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Lacrosse History
By
Thomas Vennum Jr.
Author of American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War
Lacrosse
was one of many varieties of indigenous stickball games being played
by American Indians at the time of European contact. Almost exclusively
a male team sport, it is distinguished from the others, such as field
hockey or shinny, by the use of a netted racquet with which to pick
the ball off the ground, throw, catch and convey it into or past a
goal to score a point. The cardinal rule in all varieties of lacrosse
was that the ball, with few exceptions, must not be touched with the
hands.
Early data on lacrosse, from missionaries such as French Jesuits in Huron country
in the 1630s and English explorers, such as Jonathan Carver in the mid-eighteenth
century Great Lakes area, are scant and often conflicting. They inform us mostly
about team size, equipment used, the duration of games and length of playing
fields but tell us almost nothing about stickhandling, game strategy, or the
rules of play. The oldest surviving sticks date only from the first quarter
of the nineteenth century, and the first detailed reports on Indian lacrosse
are even later. George Beers provided good information on Mohawk playing techniques
in his Lacrosse (1869), while James Mooney in the American Anthropologist (1890)
described in detail the "[Eastern] Cherokee Ball-Play," including
its legendary basis, elaborate rituals, and the rules and manner of play.
Given the paucity of early data, we shall probably never be able to reconstruct
the history of the sport. Attempts to connect it to the rubber-ball games of
Meso-America or to a perhaps older game using a single post surmounted by some
animal effigy and played together by men and women remain speculative. As can
best be determined, the distribution of lacrosse shows it to have been played
throughout the eastern half of North America, mostly by tribes in the southeast,
around the western Great Lakes, and in the St. Lawrence Valley area. Its presence
today in Oklahoma and other states west of the Mississippi reflects tribal
removals to those areas in the nineteenth century. Although isolated reports
exist of some form of lacrosse among northern California and British Columbia
tribes, their late date brings into question any widespread diffusion of the
sport on the west coast.
On the basis of the equipment, the type of goal used and the stick-handling
techniques, it is possible to discern three basic forms of lacrosse—the
southeastern, Great Lakes, and Iroquoian. Among southeastern tribes (Cherokee,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, Yuchi and others), a double-stick version
of the game is still practiced. A two-and-a half foot stick is held in each
hand, and the soft, small deerskin ball is retrieved and cupped between them.
Great Lakes players (Ojibwe, Menominee, Potawatomi, Sauk, Fox, Miami, Winnebago,
Santee Dakota and others) used a single three-foot stick. It terminates in
a round, closed pocket about three to four inches in diameter, scarcely larger
than the ball, which was usually made of wood, charred and scraped to shape.
The northeastern stick, found among Iroquoian and New England tribes, is the
progenitor of all present-day sticks, both in box as well as field lacrosse.
The longest of the three—usually more than three feet—it was characterized
by its shaft ending in a sort of crook and a large, flat triangular surface
of webbing extending as much as two-thirds the length of the stick. Where the
outermost string meets the shaft, it forms the pocket of the stick.
Lacrosse was given its name by early French settlers, using the generic term
for any game played with a curved stick (crosse) and a ball. Native terminology,
however, tends to describe more the technique (cf. Onondaga DEHUNTSHIGWA'ES, "men
hit a rounded object") or, especially in the southeast, to underscore
the game's aspects of war surrogacy ("little brother of war"). There
is no evidence of non-Indians taking up the game until the mid-nineteenth century,
when English-speaking Montrealers adopted the Mohawk game they were familiar
with from Caughnawauga and Akwesasne, attempted to "civilize" the
sport with a new set of rules and organize into amateur clubs. Once the game
quickly grew in popularity in Canada, it began to be exported throughout the
Commonwealth, as non-native teams travelled to Europe for exhibition matches
against Iroquois players. Ironically, because Indians had to charge money in
order to travel, they were excluded as "professionals" from international
competition for more than a century. Only with the formation of the Iroquois
Nationals in the 1980s did they successfully break this barrier and become
eligible to compete in World Games.
Apart from its recreational function, lacrosse traditionally played a more
serious role in Indian culture. Its origins are rooted in legend, and the game
continues to be used for curative purposes and surrounded with ceremony. Game
equipment and players are still ritually prepared by conjurers, and team selection
and victory are often considered supernaturally controlled. In the past, lacrosse
also served to vent aggression, and territorial disputes between tribes were
sometimes settled with a game, although not always amicably. A Creek versus
Choctaw game around 1790 to determine rights over a beaver pond broke out into
a violent battle when the Creeks were declared winners. Still, while the majority
of the games ended peaceably, much of the ceremonialism surrounding their preparations
and the rituals required of the players were identical to those practiced before
departing on the warpath.
A number of factors led to the demise of lacrosse in many areas by the late
nineteenth century. Wagering on games had always been integral to an Indian
community's involvement, but when betting and violence saw an increase as traditional
Indian culture was eroding, it sparked opposition to lacrosse from government
officials and missionaries. The games were felt to interfere with church attendance
and the wagering to have an impoverishing effect on the Indians. When Oklahoma
Choctaw began to attach lead weights to their sticks around 1900 to use them
as skull-crackers, the game was outright banned.
Meanwhile, the spread of non-native lacrosse from the Montreal area eventually
led to its position today worldwide as one of the fastest growing sports (more
than half a million players), controlled by official regulations and played
with manufactured rather than hand-made equipment—the aluminum shafted
stick with its plastic head, for example. While the Great Lakes traditional
game died out by 1950, the Iroquois and southeastern tribes continue to play
their own forms of lacrosse. Ironically, the field lacrosse game of non-native
women today most closely resembles the Indian game of the past, retaining the
wooden stick, lacking the protective gear and demarcated sidelines of the men's
game, and tending towards mass attack rather than field positions and offsides.
Bibliography:
Culin, Stewart. "Games of the North American Indians." In Twenty
fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902-1903, pp. 1-840.
Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907.
Fogelson, Raymond. "The Cherokee Ball Game: A Study in Southeastern Ethnology." Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1962.
Vennum, Thomas Jr. American India Lacrosse: Little Brother of War. Washington,
D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
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