Transcript
from National
Radio, Australia Broadcast Corporation
5/7/2002
Thomas Vennum - Historian/Author
(Publisher: Smithsonian Institution - 1994 ISBN: 1-56098-302-7
)
Ed Burman - Iroquios player
Oren Lyons - Faithkeeper of the Onondaga, member of Lacrosse
Hall of Fame
Doug Fox - former captain of the Australian lacrosse team
Although it has a French name, LACROSSE is an American Indian
sport. And while its origins became less and less known as
the game was westernised and formalised, lacrosse is now proudly
reasserting its heritage.
At the Lacrosse World Championships about to get underway
in Perth, a team of indigenous North American players called
the Iroquois Nationals will compete under their own flag,
in unique recognition of the history and heritage of this
sport. According to chairman and founder of the Iroquois Nationals Oren Lyons, it’s a way of reclaiming their game, and
asserting an independent identity.
Amanda Smith: The Sports Factor this week is all about lacrosse;
it’s a French name, but it’s actually North America’s
oldest sport, invented and played for centuries, in fact way
back into the mists of time, by American Indians.
THEME
Amanda Smith: The 2002 Lacrosse World Championship begins
this weekend. It’s being held in Perth, and runs over
ten days, with 16 countries participating. But the very particular
thing about the Lacrosse World Championship is that one of
the teams involved is made up of indigenous North American
players, and they compete as an entirely separate nation from
the USA and Canada. This team is called the Iroquois Nationals,
and it’s the only indigenous team that competes as a
nation in its own right, in any international sports event,
because lacrosse is a native American sport.
The game is called Gatciihkwae by the Iroquois. The French
called it lacrosse. For us it was first a spiritual game,
given to us by a game between the animals and the birds. The
ball is the medicine. It’s always been the medicine,
and it is what determines which side wins or loses. It’s
a game that’s a legacy from our people to yours.
Amanda Smith: Now, probably the best way to describe lacrosse,
if you’re not familiar with it, is to say that it’s
a kind of ‘aerial hockey’. The players run around
with a curved stick, with webbing attached to it, which is
used to catch and throw the ball.
Doug Fox: The modern game is a field-based team game in its
mainstream form. A rectangular, defined field; in the men’s
game 10 players on the field, in the women’s game 12;
a fast-running game in which the ball is transferred quickly
between team-mates, by passing the thing from the stick to
a player on your team, catching ball, moving the ball quickly.
Some people would say lacrosse looks like hockey played in
the air, only you’ve got the full-blown physical contact
with it. And scores are made by getting the ball past the
opponent and into the goal, which is a net, which is positioned
on the field. And this is a bit of a curiosity because play
can go on behind the goal.
Steve: And one of the reasons lacrosse has grown so dramatically
in the States and abroad, is once you see it, you love it,
because it’s got so many aspects of different sports.
There is some contact, although it’s not as strong as
American football, it’s very fast, it’s very high
scoring, it’s a lot of finesse, it’s a team game
but individuals can shine, and it’s got something that
no other sport has, the heritage, the native American heritage,
centuries old.
Ed Burman: Ooh, that was brutal! That’s called the buddy
pass, because the guy who passed that ball to him, passed
it to him without looking at who was coming up in front of
him. So basically, he was trusting his man to have given him
a pass and he could turn in the open, but when he turned,
the fellow was waiting for him, and knocked him square down.
So, that’s called the buddy pass.
Amanda Smith: Some buddy! Well, that’s the modern game
of lacrosse. The American Indian history of the game has been
documented in a book by Thomas Vennum. So just how old is
it?
Thomas Vennum: We really don’t know. The earliest written
mention of it is in the Jesuit relations, written by French
missionaries in the area occupied by Huron Indians at that
point, sort of south-eastern Ontario. 1637 I think is the
earliest actual use of that word to describe a game, although
it’s fairly clear that the game was quite ancient even
by that point, and so we have no written records earlier than
that to document it, so I would assume maybe a couple of centuries
before the 17th century at least, if not longer
.
MUSIC
Thomas Vennum: Now there were a number of Indian stick ball
games that went by different names and played by different
tribes. But I think the real telling criteria for whether
something is lacrosse or not: No.1 the stick that is used
to propel the ball has to have some sort of a net or webbing
on it to convey the ball, or to pick it up, and that there
is usually the cardinal rule that the ball may not be touched
by human hands. And that then cuts your list down and gets
rid of a lot of similar games, such as field hockey and so
on, where sticks and balls are used. But there are three principal
varieties that I was able to discern. One which is probably
known to most non-Indian people who play lacrosse, or have
an interest in it, is sort of the Iroquoian variety of lacrosse,
which was being played certainly up and down the St Lawrence
Valley at the time Europeans were settling there, and it’s
kept alive principally by Iroquoian tribes today.
