‘COMING TO PLAY A MEDICINE GAME’
IROQUOIS NATIONALS REFUSE TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL
When Lyle Thompson visited the Standing Rock pipeline protests in North Dakota in the fall of 2016, the professional lacrosse player travelled with his wife, his three young daughters and 20 hand-carved wooden sticks. He hoped to facilitate the playing of a medicine game — an exhibition inspired by the spiritual tradition of the Iroquois, which holds that lacrosse is played, in part, as a means of helping people heal. He walked from tent to tent in search of members of the various Native American communities represented on the grounds, apprising the occupants at each of his stops of the details of his plan.
“Every single person greeted me, welcomed me into their area and offered me food,” Thompson recalled in an interview this week. The day before he and his family arrived at Standing Rock, police had sprayed protesters at the campsite with tear gas, targeted them with rubber bullets and blasted them with water cannons, injuring more than 300. After the mayhem and amid the lingering tension, Thompson’s encounters with the campers were a source of light.
“It looked like a really poor place,” he said, “but it was a happy place for me.”
As a star player in North America’s two major lacrosse leagues and a leading member of the Iroquois Nationals, the transnational Iroquois Confederacy’s representative in international competition, Thompson’s place within his sport is perhaps inevitably entwined with politics, domestic and foreign and the points at which they intersect. It is a reality he was reminded of this week as he and the Nationals prepared to play in the sport’s most important tournament: the world field lacrosse championship, which is held every four years and begins Thursday in Netanya, Israel.
Thompson and the Nationals, the No. 3 team in the world behind Canada and the United States, will compete in Israel despite a
recent call from a prominent group in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement imploring the team to stay home from the tournament as a show of solidarity with the Palestinians.
“As Indigenous peoples, we have both seen our traditional lands colonized, our people ethnically cleansed and massacred by colonial settlers,” the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) wrote in an open
letter addressed to the Nationals on July 4, eight days before the team was to face the U.S. in its opening game at the world championship.
“We are asking you to respect our nonviolent picket line by withdrawing from the 2018 World Lacrosse Championships, denying Israel the opportunity to use the national sport of the Iroquois to cover up its escalating, violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians throughout our ancestral lands.”
PACBI’S letter failed to
convince the Nationals to boycott the tournament, but Thompson said he doesn’t intend to ignore the group’s message. He didn’t know very much about IsraeliPalestinian relations before last week, but he has since looked into the history of the conflict, reading articles and reaching out to friends of his with a familial connection to the region. He said he can empathize with the plight of Palestinians.
“What’s going on in Israel and what’s happened to the Palestinians is wrong. A lot of people are relating it to what’s happened to Native American people in Canada and the U.S., and it is similar,” Thompson said. “Morally, I want to (show) support, and I’m going to support them in the best way I can. But taking myself away from the game that’s given me so much, and something that’s very positive to our people, I don’t think is the right decision for us as Haudenosaunee people.”
“Our position is that we’re coming to play a medicine game,” said Ansley Jemison, the Nationals’ executive director. “We’re hoping to bring some healing to the world.”
One reason the Nationals aren’t heeding the Palestinian call to boycott the championship is practical: if they were to withdraw, Thompson said, they could be fined $500,000 and face the prospect of exclusion from future tournaments, including lacrosse’s potential return to the Summer Olympics sometime next decade. Another is personal: the game is deeply important to the Iroquois people, Thompson and his family among them. Three of his brothers, Jeremy, Jerome and Miles, and a cousin, Ty, are also on the Nationals’ roster. They and their teammates are “the Michael Jordan of their time,” Jemison said — college graduates and successful pros who can be positive role models for Iroquois youth, who might help inspire those kids to eat well, to exercise and to grow their hair long enough to braid.
“There are so many things that plague Indigenous communities,” Jemison said. “It’s good to have people who are competing at the world level, who can be these beacons of hope and be positive out there and walk the walk.”