian.
“I was incredibly proud of him,” Catherine says. “I want Tehoka to stand up for something.”
At first, Tehoka had his mother braid his hair before games. Now he does the braiding himself, a skill, he says, that required hours in front of a mirror to master. He keeps a brush and a colourful array of hair elastics in his equipment bag, along with two lacrosse sticks and a bottle of Ibuprofen.
Tehoka is traditional in other ways. He still attends longhouse ceremonies, an increasing rarity among young people. He’s working on his Mohawk language skills. And he is very clear about what lacrosse is all about.
“I want to spread the medicine of this game and everything that comes with it,” he says.
Tehoka was 15 when IMG Academy, a Florida boarding school for gifted athletes, offered him a scholarship. Its goal is to graduate students from some 80 countries into first-class American college athletic programs. Annual tuition runs about US$70,000. Owned by International Management Group, a sports industry giant, its alumni include Andre Agassi and Canada’s own Carling Bassett-Seguso.
The 500-acre campus in Bradenton would be the envy of most Canadian universities. There are professionalcalibre weight and locker rooms, manicured soccer fields, brand new dorms, a state-of-the-art health centre and a golf course.
The schedule is intense. Days begin at 7:30 a.m. Then it’s classes, study hall, lunch, practice, dinner, study hall and extra-tutoring until lights out at 9 p.m.
Tehoka struggled academically in the beginning. Lacrosse could be tough too. In a game against an elite prep school in Pennsylvania an opposing player spat, “Go back to the reservation, you f--king savage.”
What stung even more: As Tehoka represented Six Nations on the field, his teammates back home wondered why he’d left. Weren’t they good enough? Some of his oldest friendships frayed.
He eventually improved his grades. He still wrestles with math. English isn’t his first love. But he aced his history and law courses. And all the while, his lacrosse skills dazzled. He was named a high school All-American.
Several top U.S. college programs — Rutgers, Syracuse, Denver, the defending national champions at Maryland — recruited him. But Albany was always Tehoka’s first choice. The team plays a “run and gun” style, where behind-the-back passes and between-the-legs shots aren’t discouraged. The coach, Scott Marr, gets what the game means to Indigenous players — and what they can do for him.
A beefy, red-faced, middleaged white guy, Marr has two tattoos on his back: one of a native player kneeling with a lacrosse stick, the other of a medicine wheel. In the last 10 years, he’s built Albany into a college powerhouse by mining Iroquois talent. Tehoka is the ninth Indigenous player on his team.
“Lacrosse is part of these kids’ DNA,” says Marr.
Any of Albany’s players would be lucky to end up like his former recruit Lyle Thompson. He is arguably the most gifted lacrosse player on the planet. While at Albany he was twice named American college player of the year. He now plays professionally for both Major League Lacrosse and the National Lacrosse League (which named him MVP this year). He is sponsored by Nike.
The 25-year-old also promotes his people. Raised in a traditional Onondaga home, he wears his hair long, which some white fans have been copying. Thompson Bobblehead night for his NLL team, the Georgia Swarm, featured a figurine with a braid.
Last November, Thompson loaded his car with lacrosse sticks and drove 30 hours to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to organize a medicine game for the Dakota pipeline protesters.
“People who play lacrosse are, in general, rich and white, and on social media that is who my followers are,” Thompson says on the phone from his home on Onondaga Nation. Standing Rock was his way of standing up for what he believes in, he says, but also to reach people who may not understand — or even be aware of — the fight over native land.
“It can sometimes feel as though a lot of white people don’t know Native Americans still exist.”
In Canada, things are different. Sort of. In the last few years, native issues have been making headlines. Native voices are speaking out. But conventional routes to success — on campus, in the professions — remain out of reach for many Indigenous people.
“Ask yourself, how many times have you come across or had any real contact with an Indigenous person?” says Ansley Jemison, the executive director of the Iroquois Nationals and an adviser with the Office of Academic and Diversity Initiatives at Cornell University. “Admit it: it is rare. This is a time for us to be sending our best and our brightest to these institutions, so that all of a sudden we’re meeting on common ground and people can see the native person as a person.”
Thompson’s degree in sociology, the lacrosse business he runs with his brothers, are as much political acts as staging a game at Standing Rock.
Tehoka will have to figure out where he fits into all this. He is clear on the struggles of the Six Nations. “The land we live on today represents about five per cent of what was given to us,” he says. But he also wants to be a part of the bigger world, beyond that land.
Of his decision to leave the reserve for school, first IMG and now university, he says, “It is hard to leave home, I think, for most people. But for me, I wanted to get out of here. Because I know who I am and I know where I am from — and I know life isn’t just here, it is everywhere.
“My Mom is politically active with the Rez and that is cool, because she is sticking up for people and doing what my Grandpa did. And of course I am going to speak out. But I don’t want to just be a spokesperson for the Rez.”
On a late August afternoon Tehoka emerges from the weathered, woodgrey house his grandfather built about 10 minutes from Ohsweken.
Catherine moved in a few years ago. Her parents died in 2008, just six months apart, and their old home is a gathering place for Catherine’s children and grandchildren. Today, Vernon’s boys — Rossy, Chazy and Bun — are buzzing around the yard, trying to avoid the bikes and an old tractor on the lawn as they fire balls into a net.
Tehoka, of course, can’t resist joining in. His hair tucked under a black LA Dodgers cap, he grabs a stick from the trunk of Chancey’s black Ford. Rossy shuts his eyes as shots whiz past him.
“Don’t be scared,” his uncle coaxes. “Don’t be scared.”
Tehoka might be forgiven for any jitters of his own. University is a week away and there’s still dirty laundry to do, packing. “I haven’t even started,” he moans.
The following night, the Six Nations Arrows will also compete for the Minto Cup at Canada’s junior “A” lacrosse championship.
About 300 fans from Six Nations show up for the game at the Brampton Memorial Arena. They are identifiable by their orange T-shirts and their resolve to stay seated during the Canadian anthem.
“I try not to be in here when they play this song,” Catherine says.
She is sitting in “enemy territory,” surrounded by supporters for the Coquitlam Adanacs. As a star player, Tehoka is their target. But as Catherine watches from the stands, her son never seems ruffled.
At one point, several Coquitlam players pounce on him, pounding away with their sticks. Somehow he shakes free, drawing a roar from the crowd and a penalty against his opponents. The Arrows eventually overwhelm the B.C. team 8-3. They are too fast, too good.
What that means — there will be time for that. For now, Tehoka is 19, and families are pouring onto the floor around him. Catherine hugs him hard. “Konnoronkwa,” he says as he gives her a kiss, Mohawk for I love you.
Then he walks toward the dressing room, down a flight of stairs, disappearing from view.
I WANT TEHOKA TO STAND UP FOR SOMETHING.