Most lacrosse players tell the same story of falling in love with the game: It started with the stick. From the game’s traditional strongholds in Canada and the American Northeast and mid-Atlantic to 21st-century hotbeds like Colorado, Florida, Israel and Japan, male and female players alike recount that moment they first picked one up — whether titanium or wood, whether a standard 40-inch stick or a defenseman’s six-foot pole — and felt its potential for trickery, firepower, a bit of swagger. But nowhere does the bond with the lacrosse stick run deeper than in the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Located mostly in central New York and Ontario, its peoples — the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora Nations, formerly known collectively as the Iroquois — have been playing lacrosse for nearly 1,000 years. Though they adapted masterfully to the lighter, tougher, cheaper artificial materials that have revolutionized stick design over the past five decades, the wood stick retains its profound importance for the Haudenosaunee. Male newborns are often given miniature “cradle sticks”; men are buried with their favorite stick. The Onondaga attackman Lyle Thompson, 32, one of the greatest ever to play lacrosse, considered his childhood stick a living entity — “my best friend,” he calls it — and wept the day it broke.
The use of a wood stick these days is mostly talismanic. The Haudenosaunee Nationals — one of the world’s best national lacrosse teams — started every game at the most recent men’s world field championships, in San Diego in 2023, by having a defender use a wood stick for one shift. Three weeks later, when a six-person Haudenosaunee delegation attended a private, high-stakes White House meeting with United States officials, they brought one of those sticks from San Diego. Their mission, in part, was to press their case for the Nationals to be included on the biggest international stage of all, the Olympic Games.
At the time, LA28, the organizing committee of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, was on the cusp of adding lacrosse. But though the lacrosse World Championships have included the Haudenosaunee Nationals since 1990, making them the only Indigenous national team accepted by a major international sports federation, the International Olympic Committee does not consider the Haudenosaunee eligible as a national team, and thus is not allowing them to participate in the Games.
International competition has long been the most prominent vehicle for Haudenosaunee sovereignty and pride. When the team traveled to Perth, Australia, for its World Championship debut in 1990, for example, it did so using partly handwritten Haudenosaunee passports; when it took the field there, it did so with a newly created national flag and anthem. “That was: Here we are,” says Sidney Hill, a player on that team who would go on to become tadadaho, or the leader of the Six Nations that make up the Haudenosaunee. “Being recognized as a nation. We have our land, we have our language, our culture — what land we have left. We’re still here. We’re still going.”
Hill was part of the delegation that met with senior Biden administration officials, including Tom Perez, the director of intergovernmental affairs, and PaaWee Rivera, the director of tribal affairs. One purpose of the visit was to get the administration to back their cause and, when the time came, perhaps even lobby the I.O.C. on behalf of the Haudenosaunee. The wood stick was presented as a gift to Perez. The gesture was hardly needed. “Going into the meeting, it was a no-brainer in my mind,” Perez told me. “There was never any persuading that anyone had to do.” He was already “really excited” by the idea of the Haudenosaunee competing in the Olympics, on American soil.
The meeting in Washington laid the groundwork for the most significant development in one of the thorniest, most intriguing and still unresolved issues in the run-up to the Los Angeles Olympics. When the I.O.C. finally admitted lacrosse to the Games in October 2023, its president, Thomas Bach, noted the game’s place in American history: “This is the sport — if I may say — of the First Nations of the U.S.” Despite that acknowledgment, and the celebratory reaction from Haudenosaunee, days later the I.O.C. stated that its official position was that the Olympic charter prevents Haudenosaunee participation and that its athletes could try out for the United States or Canada teams.
In early December 2023, President Biden addressed hundreds of Indigenous leaders at the White House Tribal Nations Summit. Toward the end of his campaign-style remarks, which centered on his administration’s investment in Indigenous communities, he declared that the Haudenosaunee should be able to compete under their “own tribal flag” in Los Angeles. “Their ancestors invented the game,” Biden said. “They perfected it for a millennia. Their circumstances are unique, and they should be granted an exception to field their own team at the Olympics.” Just hours later, Canada’s sports minister issued a similar call.
Four days before leaving office in January this year, the Biden administration — in a joint statement with Canada — repeated its support for the Haudenosaunee: “While we respect the I.O.C.’s independence, we encourage the I.O.C. to take advantage of this historic opportunity.” The I.O.C. responded with silence. When I contacted the organization the following month, an I.O.C. spokesperson restated its stance: “Only National Olympic Committees (N.O.C.s) recognized by the I.O.C. can enter teams for the Olympic Games in accordance with the Olympic Charter.” Asked for an update in May, an I.O.C. spokesperson told me, “Please note that our position remains the same.”
