GETTING TO THE HEART OF IT
Indigenous athletes seek to reclaim sport, fight for recognition in U.S. and the world
Brendan Bomberry’s voice was growing louder, his words spilling out faster and faster as he unleashed a profanity-laced pep talk on his teammates.
The Haudenosaunee Nationals men’s lacrosse team, a squad that represents the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora — was preparing to play a competitively meaningless game earlier this month at the World Games, an Olympic-style event, after being knocked out of medal contention.
Bomberry, 27, was there to remind the players that, for them, every game and every minute spent in a Haudenosaunee uniform held deep significance. “Sports may not be political, but for our people, they are,” he said, peppering his words with expletives and jabs of his fist. “Let’s show some heart on this stage. This means something to the people back home.”
His message was plain: Representing the Haudenosaunee (formerly called the Iroquois) has come to involve a set of larger, intertwined objectives beyond winning lacrosse games.
They are fighting, first of all, for official recognition in global sports — an effort symbolic of Indigenous nations’ broader efforts to assert their nationhood and sovereignty in the geopolitical arena. Their goal, in this realm, is acceptance from the International Olympic Committee, with the aim of appearing at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, where the sport could make a return to the medal program after more than a century away.
“One thing that I have come to realize is that lacrosse makes us relevant in terms of our place within the world,” Bomberry said in an interview.
The Haudenosaunee (hoe-dee-no-SHOW-nee) are fighting, too, for the very spirit of the game. Lacrosse is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, but in recent decades, its prevailing image in popular culture, the players said, has felt like a caricature of suburban white privilege — in Bomberry’s words, “a frat boy persona.”
As some of the historical originators of lacrosse, as people who see it as a sacred “medicine game,” the Haudenosaunee want to reclaim its heart.
“Representation here matters,” said Cody Jamieson, 35, a member of the men’s team, describing the pride of seeing the Haudenosaunee flag at the World Games in Birmingham, Ala. “We are sovereign. Us being here at the World Games and being accepted is all the IOC needs to know.”
The Haudenosaunee men’s team — formed in 1983 and known as the Iroquois Nationals until recently — was officially recognized by lacrosse’s international governing body in 1988, while the women’s team was recognized in 2008. Today, the two squads remain the only Indigenous teams in any sport competing at the international level.
Despite operating with a fraction of the talent pool enjoyed by other top teams such as the United States and Canada, the Haudenosaunee Nationals have thrived in recent years. The men’s team finished third at the past two field lacrosse world championships, in 2014 and 2018. The women’s team finished eighth out of 29 teams at the women’s world championship this month in Maryland.
This made it all the more perplexing when the men’s squad was initially left out of the field for the 2022 World Games — in which men’s lacrosse made its debut and the women’s game had its second appearance — because of some apparent confusion between World Lacrosse, the sport’s global governing body, and the International World Games Association about the team’s eligibility. The Haudenosaunee are spread across Ontario, Quebec and upstate New York and carry their own passports. They are not currently a member of the United Nations or the IOC.
The news caused a minor uproar. Lacrosse officials eventually signaled a willingness to change course, but there was one problem: By then, the eightteam men’s field was considered locked. The situation was resolved, finally, when the Irish national team agreed to give up its spot in Birmingham to let the Haudenosaunee compete. (The women’s field wasn’t set until this month’s world championship, after the Haudenosaunee had been ruled eligible.)
“What kind of competition would you have in lacrosse if the first nation to ever play, and still one of the best, isn’t represented?” said the men’s team’s coach, Peter Milliman, who does not have Indigenous heritage.
That very question could echo until the 2028 Olympics.
In 2018, the IOC offered so-called provisional recognition to World Lacrosse (then known as the Federation of International Lacrosse), which meant the federation and its several dozen member nations could receive financial support from the IOC. The decision was also interpreted as a sign that lacrosse, last contested as a medal event in 1904 and 1908, could make a return to the Olympic program in time for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
But if the Olympic community embraces what is, in a way, the most quintessentially American sport for an upcoming U.S.-based Olympics, can they reasonably exclude its creators?
“You see some of the sports in the Olympics, and it’s like, ‘How is lacrosse not in the Olympics?’ ” said Cassandra Minerd, 27, a member of the women’s team. “And if you’re going to have lacrosse, the people who created the game need to be there.”
In Birmingham this month, lacrosse was contested in the “sixes” format — smaller and faster than the established field and box lacrosse disciplines — that international officials have developed for potential use at the Olympics.
Neither the men’s nor women’s Haudenosaunee team made the podium — a letdown particularly for the men, who entered the World Games ranked third in the world — but the players found the experience fulfilling nonetheless. One night, they accepted an invitation from the Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama for dinner at a local hotel.
“The game that you see out there, the long-stick game, is our game,” Oren Lyons, 92, who founded the Haudenosaunee team, said to the assembled group. “It’s taken our team around the world. And it’s given an opportunity for people to understand that the Indian nations are still here.”
In more and more lacrosse arenas, the U.S. and Canadian flags commonly seen in venues across North America now fly alongside a purple Haudenosaunee flag.
That is why the visibility they enjoyed in Birmingham — and the recognition they crave for the future — matters so much to them.
“Western society keeps trying to push us back down and erase us from the history books,” said Kason Tarbell, 25, a member of the men’s team, “but with our flag showing with every other country, we’re still here, and we’re still fighting.”