Lacrosse Returns to Olympics in 2028but Will the Sport’s Indigenous Founders Be Allowed to Play? – Foreign Policy

The Tokyo Olympics offered much of the world a needed reprieve after 18 months of pandemic loss. Now, some fans are looking as far ahead as the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angelesand not just because the coronavirus pandemic will, hopefully, be a bygone era. That year is also the year lacrosse is primed to return to the Olympic field after nearly a century.

Lacrosse is more popular than ever before. From elite U.S. suburbs to college quads to Japan and Uganda, it is quickly blossoming into the fastest growing sport on Earth, with 70 nations in its global federation. But its return to the Olympics is also not without controversy: Lacrosses most important teamand its best playermay not be invited to play.

Lyle Thompson is the NCAAs all-time lacrosse scoring leader. Hes also Iroquois and a member of the Iroquois Nationalsthe only national team belonging to an Indigenous nation. Last August, the Iroquois Nationals was excluded from invitation to the 2022 World Games, a stepping stone to the Olympicsthe latest political snub faced by a team from a once prestigious nation now boxed in by generations of legalese. The scandal was resolved only after a Change.org petition and a boycott threatclearing a wide open yet uncharted path for the teams Olympic participation.

If they compete, the Iroquois Nationals will not be the only Olympic team representing an unrecognized state. Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Hong Kong all have their own teams, as do a handful of dependent freely associated states in contract to a larger nationsuch as Palau, Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, and Micronesia. The Iroquois Nationals, however, would be the first unrecognized Native American nation to join that list.

It means a lot for the next generation, Thompson told Foreign Policy. I want to see my other relatives repping each other too. Were Native America.

The Iroquois Nationalsfounded by college lacrosse star-turned-political firebrand Oren Lyons, his friend Rick Hill, and lacrosse stick-maker Wesley Patterson in 1983was, from its birth, an Indigenous sovereignty movement, the latest diplomatic turret in an Iroquois lineage of transformative foreign policy. But as the team ascended world rankspulling from a talent pool numbering just hundreds of playersit has been carrying other facets of the nation state along with it.

Nestled between and beyond the Adirondack Mountains and Great Lakes in what is now the United States and Canada, the Haudenosaunee Confederacythe mother-tongue name for the Iroquois Confederacyhas existed for centuries. With a capital at Onondaga (outside Syracuse, New York), the six-member confederacy is a European Union-type alliance led by a 50-chief legislative Grand Council. As the oldest continuously governing body in North America, the Haudenosaunee Confederacycomprised of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Seneca nationsstraddled an empire before its lands were whittled and strewn, violently encroached on by U.S. and British settler regimes.

The Haudenosaunee developed the game of lacrosse millennia ago and fashioned hickory to play it. As early as the 1750s, Mohawks were sharing the game with Quebecois. In 1834, the Mohawk played a public game at the St. Pierre racetrack in Montreal, and lacrosse became a popular spectator sport. By the 1840s, Haudenosaunee and Canadians played each other often, and, in 1856, a lacrosse federation was formed in Montreal. Today, the wooden lacrosse stickgiven to Haudenosaunee at birthflies alongside a Nike logo. The Iroquois Nationals rank third out of the 46 teams and 70 lacrosse federations in the worldnipping at the heels of the United States and Canada, and miles ahead of the rest of the field.

Theyre the creators of the game, said Paul Rabil, a member of the U.S. national lacrosse team.

Fast forward four centuries, and the transition of the game has taken root. [The Iroquois Nationals have] the best players on the planet.

But whether on the map of politics or playoff bracketology, the Iroquois Nationals path to the playing field has been fraught, vexed by the same bylaws of the international system that have long stymied the Haudenosaunees own quest for formal recognition.

Although there is no law requiring the Olympics fit inside the United Nations framework, the Olympic Charter of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) requires countries be recognized by the international community to become eligible as a National Olympic Committee. The primary reference for units of sovereignty since 1947 is U.N. member states. Complications with this definition begin and end with the obvious: The Haudenosauneelike every other native nation in North Americais not an internationally recognized, independent state.