For now, the vision for lacrosse at the 2028 Games is equal parts joyous and fraught. The last time it was seen at the Olympics, in London in 1948, only men from Britain and the United States took part. Powered in large part by the boom in women’s collegiate programs, no American team sport has grown faster in recent decades; last month, World Lacrosse, the sport’s governing body, added Bangladesh as its 94th member nation. When the smaller, speedier version of the game, called sixes, is played in Los Angeles, lacrosse will return to the Olympics transformed. But if the sport’s originators are shut out, will this still be considered a triumph?
“When you’re a male and you’re born, you’re one of three things,” Rex Lyons, a former star attackman and a board member of the Haudenosaunee Nationals, told me. “You’re a speaker, which means you speak the languages and do the ceremonies. Or you’re a singer of the songs that you need for the ceremonies. Or you’re a lacrosse player.” He went on: “It’s not a casual thing. It’s a part of our culture, our cosmology, our creation story.”
And yet lacrosse has also been another means of Haudenosaunee displacement. The Canadian colonies became a single dominion within the British Empire on July 1, 1867, now celebrated as Canada’s birthday; that same month, W. George Beers, known as the father of modern lacrosse, published his rules of field lacrosse. In 1868, organizers adopted a slate that included Rule IX, Section 6: “No Indian must play in a match for a white club, unless previously agreed upon.” In 1880, the sport’s ruling body, the National Amateur Lacrosse Association, effectively banned the Iroquois from their own sport.
While Haudenosaunee men never stopped playing medicine games — competitions staged to foster communal healing and, to this day, featuring only wood sticks — the secular discipline of field lacrosse in Iroquoia gave way, in the 1930s, to indoor, or “box,” lacrosse, invented to fill unused rinks when hockey was out of season. In its speed and violence and emphasis on individual play, box lacrosse was deemed far closer in spirit to the Indigenous game than the version codified by Beers. Field lacrosse, meanwhile, seeded by a southward flood of Canadian immigrants in the late 19th century, took root across New England, New York and the Baltimore area. For nearly a century, it has found its most familiar expression in the 10-man games played in prep schools and American colleges. Though a steady trickle of intrepid Haudenosaunee played at Syracuse University, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the Iroquois began seriously competing in field lacrosse again.
In 1983, an Onondaga faithkeeper named Oren Lyons helped found the Iroquois Nationals. (His son, Rex, played on the team’s debut World Championship roster.) Lyons — Seneca-born and Onondaga-adopted — played at Syracuse in the mid-1950s, where he was an all-American goalie and a teammate of Jim Brown, who, before he became an N.F.L. star, was considered one of lacrosse’s all-time greats. Lyons would go on to became one of the country’s most prominent Indigenous activists, protesting for Onondaga rights with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971, for example, and addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1992. Lyons and the 50-man Grand Council of Chiefs viewed the Nationals as a way to showcase Haudenosaunee identity and gain international recognition. Lacrosse was a medal sport in the 1904 and 1908 Olympic Games, and a demonstration sport in 1928, 1932 and 1948. Lyons was one of few in the sport who spoke of its returning. As he told a reporter in 1983, “I am confident that when the day comes, when the time comes, we will be there.”
From that moment to the day, in 1987, when the sport’s ruling body granted full membership to the Haudenosaunee, and through their rise into the field game’s elite, the coverage from mainstream media was framed mostly as a sports story: the reclaiming, by Indigenous North Americans, of their game, played their way. Canadian players, with skills also honed playing box, come closest; emblematic stars of both nations can pass and shoot out of the tightest scrums, dazzle with behind-the-head or -back stickwork. But because Haudenosaunee lacrosse is meant to “entertain” the Creator by being played with a “clear mind,” what matters most is how the game is played. Turnovers induce no guilt. Defense is secondary. “Just like street ball for basketball — there’s structure, but not a whole lot,” says Jerome (Hiana) Thompson, a Nationals veteran and a member — with his brothers Miles, Jeremy and Lyle — of one of the most accomplished families in lacrosse history. “You create. I try to figure it out on the spot — how to get open or get guys open.”
That run-and-gun mentality, combined with the absence of a regimented youth-to-college pipeline, makes for unpredictable, and often astonishing, play. A goal scored by the Albany attackman Ty Thompson — a cousin of the four brothers — in 2014 against Siena was received in lacrosse circles as both revelatory and unsurprising. A lefty, Thompson flipped the stick to his right hand and, while on the run, casually skipped the ball behind his back and past the goalie. “Their body control is different,” says Shamel Bratton, who was a two-time all-American at the University of Virginia. “How they use their stick at the release point is just really cool: stop, start, hesitation — so you almost always are on the defensive, because you don’t want them to use your body weight against you. There’s all sorts of craziness.”
