‘Medicine game’ used to bolster pipeline protest
Player sees sport’s potential to peacefully aid cause at Standing Rock
Last week, Lyle Thompson packed up his family, a couple of friends and dozens of lacrosse sticks and drove more than 24 hours from his home in Upstate New York to the site of the Dakota Access pipeline protests.
The lacrosse star wanted to see the demonstrations for himself, and he hoped he could lift spirits at the protesters’ campsite through his sport, known by the Iroquois as the “medicine game.”
He also brought his wife Amanda, their three daughters, fellow pro player Bill O’Brien and University of Albany head coach Scott Marr to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation near the border between North and South Dakota. The plan was to organize a lacrosse game.
“All I’m trying to do is spread awareness and help other people, help other people in this world,” Thompson said Tuesday from Syracuse, N.Y., near Onondaga Nation, where he grew up. “For this case, it’s the people in North Dakota. It’s been people fighting for other people, the people of this world, everything living.
The protests over the construction of Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access pipeline began in the spring.
Protesters want to stop the completion of the 1,886-kilometre pipeline because of the potential effects on drinking water on the reserve and further downstream on the Missouri River, as well as the possible destruction of cultural artifacts, including burial sites.
Thompson, 24, arrived Nov. 22, less than a day after violence erupted between protesters and security officers.
After addressing the protesters at the community bonfire, Thompson walked around the campsite to personally spread word of a lacrosse game he was organizing.
The Iroquois, who refer to themselves as the Haudenosaunee, created the sport of lacrosse, believing it has both physical and spiritual healing properties.
Thompson, who plays professionally for the National Lacrosse League’s Georgia Swarm and Major League Lacrosse’s Florida Launch, hoped to tap into that tradition at the protest site. More than 16 people, including Caucasian, African-American and First Nations players, joined Thompson, O’Brien and Marr on a field that had wooden posts as goals.
“It was really kind of a spiritual experience, to be a part of the traditional sense of the game, playing for a cause, playing for a purpose, rather than playing for a win or a loss in a collegiate game,” Marr said.
“It was really deep to be part of something like that. You were trying to play for the healing of the people that were there and what’s going on at that reservation.”