But the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was once a recognized nation that then became an unrecognized state. Haudenosaunee independence is enshrined mostly in individual treaties with other nations and not multilaterally through sporting leagues or international bodies.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was and is highly diplomatic. Unlike many Native American nations, the densely organized Haudenosaunee heartland lays smack amid a heavy corridor of colonial migration. This rendered the confederacy a broker between Europeans and other Native American nationsand ultimately decimated the confederacys territory.

The confederacys earliest treaty with Europeans, made with the Netherlands in 1613, is still celebrated today by the Dutch government. In 1710, three confederacy statesmen from the Mohawk nation visited England; they were received as emissaries and had portraits commissioned by Queen Anne. Haudenosaunee politics have been praised by everyone from Benjamin Franklin to the 1987 U.S. Congress. The confederacys constitution, the Great Law of Peace, was published in text in the 19th century.

The convulsions of the American Revolution tore apart the quasi-singular confederacy. Grand Council chiefs couldnt agree on whether to support the Continental Army or the British. Some Haudenosaunee who backed the British resettled to the western frontier of the confederacy, delineated by Niagara Falls and under the Seneca nations general protection.

After the war, a portion of those who fled west were gifted land by the British monarchy in its Dominion of Canada. The subsequent establishment of Six Nations of the Grand Riverwhich exists to this daygave the splintered confederacy a second major pole of political society next to Onondaga. Much of the current Iroquois Nationals roster hails from Six Nations.

On the U.S. side, the fruit of revolution was quickly seen in the form of land prospectors, shaky treaties, and state-led contracts that devoured Indigenous territory up to its edges. Many acquisitions made then have been disputed in writing since the first U.S. administrations and still face lawsuits today.

The state of New York began transacting with native bands, a violation of the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which prohibits states from purchasing Native American land without federal approval. Indeed, an 1802 memo from then-U.S. President Thomas Jefferson queried the legality of land deals with the Seneca nation. But soon, plans were in place to link the Hudson River to the Great Lakes via the Mohawk Riverright through Haudenosaunee heartland. It was only the first project driven by private pockets that hastened after the War of 1812 and led to a precipitous loss of land. Between 1790 and 1825, nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy lost up to 99 percent of their territory.

In 1867, Britain passed a wedge of self-control back over to Ottawa in its Dominion of Canada. Lost in the shuffle was the transfer of Londons formalized recognition, decorated with a long-standing diplomatic protocol, of the confederacy as a foreign partner. Geopolitics and settler sovereignty were pivoting from seizing land to forced assimilation.

Canadas settler government swiftly ushered in the Gradual Enfranchisement Act, spiriting to dismantle native governments. Then came the Indian Act, a series of legislation beginning in the 1870s and resurging in 1921and still active todayseeking to belittle Indigenous nations via reserves, identification cards, and proxy councils as subsidiaries of the Dominion of Canada. The recent discovery of mass graves across Canada filled by remains of Indigenous children has exposed long-silenced massacres and reminded many of the forced relocation of the young to residential schools operating into the 1990s by the Canadian government.

Canada sought to eradicate nearly all aspects of Indigenous cultureexcept lacrosse. Canadians loved lacrosse. They loved it so much that, in 1859, Canada made lacrosse its national sport. But in 1880, Canadas lacrosse federation banished native athletes from playing.

Today, there are 193 U.N. member states but 206 active National Olympic Committees (NOCs) registered with the IOC. Although there arent many unrecognized nations competing in the Olympicsbesides Palestine, which has competed since 1996 and is a U.N. permanent observerthere are at least one dozen Olympic nations that are contracted in some form to other countries, often via a Compact of Free Association or otherwise delineated special relationship, Palau and Hong Kong among them.

Many of these anomalies can be understood as a result of arbitrating a confused category on the worlds modern map: the U.N. list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. Crossed down from 72 names in 1946 to 17 names today, the register functions both as a catalyst for emancipation and as a barrier to statehood. Being on the list isnt a prerequisite for Olympic credentials, but it is a bit of its own tenure track.