But competing as a national team, for the Haudenosaunee, has always been as much about asserting national identity as athletic identity. Onondaga Nation, the confederacy’s political and spiritual capital, has long been the Six Nations’ most zealous defender of Haudenosaunee autonomy, which is rooted in a treaty signed by George Washington in 1794, one that the U.S. has honored every year since with an annual payment of $4,500 in cloth or other goods. Onondaga leadership set the team’s tone: Traveling as a Haudenosaunee citizen — then winning — was paramount. When the Nationals played overseas for the first time, in 1985, England accepted their Haudenosaunee passports; to the Haudenosaunee, this amounted to a de facto diplomatic recognition of statehood that was repeated whenever they have successfully crossed another border.
But the 9/11 attacks prompted stricter standards for travel documents. When Britain refused to honor Haudenosaunee passports in 2010 and 2015, their teams pulled out of the world championships. Israel’s reluctance to accept their passports — without a guarantee from Canada that it would welcome the team’s return — nearly derailed the Haudenosaunee men, en route to Netanya for the 2018 world championship. It took two days of calls, texts and emails among tournament staff, Israeli and Canadian government officials and the Taiwanese Canadian billionaire (and now the Brooklyn Nets owner) Joe Tsai to gain both nations’ last-minute assent. Getting through one of the world’s most restrictive border controls — just hours before a scheduled showdown between the Nationals and the United States — represented perhaps the program’s most nerve-racking coup. Had the Haudenosaunee missed a third championship in eight years, they would have been hit with crippling financial and competitive sanctions. “We would’ve been done,” Oren Lyons told me later that year. “It would’ve been the end — absolutely.”
For a sport, gaining entree to the Olympics can be a process as arduous as the competitions themselves. The push for lacrosse began in earnest in 2008, led by Tom Hayes, a former head coach at Rutgers. His faith in the game’s appeal — “The stick is magic!” he often said — never wavered. As the development director at the Federation of International Lacrosse, Hayes shouldered the early grunt work for satisfying I.O.C. requirements: signing onto the World Anti-Doping Agency’s code and its Olympic-level testing regimens; expanding the number of countries that played lacrosse; joining Olympic-style organizations like the International World Games Association. By 2016, these efforts had helped persuade Tsai, who made the lacrosse team at Yale as a walk-on, to pledge $2.5 million to the federation’s operating budget. This enabled it to hire — as its first full-time employee — a former head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Jim Scherr, to be its chief executive.
Lacrosse’s goal of entering the 2028 Olympics received its first official encouragement toward the end of 2018, when the I.O.C. provisionally recognized the sport’s governing body, which soon afterward rebranded itself as World Lacrosse. A name change was not its only modification. In keeping with the I.O.C.’s effort to reduce the Games’ size and cost, the federation also began developing a new version of the outdoor game, sixes, with vastly reduced field dimensions, shorter games and shot clocks and smaller lineups and rosters. The plan was to debut sixes officially at the 2021 World Games in Birmingham, Ala. The event, a quadrennial festival for non-Olympic sports, has often served as a trial platform from which individual sports have gone on to become part of the Olympics. It also follows I.O.C. eligibility requirements.
In late 2019 World Lacrosse announced the eight men’s teams invited to the World Games. The Haudenosaunee, then ranked No. 3 in the world, were conspicuously absent; an uproar ensued. One Canadian lacrosse official put it this way: “A World Championship of lacrosse, in any form, without the Haudenosaunee is not a World Championship.” Eventually, the World Games backpedaled and allowed both the Haudenosaunee men and women (then ranked No. 12) to compete in Birmingham. But because the men’s field had already been set, one nation needed to give up its place. Ireland, ranked No. 12 in the world and last among the participants, volunteered. “We shouldn’t have been invited in the first place,” Michael Kennedy, the chief executive of Ireland Lacrosse, told me. “They’re taking back what is rightfully theirs.”
Shortly after sixes lacrosse got its close-up at the World Games in the summer of 2022 (the pandemic caused the competition to be postponed a year), the I.O.C. and LA28 announced that lacrosse was one of nine new sports, from an original pool of 40, on the shortlist for the Los Angeles Games. Over the next year, each sport — cricket, break-dancing, baseball/softball, flag football, karate, squash, kickboxing and motorsport, in addition to lacrosse — would make its case to LA28, after which it would need final approval by the I.O.C. No more than five would be selected.
