The Creator’s Game: Keeping Traditions Alive Through Lacrosse

More than just a game

Takapsicapi, Peekitahaminki, and Caabnąįkiisik are just a few names of the game played in North America long before French settlers arrived and gave it their own name: “lacrosse.”

Lacrosse is the oldest sport in North America’s history. To people Indigenous to North America, it’s more than just a game: it’s a gift from the Creator and a way to teach their children traditional values. 

In Menominee stories, in which the Creator made the earth, he also made spirits in the form of animals. These animals were the first lacrosse players and held their games on fields spanning hundreds of miles across the Great Lakes region, from Green Bay to Chicago to Detroit.

While the stories behind, rules of, and reasons for playing the Creator’s Game vary among Tribes and Nations, most early lacrosse matches included 100 to 1,000 men or more. These players used wooden sticks, sometimes with net baskets or pockets attached, and small, deer hide-wrapped balls. Borderless fields could span miles, and games could last days. It was a game played to prepare for war, but it was also a social event during which, trades were made and disputes were settled. Among many Tribes, the game was as much a mystic ceremony as a sport, preceded by complex rituals and a solemn dance.

In the 1800s, the US government began assimilating Native children in boarding schools: a process that included many efforts at cultural erasure, including the prohibition of lacrosse and its replacement with baseball. Native men excelled at baseball, forming organized baseball teams and playing in minor leagues nationwide throughout the 1930s and 1940s. 

Some of these baseball players took on an instrumental role in reasserting tribal sovereignty. In Wisconsin, the men on the Ho-Chunk baseball team helped obtain federal recognition of their tribe—a political shift that made way for the return of lacrosse, too. However: the game they played in the twentieth century had changed over time. 

While lacrosse was and is still played across Tribes and Nations for many purposes,  modern sticks and the most widely-followed rules of the game are based on lacrosse played by Eastern tribes, like the Haudenosaunee. The traditional Great Lakes style of lacrosse played by the Ho-Chunk was seemingly lost following the assimilation of the 1800s: the history of stickmaking, rules and regulations, and cultural connections were puzzle pieces spread across time and space, waiting to be put back together in the 21st century. 

Great Lakes-style lacrosse returns to the Miami Tribe

How does one go about playing a game that hasn’t been played in 200 years? First: by recreating community.

The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, another Great Lakes Nation whose original homelands lie within the boundaries of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, lower Michigan, and lower Wisconsin, began years of research to recover scattered lacrosse knowledge. After decades of playing with modern rules and sticks, members of the Tribe read and searched for historical references on how they played lacrosse before contact with Europeans. They researched how sticks were made, found clues, and sought out other Great Lakes tribal communities, like the Menominee, for their resources and information.

In 2017, George Strack, George Ironstrack, Jodie Gamble, and Gamble’s sons—all members of the Miami Nation— traveled to visit the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. There, they met people who still knew the rules and traditions surrounding the game: a lack of “out-of-bounds” territory, players of all ages, a sapling for a goal but no goalies guarding it, wooden balls with holes whistling across the field, and a meal shared by everyone after the game’s end.

They also learned how to make Great Lakes-style lacrosse sticks and brought back this knowledge to other Miami Tribe members, like Doug Peconge. 

As a young kid, Peconge attended lacrosse games and developed an interest in the sport. As an adult with 17 years of experience in IT and mechanical engineering, an enrolled member of the Miami Tribe, and Kiihkayonki American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) project manager for the Tribe in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that interest became an opportunity to rebuild a community. 

“We had conflicts, wars, loss of land, loss of resources, two removals–all those things take a toll on that cultural knowledge,” said Peconge. “What the tribe has done is pick up those threads of knowledge along the way, and lacrosse is one of those threads.” 

Between 2018 and 2019, Peconge spent 6 months making 75 wooden lacrosse sticks in the Great Lakes style. When they were used for a lacrosse game in June 2019, it was likely the first the Miami Tribe had gathered as a community and played with their traditional rules and sticks since their ancestors were forcibly removed from their homes and ways of life two centuries earlier. 

“When we pick up a Great Lakes stick, it’s a closer connection to our ancestors because that’s the type of lacrosse sticks that they would have held in their hands and played with on that open field,” says Peconge. “This is a connection to us and our relatives who have passed on.” 

Visit The Creator’s Game in Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories to learn more.