The U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoanone of which fight their own warsare on the U.N. list, and all are Olympic nations. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, made up of nations whose land has been decimated by colonial expansion and forced assimilationhas never made any list of non-self-governing territories and is neither an IOC nor U.N. member.

But its athletesin lacrosse, in particularhave already been bronzed by the Olympics well before the United Nations existed. After the IOC was founded in 1894, and following the success of the first modern games in Athens in 1896, both Canada and the United States yearned for lacrosse to be included. By the 1904 Games in St. Louis, it was an Olympic sport. Three teams from two NOCs competed: a U.S. team, a Canada team, and the Mohawk Indiansin some sources referenced as Iroquoisa team mostly from the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve carved from southern Ontario. The Mohawk team was sponsored by Canadas NOC.

When the United Nations was founded in 1945, the Haudenosaunee traveled to San Francisco for the new world bodys creation, which brought with it simultaneous waves of emancipation and codified order. In 1949, six chiefs of the confederacy attended the U.N. headquarters groundbreaking at 42nd Street in Manhattan with other heads of state. The New York Times reported they were the center of attraction. It didnt last.

As the tide of colonialism receded and people from India to the Democratic Republic of the Congo gained independence, they received a key ring to their new units of sovereignty: U.N. membership. The IOC swiftly ushered them in too, with NOC codes of their own. The confederacy and its pronounced desire to join the world wasnt forgotten; it was neglected. Should an attempt at participation, either limited or comprehensive, be made by the Nations of the Iroquois, a 1961 study of U.N. procedure and statehood found, it could not be entertained.

In 1977, a Haudenosaunee delegation traveled to Geneva to partake in a U.N. conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americasthe first time Indigenous delegations were invited to a U.N.-led event. The delegation was led by Oren Lyons, a member of Onondaga nation and a multiple All-American lacrosse star for nearby Syracuse University.

They traveled on new Haudenosaunee passports, brown booklets with Hau de no sau nee Passport written on the cover. The document befuddled Swiss border police, who suggested they allow the delegation into the country on a special permit instead.

According to a Mohawk newsletter covering the trip, a delegate swiftly rebuked the Swiss guard, lecturing that a special permit dared to undermine the validity of the Haudenosaunee passport.

The important thing is not to get in but that every step of the way, our validity as Indian nations is recognized, one delegated reportedly said.

The standoff eased when the Swiss officials clarified entry permits were standard for passports from all nations Switzerland had yet to formalize relations with, and the stamp endorsed freedom of that passport. So, stamped passports in hand, the new diplomats walked into Europe.

Although the Geneva trip fell short of clinching formal U.N. recognition for the confederacy, its new Haudenosaunee passports would prove key to entering a tinier, cliquey, and humble club: that of international lacrosse competition.

Thanks in part to Lyons leadership, more Haudenosaunee athletes joined collegiate teams in the 1970sin addition to running their own native leagueand, by 1980, overtures grew between tendrils of sporting federations and Indigenous athletes.

The Haudenosaunees first chance was an amateur tournament held in Vancouver in 1980, with U.S. and Canadian national teams also competing. Lyons, together with a Tuscarora student named Rick Hill and a stick-maker named Wesley Patterson, slapped up a Haudenosaunee All-Star team and won second place. Well-respected in the sport, Lyons represented a bridge between the litism of formal Canadian and American organizing bodies and native athletes, argued Allan Downey, a professor of history at McMaster University, in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association.

After the tournament, some suggested the Iroquois Nationals apply to the then-named International Lacrosse Federation (ILF). Impressed by the teams success and charmed by its effort, the ILF members at the timethe United States, Canada, England, and Australiaoutlined a series of challenges, essentially requiring the group to prove itself capable to field a viable national teamfinancially, competitively, and politically.

In 1983 at Onondaga, the Grand Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy formally sanctioned the Iroquois Nationals as the official team representing its nations. The declaration was formative to Haudenosaunee history, centering the confederacy on a single unit. For the Grand Council, it was a fundamental and explicit move to pivot to traditional culture and philosophy as opposed to, say, proliferating casinos. It also offered a potential track to national recognition.