Amanda Smith: The Iroquois, also known as the Six Nations,
are a confederacy of six American Indian tribes whose lands
covered what’s now New York State, Southern Quebec, and
Ontario. Chief Oren Lyons is a faithkeeper of the Onondaga,
one of those tribes, and a member of the Lacrosse Hall of
Fame.
Oren Lyons: Yes, I think that lacrosse is sort of the fabric
of our peoples. It’s interwoven in our culture very strongly,
it’s in the spiritual side of things. When we have our
series of thanksgivings, which goes around the lunar clock,
lacrosse is involved, particularly in the large midwinter
ceremony when there is a specific and special place for it.
And we know for instance, that all players eventually are
captains, and we say this because after you pass on from this
world into the second world, on the very day that you make
that transition, your name will be announced on the other
side as captain for that day’s game. So all players are
captains.
Amanda Smith: Now of course, this game wasn’t called
lacrosse by native Americans; they had all sorts of different
names for it. So how did it come to be given the name ‘lacrosse’? Doug Fox was the captain of the Australian lacrosse team from
1968 to 1974, and he’s now the Australian Lacrosse Council’s
historian.
Doug Fox: French in name I think, French, certainly not in
origin but French settlers in Canada watched the game and
likened it to other ball games with a stick, ‘le jeu
de la crosse’ and the cross, or the stick appeared similar
to the crosier carried by a bishop, and they made that connection,
and the games carried the name. So named by the French, not
until recent years played by the French. But they’re
starting to play now.
Amanda Smith: So to French-Canadian settlers, the curved
stick, with the netting at the end looked like a bishop’s
crosier, the Christian symbol of the shepherd’s crook.
For native Americans, though, the traditional wooden stick
with deer skin netting carries a different spiritual meaning.
The wood symbolises all the trees of the world, the netting
all of the animals.
For Iroquois player, Ed Burman, who’s based in San Francisco,
this spiritual value combines with a game that’s great
sport.
Ed Burman: It’s a game that someone who’s really
fast and quick and very skilled with their stick can more
than over-compensate for someone who weighs 220 lbs and then
has a lot of muscle. So it is a game that you have certain
advantage to by being fast, being quick, being skilled. And
you can continue to improve your understanding, your knowledge
of the game, then you can continue to be reimbursed by the
spiritual value of the game. So it has a lot to it. As the
game has evolved and become more Westernised, the game has
been concentrated more on strategies than are relevant or
prevalent in other Western games, such as defence, hitting,
this sort of thing. Not to say that there are reported deaths
during games, in there’s tribes against tribes, and there
certainly would be probably some violence, but as in any other
indigenous sort of confrontational activity, violence was
not the emphasis.
MUSIC
Thomas Vennum: Well it’s fairly clear that Indian people
considered it more than just a game. There’s so much
ritual surrounding the game, ceremonial aspects to it. Even
today there are tribes in the United State that play lacrosse,
not as a game so much as a means of honouring the great spirit.
Lacrosse is sometimes played to honour a famous lacrosse player,
now dead, or particularly it had curing functions, and if
someone were sick, a game would be played on his behalf and
the belief was that by playing the game, the players were
given back to the great spirit who gave them the game in the
first place; they were doing this to please him, that some
sort of efficacy would lie in the actual performance of the
game itself.
Amanda Smith: But has this ritual and healing element disappeared
from modern lacrosse?
Ed Burman: I don’t think it’s disappeared. I think
it’s probably disappeared at an obvious level for the
kids right here, and I think they get home and the mothers
see how much they’re bruised, and their fathers whacked
up and cut, then they probably don’t think that it’s
doing much for their physical nature, but it’s doing
a lot for their spirits, it’s doing a lot for their spiritual
nature and I think that that’s where it still does a
lot for our people. I mean we’re able to compete on an
international level with powerful countries, and stand out
in the field and throw our whacks. Of course we don’t
usually win the games against the larger players, but we’re
out there playing, and that’s what’s important,
so that part of our culture is still surviving and it’s
still being kept carried out by the seventh generation which
is the seventh generation from our ancestors, and we’ll
have a seventh generation that will continue to play the game
from our point of view. So that’s what’s important,
that’s the healing part of the game, and there are still
medicine games as part of the condolence ceremony which is
a mourning period I guess you would call it in this way, like
the time when you’re recognising someone’s death
.
Amanda Smith: And what is this medicinal and healing part
of American Indian lacrosse?
