Before it was ours,
it was theirs.

This one is different.

You know us. We are the two guys who cry about ground balls and argue about a town championship from 1987. Most weeks this space is for jokes. Not this week.

We have spent our whole lives around this game. Frozen fields in New England, warm ones down here in Carolina, and now Wednesday nights watching your kids at Smith Turf. And somewhere along the way, both of us realized we knew embarrassingly little about where lacrosse actually comes from. So this offseason we did the homework. We read everything the Onondaga Nation publishes about the game. We read the Smithsonian. We read about a team that plays under its own flag and a country that gave up its seat so they could.

What we found is the best sports story either of us has ever come across. It is also a hard story in places, and we are not going to soften those parts. The kids in this league deserve the real one.

A gift, not an invention.

Nobody invented lacrosse the way somebody invented basketball. There is no Dr. Naismith, no peach basket, no date on a plaque. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the six nations of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, teach that the game was given to them by the Creator, to be played for the Creator’s enjoyment, to settle disputes, and to heal the sick. That is why it is called the Creator’s Game. It has been played on this continent for something close to a thousand years, and by some accounts longer.

The earliest games would break your brain a little. Entire villages played against entire villages. Hundreds of players on a side. Goals could be set miles apart, and a single game could run from sunup to sundown, sometimes for days. It trained young men for hunting and for battle, it settled arguments between nations before they became wars, and it bound communities together.

The game had many names, because many nations played it. Here are a few.

The name we all use came later. French missionaries watching the game in the 1630s thought the netted stick looked like a bishop’s staff, la crosse, and the name stuck. The oldest written account we have is from a Jesuit missionary named Jean de Brébeuf in 1636, who watched the Wendat people play and wrote about villages betting beaver robes on the outcome. Which means the first European to ever see lacrosse immediately started talking about it like a fan. Some things never change.

The Medicine Game.

Here is the part that stopped both of us cold. To the Haudenosaunee, lacrosse is not only a sport. It is medicine.

At Onondaga, games are played to heal the sick, to honor those who have passed, and to give thanks. When someone in the community falls ill, a medicine game can be organized on their behalf. The energy of the game itself is understood to carry healing power. This is not a legend about the old days. It happens now, this year, on Haudenosaunee territory in New York and Ontario.

And the stick is at the center of all of it. In Haudenosaunee tradition, a baby is given a small wooden stick in the crib. That stick, and the ones that follow it, stay with a player for life. When a Haudenosaunee lacrosse player passes away, they are buried with their stick, so they can keep playing the Creator’s Game on the other side.

“When we play a game here on Mother Earth, a game is taking place up there in the Land of the Creator at the same time.”

Chief Irving Powless, Onondaga Nation

The traditional stick is carved from hickory, steamed and bent by hand by craftsmen whose knowledge passes down through families. Every part of it means something.

Most players today, including everyone in this league, run plastic heads and metal shafts. But at the highest levels of the game, you will still see Haudenosaunee players warming up with wooden sticks. When you see one, you are looking at the oldest piece of equipment in American sports, still in active service.

This happened here, too.

You do not have to look to New York or Canada for this history. It is a three hour drive west on I-40.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, in the mountains of western North Carolina, have played their own version of the stick game for centuries. It is called anetso, and it is played with two small sticks, one in each hand, and a walnut sized leather ball. Historically it was known as the little brother of war, because it could settle a dispute between towns or nations before anyone had to fight one. There is a record of the Cherokee settling an actual land dispute on the outcome of a stickball game, which is, frankly, a better system than most of what we have come up with since.

These games were the first large scale spectator sporting events in North Carolina history, drawing huge crowds in the 1800s. And anetso is not a museum piece. The Eastern Band still plays it, most visibly at the Cherokee Indian Fair every fall, no pads, no shirts, no timeouts. If your family ever makes the trip to Cherokee, NC, go watch. Tell your kids that what they are looking at is the older cousin of what they play on Wednesdays.

So when a kid in Greensboro picks up a stick, they are not borrowing a northern tradition. They are standing in a game that native people played across this entire state, and this entire continent, long before any of our families got here.

The long road.

Here is where the story gets harder, and where we owe it to the game to tell it straight. The people who were given this game were, for about a century, shut out of it.

Why our banners say what they say.

The Drew League calls lacrosse the Creator’s Game on purpose. Not as a slogan. As a debt.

Every kid in this league is playing a borrowed game. That is not a guilt trip, it is an honor, and it comes with a small job: know whose game it is, say the names right, and carry the values the game was given with. The Haudenosaunee played to heal people, to settle arguments without fighting, and to bind a community together. If that is not a youth sports mission statement, we do not know what is.

So here is what honoring the Creator’s Game looks like at our level. Play hard and play generously, because the game was a gift and gifts get shared. Respect the whistle, your opponent, and the field, because the original game settled conflicts instead of starting them. And when the Haudenosaunee Nationals play on television, and in 2028 they just might, make sure your kids are watching. Tell them that team did not adopt lacrosse. Lacrosse came from them.

“You're not gonna take it and not take us with it, because you can't be about us without us.”

Claudia Jimerson, Haudenosaunee Nationals

Chip's Corner and Chirp's Calls.

Read the sources. Seriously, read them.

Everything above is drawn from these. The first two are worth your whole coffee break.

• Lacrosse at Onondaga · Onondaga NationThe game in the Nation's own words: Deyhontsigwa'ehs, the Medicine Game, and what the stick means.
• The Creator's Game · Smithsonian National Museum of the American IndianThe full history, including the 1867 and 1880 exclusions and the rise of the Nationals.
• Will the game's creators make the 2028 Olympics?The current fight for a Haudenosaunee flag in Los Angeles, including the stick symbolism quoted above.
• Joint US and Canada statement on Haudenosaunee Olympic participationTwo countries formally asking the IOC to make the exception.
• Ireland bows out so the Nationals can play · NPRThe 2020 gesture that the lacrosse world will never forget.
• The 2010 passport standoff · CBCThe team that stayed home rather than travel as anyone but themselves.
• Cherokee stickball · Eastern Band of Cherokee IndiansAnetso today in western North Carolina, in the Eastern Band's own words.
• Stickball · NCpediaThe game's deep history in North Carolina, including the state's first big spectator events.
• Origin and history · World LacrosseThe sport's global governing body on where it all comes from.
• Haudenosaunee Nationals · background and current statusA running record of the team and the Olympic question, updated as it develops.