Ahead of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, Lyons and the Iroquois Nationals helped host the Jim Thorpe Memorial Pow-Wow and Native Games, which brought members of more than 40 native nations and the national teams of Australia, Canada, England, and the United States together. That year, a womens team was also founded. In 1985, the Iroquois Nationals toured England, successfully journeying on Haudenosaunee passports as they had in Switzerland.

In 1987, the ILF admitted Iroquois Nationals as the national team of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, making it the fifth member of their federation. ILF membership hoisted new scaffolding around the concept of Haudenosaunee nationhood as a physical sovereign unit: Only after the Iroquois Nationals formed did the Haudenosaunee Confederacy design a national flag and compose a national anthem.

Since then, the Iroquois Nationals presence has been irksome, everything from a media headache to a political controversy to a fetish. As the Haudenosaunee passport grew famous and the team ascended global ranks, it was perceived as both an unbeatable Goliath and lacrosses golden ticket.

Iroquois Nationals tryouts brought athletes from all six nations of the confederacy. The first match was in Perth, Australia, in 1990. It was a big deal from the beginning: The Iroquois Nationals arrived on Haudenosaunee passports, the Haudenosaunee flag was flown, and the team lost every game. From there, things could only go up.

By 2006, Nike inked a deal with the Iroquois Nationals, which has been continually renewed since. More than a modeling gig, Nike provides the team with footwear, clothing, and equipment. It was one of the first-ever deals between a Native American nation and a Fortune 500 company and has since been renewed and expanded. It also instilled a confident, motivated momentum in the team, which has lingered with the medal circle; this was seen particularly in its new recruits, who would lift a golden generation of Iroquois lacrosse.

But the Iroquois Nationals newfound prominence also drew scrutiny to the Haudenosaunee passport, a growing symbol of the confederacys broader pursuit for recognition of its sovereignty.

In 2010, the now-named Federation of International Lacrosse (FIL) championships were held in Manchester, England. Although a Haudenosaunee delegation had traveled to Sweden earlier that year without issue, both the United Kingdom and the United States said they would not honor the Haudenosaunee passports, nominally due to post-9/11 security standards.

The United States offered to deliver emergency U.S. passports, but the teams athletes refused.

The Iroquois Nationals became stranded in Manhattan, and the ordeal created a diplomatic crisis. By the time then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved travel on Haudenosaunee passports, U.K authorities said it had no guarantee the travelers would be permitted to return. In 2015, the United Kingdom again barred the Haudenosaunee womens lacrosse team from entering on Haudenosaunee passports to compete in Scotland.

When Haudenosaunee passports work, its often with prearranged clearance. Outside of athletics, citizens have traveled on Haudenosaunee passports around the world: in 2004 to Japan; many times to Switzerland; in 2010 to Bolivia, El Salvador, and Peru; to New Zealand and Venezuela, and through much of the European Union. (The EU, for its part, continues to list the Haudenosaunee passport as a fantasy passport.)

Since 2006, when the confederacy formed a Documentation Committee, it has been working to update travel documents consistent with international standards. In February 2008, a Haudenosaunee delegation met with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian Embassy in Washington to iron out details. In March, the Grand Council of Chiefs chose to contract Siemens AG for $1.5 million to manufacture new biometric passports. When the prototypes of the new passports finally arrived in 2009, however, some key features were absent, such as the microchip.

In 2015, the Iroquois Nationals hosted the World Indoor Lacrosse Championships in Onondaga. The theme was lacrosse comes home, and rather than travel on their own passports, the Haudenosaunee stamped those of visiting nations. The tournamentthe first ever global sporting event hosted by an Indigenous nationproved to be a success. It was attended by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and 12 passport-carrying nations, from Israel to Australia to Serbia. (Canada refused to get its passports stamped by the Haudenosaunee hosts.) The Iroquois Nationals opened the tournament by beating the United States.