Thomas Vennum: Well there’s still a residue of strong
belief in the medicinal properties or the medical properties,
potency, of the game, in that games are still played for people
who are ailing. Along those lines, I was interested in reading
the history of Iroquoian tribes, and Handsome Lake who was
the great Seneca prophet, was dying in 1814, I believe, at
Onondaga in upstate New York, and it was said that the people
around him put together a lacrosse game and brought him out
on his bed so he could see it and the kind of perception there
was that it was something to cheer him up, and I interpret
it that it was a desperate attempt to save his life.
Amanda Smith: But there wasn’t only a healing aspect
to this game. Thomas Vennum’s book is called ‘American
Indian Lacrosse – Little Brother of War’, and ‘Little
Brother of War’ is a translation of one of the Iroquois
names for lacrosse. It’s a pointer to its other traditional
purpose.
Thomas Vennum: Well the more I began to research this, the
more it was evident to me that particularly with many of the
south-eastern tribes, that the preparations for getting into
a game involved many of the same rituals with incantations,
and taboos and all sort of prescriptions given to the players,
that were almost identical to the preparations for the war
path, particularly among the Cherokee. There are some superb
manuscripts dating from the 18th century that describe war
parties going out and in terms of the types of things that
they carried, amulets and so forth, these all found their
way into the ball game as well. And in some of those tribes
the colloquial terms for lacrosse, or the ball game, stick
ball game, means ‘Little brother of war’, or ‘Little
war’ and in some slang expressions, informants were said
that certain teams were going to have a little warfare or
something. So it’s tied into the language as well.
Amanda Smith: So does that mean it’s a surrogate for
war, or it is an actual enactment of a battle?
Thomas Vennum: Well I see it as a surrogate for warfare.
There certainly is evidence enough to suggest that Indian
people, particularly when tribe was against tribe in territorial
disputes, very often settled these by playing a game rather
than actually going to battle. So that it mattered not whether
it was a large parcel of territory, or whether it might be
just some pond where the beaver were particularly populous,
but they’d be fighting over territories and would send
delegates to arrange for a lacrosse game to play instead of
actually becoming combative.
Amanda Smith: And sport has often been typified as a substitute
for battle, as in George Orwell’s famous line, ‘Sport
is war minus the shooting’. But in the case of American
Indian lacrosse, winning or losing this ‘little war’
was beside the point.
Thomas Vennum: It didn’t really matter what the score
was, and even today on the Iroquois reservations where you
find perhaps the long house playing against the mud house,
it doesn’t matter how many people are on each side or
what the score is. The efficacy is in the actual playing of
it, going out there and doing it.
Amanda Smith: And does anything of this philosophy remain
in the modern game of lacrosse? And how was the game changed?
Iroquois player, Ed Burman.
Ed Burman: Obviously the technology of the game has changed
quite a bit from wooden sticks and no equipment to plastic
pads and wooden or aluminium shafts, helmets, face-guards,
shoulder pads, elbow pads, gloves, and the goalie wearing
a chest protector, all those are this state-of-the-art technology
from year to year that the two major lacrosse manufacturers
keep bringing in to the game. So that’s the large difference.
The other difference I think is the emphasis on it being a
win or lose game, as opposed to it being just played for either
the medicine of the game or the two tribes coming together
to settle whatever differences they had by playing it. So
it’s more of a competition in this way in many regards.
MUSIC
Ed Burman: I grew up playing this game, I didn’t grow
up playing the same game as my grandfather played, or he didn’t
grow up playing the same game that his grandfather played,
and I think that you can’t fix any sort of game or society
in one place in history. I think it evolves, I just think
this game has evolved. And how much credit we give for the
game all in all, that’s the controversial part. I mean
half these kids playing don’t know where this game originated.
So that’s problematic, I mean there should hopefully,
will be, a better education on where the game came from so
that they would understand some of the more philosophical
and deeper meanings of the game besides it being you score
more goals, you win.
Amanda Smith: Well, in the history of lacrosse, how did the
game transfer from American Indians to European settlers? Thomas Vennum says it happened in the 1850s and 1860s, and
a key figure in the appropriation of the game was a Montreal
dentist by the name of George Beers.
Thomas Vennum: And it was literally taken over wholesale
in Montreal, that’s really where the whites got the sport,
principally from watching Mohawk Indians play it over the
years in nearby reservations; the three Mohawk reservations
are very close to Montreal, and George Beers is sometimes
called the Father of Lacrosse and wrote the first book on
lacrosse as a young man, even though he was a dentist, he
became I think the Dean of the Dental College in Canada, certainly
the Editor of the first Dental Journal. But George Beers and
his friends, who were all part of the whole amateur athletic
movement going on in Canada and England and the States to
some degree at that point, they simply took over what they
had seen the Indians playing and wanted to make some order
out of it, so they wrote a series of rules, certainly the
first ones that had ever been codified and published and put
down. And those really formed the basis for the non-Indian
game to start with.