The now-2022 World Lacrosse Championships; 2022 World Games, and 2028 Olympics will all be in the United States, effectively removing the obstacle of Haudenosaunee passport trouble from the Iroquois Nationals Olympic path. But going from FIL competition to the Olympics still means a second layer of legal vetting and political scrutiny that will involve encountering the United Nationswhether by announcement or vote.

The United Nations celebrates Indigenous issues but has kept expressions of sovereignty at arms-length. From the outset of the Iroquois Nationals membership to the ILFnow the FILthere was pushback from Canada and Australia, which had concerns about whether and how the Iroquois precedent might affect Indigenous aspirations in their own territories. When a 2007 U.N. nonbinding Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed overwhelmingly, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Statesall settler colonial states with major Indigenous groupsdid not vote for it.

The most promising precedent for a special Olympic invite may be the IOCs special refugee team. With help from the United Nations, the IOC cobbled together a squad of athletes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Syria to draw attention to migration crises. Its launch was announced during the 70th session of the General Assembly in 2015. The team also featured in Tokyo this year, bulked up by the presence of athletes from a number of new countries who competed in 13 sports. The IOC is planning for a refugee team to reappear for the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

If the Iroquois Nationals and theHaudenosauneeflag meet Olympic fanfare in 2028, some post-colonial governments with active Indigenous minorities could see power slipping through their hands, said Helen Lenskyj, a professor emerita at the University of Toronto who is an Olympics specialist. The Olympic Games recognize a nation in quite a remarkable way, she continued. It might be a slippery slope.

In 2000, when Australian sprinter Cathy Freeman won the 100 meter dash at the Sydney Olympics and did a lap of the field waving an Australian aboriginal flag, it did not go over well in the upper echelons of Australian politics, Lenskyj said.

In recent years, a proliferation of National Olympic Committees have formed throughout semi-autonomous regions, including Somaliland, Macao, Gibraltar, Catalonia, the Faroe Islands, and New Zealands island of Niueall for a chance at the world stage to win a medal.

In the interim, Indigenous nations do what they can: wear hearts on sleeveswith a bazaar of merchandise. Iroquois Nationals gear gets scooped on eBay for hundreds of dollars in bidding wars. An Iroquois Nationals helmet was up for $600. A T-shirt went for $80. And a vintage baseball cap is going for nearly $70. Nike has partnered with the Iroquois Nationals and Thompson Brothers Lacrosse.

But bling doesnt erase red tape. The Iroquois Nationals would like to be in Los Angeles in 2028, in time to meet up with its pastime and win. It needs a way to transform the Haudenosaunee lacrosse federation into a fully fledged NOC.

An NOC requires at least five different sports be represented. In a Haudenosaunee NOC, there could be room for an ice hockey teamalso popular with native athletesas well as baseball or swimming. There is already a Native American Olympic Team Foundation, which counts Lyons as a board member.

On the public relations side, things have been moving swiftly in the months since the World Games reversed its decision to exclude the Iroquois Nationals from the 2022 World Games. In addition to gaining new visibility on social media, the U.S. and Canadian National Olympic Committees signed on in support of the Iroquois Nationals.

Now, the team and Haudenosaunee leaders are working to form a National Olympic Committee and are coordinating with now-named World Lacrosse, the World Games, and the International Olympic Committee. Theyre keeping their fingers crossed that U.S. President Joe Bidens Syracuse connectionhe studied law at the university, graduating in 1968could help.

Meanwhile, the Haudenosaunee will revisit its application for U.N. membership, according to some of the confederacys leaders.

Like many Haudenosaunee, Thompson, widely regarded as the best lacrosse player on the planet, calls lacrosse our vehicle.

Lyons, at age 90, likes the phrase flagship. They have a flag. They want the championship.

But Rick Hill is more philosophical.

The ball will go where the ball will go, Hill told Foreign Policy, and we hope it goes to the back of Canadas net.

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Lacrosse Returns to Olympics in 2028but Will the Sport's Indigenous Founders Be Allowed to Play? - Foreign Policy