Amanda Smith: It’s interesting that modern lacrosse
is seen as I think quite a middle-class sport. I’m interested
in that migration from American Indian communities into elite
white institutions, the Ivy League colleges in the United
States and English girls’ schools.
Thomas Vennum: I think it has an awful lot to do with what
was going on in Canada at that time. Whether lacrosse would
have started in the United States I’m not sure, because
that was a period during the Civil War, and it really didn’t
get a foothold in this country until after the Civil War was
over. But we find that lacrosse was picked up by gentlemen
professionals who formed the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association,
and was simply added to the list of other activities which
were quite distinctly native in origin, such as sledding and
tobogganing and snow-shoeing, which were listed as sports,
and these were being picked up by the upper classes in Montreal
as sort of elite amateur things. Now they had a strong feeling
that they were civilising these things. Now I don’t want
to get too far into that, but they really not only civilised
lacrosse, they deliberately wrote rules into it to prevent
Indians from partaking in it as far as international competition
goes, all the way up until recently.
Amanda Smith: But how were the indigenous players excluded
from the game they’d invented? Chief Oren Lyons.
Oren Lyons: Well that occurred after the game had developed
into a league, in Canada, the Iroquois were fielding very
strong teams, Mohawks in particular, and at one point somewhere
around 1890, the Mohawks were trying to raise funds for travel
and so they put on an exhibition match and charged entrance
fee to help raise funds and quickly Canada said That is commercialism,
and professionalism, and therefore you cannot play any more.
And I’m not sure whether that was the total reason for
it, probably one of the other reasons is it just couldn’t
beat the native peoples at this particular game. But nevertheless,
we were more or less put the side in the international championship
games, but we played inter-nation all the time amongst ourselves,
so if lacrosse were to disappear in the whole world, the Six
Nations would be playing fiercely yet.
Ed Burman: The downfall of Iroquois lacrosse around the 1800s
is when we were becoming less a part of the players. I think
that it’s kind of ironic that the game has probably survived
through the league institutions. The English kept it alive
through very elite women’s organisations playing women’s
lacrosse; the teams that were around when my grandfather played
were Johns Hopkins, Syracuse University, Harvard, Princeton,
all elite academic institutions in this country that kept
the game alive.
Amanda Smith: Nevertheless, American Indians have reclaimed
their game. At the Lacrosse World Championships, which open
tonight in Perth, the Iroquois Nationals are playing under
their own flag and anthem, as they’ve done at World Championships
since 1990. The resurgence began in the 1980s, when it was
proposed that an indigenous team be formed for an exhibition
match against Canada. Oren Lyons was playing an indoor form
of lacrosse at Syracuse University at the time, and he was
largely responsible for the formation of the Iroquois Nationals.
Oren Lyons: So I said, Let me ask the boys, so I did, and
they said Well that’ll be interesting, we’ve been
playing box lacrosse, which is the inside version of lacrosse
and very tough, fast, rough game, and highly skilled. But
we hadn’t been on the field for some time. So they agreed,
and so we fielded a team, took it down and in 1983 the Iroquois
Nationals which were sanctioned by the Grand Council of Chiefs
of the Haudenosaunee, played our first game as an international
team again. And we were roundly defeated by Canada, as we
were with several of the other teams, but the boys liked the
game. They said, Hey, hey, let’s get back to this and
let’s take our name back.
Amanda Smith: And the Iroquois Nationals first competed in
the Lacrosse World Championships in 1990, which were held,
as they are being held this year, in Perth. What has competing
at this level as a distinct nation meant to you?
Oren Lyons: It’s meant a great deal. The players were
inspired, the nations were inspired. As I said, we had the
sanction of the Confederacy Chiefs, the Grand Council of Chiefs
have sanctioned the Iroquois Nationals as our national team,
and of course it’s then an inspiration to all the young
people, and everybody’s hopeful that the boys will perform
in good style, and we, for our part, are the grandfathers
of this game. It’s our invention, it’s old beyond
old, and yet probably to the best of my knowledge, the first
team sport in the world, and I think that says a lot for a
society and for a people, a culture, to be the first team
sport and the idea of playing as a team. There’s a certain
mystique to lacrosse that isn’t in any other game, and
I think that particular aspect of it is held respectfully
by teams that just have kind of an idea about it, don’t
really understand what it is, but they do have the utmost
respect for that side of it.
Amanda Smith: So what has it meant for the sport of lacrosse,
internationally, to have this Iroquois team among its competing
nations? How important has its inclusion in world championships
since 1990 been to lacrosse in general?
Doug Fox, from the
Australian Lacrosse Council.
Doug Fox: I think very important. What it did for lacrosse,
it was a decision made the International Lacrosse Federation
to allow the American Indian tribal groups if you like, to
play at an international level in the game that they gave
to the world. And that had great significance. Over the world
championships, it cast a new mantle. It said This game, beyond
having international appeal for the countries playing it,
has an historical significance about ball games and their
place in recreation, substitutes for warfare, international
relations, in a way that is exactly the same way that the
Indians used the game. I think that many of the native American
people have had great elevation in a modern world through
lacrosse. They get Ivy League sports scholarships in America
because lacrosse is part of their upbringing and they’re
good at it. I think it was a very significant thing.
Ed Burman: Lacrosse is an entire community at home, everyone’s
involved. The women are involved in a certain aspect, the
children are involved, I mean everyone goes to the game, everyone
participates at a certain level. Great lacrosse players in
a family means a lot of prestige for your family. It brings
to you a lot more than financial reward, it brings you respect
from the community, it brings to you admiration from other
large families, so the game is larger than They won by this
many goals sort of orientation, it has a lot of influence
on how our communities develop.
Amanda Smith: But in international competition, the three
most successful nations are the USA, Canada, and Australia,
not the Iroquois. Oren Lyons, the Chairman of Iroquois Nationals
Lacrosse, says it’s a slow process of rebuilding.
Oren Lyons: Our player pools are quite small compared to
the other player pools of the world. Nevertheless the quality
of our players are very high. And that just comes from playing
the game for so long, and constantly, you know. We have at
any one of our Indian nations, children starting at the age
of four, and from what we call peanuts on up, you know, each
age level playing their own brand and style. So by the time
that a kid is 16 years old, he’s had 12 years of experience
at competition, and pretty rough and tumble all the way. So
the quality of their play is quite high, and also I should
say that the cultural side of it is kept as a very integral
part of our whole persona of Iroquois Nationals.
Amanda Smith: Do the Iroquois Nationals play with a different
spirit from, say, the US, or Canadian or Australian lacrosse
teams?
Oren Lyons: There’s no doubt about that, because we
have a depth of understanding of the game. We go much beyond
how other teams relate to the sport. And again, it’s
not really a sport. When we use it in the medicine side of
it, spiritual side of it, it’s much beyond that.
Amanda Smith: Has establishing this Iroquois Nationals lacrosse
team been at all controversial? I mean is having your own
national lacrosse team emblematic of a kind of wider, political,
separatist statement?
Oren Lyons: People put it that way. We’ve never really
looked at it in that context, because we’ve always been
who we are, so we’ve never thought of ourselves as anything
but who we are. But I think, to answer your question, in the
eyes of other nations and other people, that kind of surprises
them.
Ed Burman: Yes it has a galvanising effect because it becomes
a way for the Iroquois National team competing in the world
games, travelling abroad, to assert the sovereignty of the
Haudenosaunee and the Iroquois people, which is a non-confrontational
political statement, asserting one nation’s sovereignty.
And it’s been recognised by other nations, the passports
have been stamped and recognised by other nations, so the
game sort of epitomises the sovereignty of the Iroquois and
the different nations that make up the Iroquois, and so at
that point the game galvanises, but also becomes larger than
life, it becomes political, in a sense, it becomes a statement.
And as I say without any kind of confrontation, no tanks on
the borders, no police, no gunfire, it’s just a bunch
of young men playing a game that our great-great-great-great-grandparents
have played from time immemorial, to now.
MUSIC
Amanda Smith: And the 2002 Lacrosse World Championships begin
tonight in Perth with the traditional opening ceremony; and
competition gets underway tomorrow, including the Iroquois
Nationals.
The Sports Factor is produced by Maria Tickle; Paul Penton
is the technical producer; and I’m Amanda Smith.
Guests on this program:
Thomas Vennum - Historian
Ed Burman - Iroquios player
Oren Lyons - Faithkeeper of
the Onondaga, member of Lacrosse Hall of Fame
Doug Fox - former captain of the Australian lacrosse team
Musical Items:
Winnebago - Buffalo Feast Song
Composer: Traditional
Copyright: Folkways Record and Services Corp
Publications:
Lacrosse - Little Brother of War
Author: Thomas Vennum Jr
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution - 1994
ISBN: 1-56098-302-7
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Maria Tickle
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