There was never much doubt that LA28 would welcome lacrosse. The story of America’s oldest team sport’s returning to the Olympics in Los Angeles appealed to the organizing committee’s chairman, Casey Wasserman. “When we talk about having the most compelling sports program and the greatest collection of athletes in the history of the world, which it will be in 2028, lacrosse is an important piece,” he told me. Wasserman, who runs a sports-marketing-and-talent agency and whose grandfather was the Hollywood film mogul Lew Wasserman, is also smitten with the game’s Haudenosaunee roots. He has called the prospect of their competing in Los Angeles “an incredible story.”
In October 2023, the I.O.C. approved LA28’s choice of lacrosse and four other sports: cricket, baseball/softball, squash and flag football. Now the focus could turn to the Haudenosaunee. According to current I.O.C. rules, a nation that wants to participate in the Olympics must satisfy several requirements. These include recognition by the international community (the United Nations, for example) — exceptions were once made for territories like Puerto Rico and Hong Kong, which still compete as separate teams, but that loophole was closed in 1996 — and having a National Olympic Committee. This last prerequisite itself requires participation in at least five sports recognized by international sports federations. The Haudenosaunee satisfied neither of these conditions.
Still, after the I.O.C.’s approval of lacrosse, it seemed logical to expect some flexibility from the organization. After all, it had witnessed the World Games 2022 controversy; if the I.O.C. feared a similar reaction involving the 2028 Games, it simply could have cut lacrosse from LA28’s shortlist. Instead, the I.O.C. did what to many seemed inexplicable: It let lacrosse in but assumed its current hard-line stance toward the Haudenosaunee.
Some I.O.C. observers believe that what the organization really fears is setting a precedent that could spark quests by other groups, like the Catalans in Spain or the Aboriginal people of Australia. But “this is a unique circumstance that doesn’t exist in any other sport,” Scherr of World Lacrosse told me. “This is one people who essentially are sovereign in their own territory, as declared by the U.S. and Canadian governments, that originated the game and still participate in it at the highest levels — against all odds.”
Howard Stupp, who was the I.O.C.’s director of legal affairs from 1985 to 2017 and who has been a Haudenosaunee adviser since 2020, says that any such fear felt by the I.O.C., while understandable, does not apply. He’s also sure that his former organization will pivot to yes. “When we have a chance to sit down face to face with the I.O.C., including its president, we are confident that we can convince the I.O.C. that the right thing to do would be to accept the Haudenosaunee,” Stupp told me recently. “Why would one not include the Haudenosaunee in the competition?” Accepting the Haudenosaunee should not open the doors for claims by other entities, he said, “because of the special uniqueness of the Haudenosaunee.”
The I.O.C.’s requirements for admission were dismissed early by the Haudenosaunee. The confederacy had neither the resources nor the time nor the will to pursue United Nations recognition and to establish four more sports recognized by international federations. The other option — Haudenosaunee players trying out for the United States or Canadian teams — is now regarded as an insult. “I would never play for Canada or the U.S.,” Lyle Thompson told me. (In a rare case, a Haudenosaunee star named Alie Jimerson played for Canada in the last two World Championships before she returned to the Nationals this year.)
For those seeking compromise, the most sensible solution would resemble the Refugee Olympic Team. For the 2016 Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro, the I.O.C. sponsored 10 athletes from Syria, Ethiopia, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to highlight the plight of displaced millions worldwide. Competing under the Olympic flag then, and again in 2021 and 2024, the Refugee Team has been a clear success, a boost to the Olympic image. Another boundary-breaking initiative followed in 2018, when the I.O.C. permitted North and South Korea to create a unified women’s hockey team for the Winter Games in Pyeongchang.
One obstacle, though, is the lack of an established process within the I.O.C. through which to pursue such an exemption. The Refugee Team and the unified Korean hockey team were both created from the inside out. There is no recent precedent for an outside entity like the Haudenosaunee lobbying for entry, nor is there an I.O.C. procedure for a federation like World Lacrosse to make a formal request.
In any case, the Haudenosaunee aren’t embracing the idea of playing under the Olympic banner. Whenever the I.O.C. has publicly reinforced its hard line, Nationals officials reiterate theirs. Sovereignty remains a core rationale for the team’s existence. Walking into the opening ceremony at the Olympics beneath a Haudenosaunee flag before a television audience of billions remains the mission.
The Los Angeles Olympics will not get underway for another three years, which would seem to leave plenty of time to resolve its Haudenosaunee issue. But the Olympics are foremost a sporting event, and one that involves a long road to qualification. With regional qualifiers for 2028 beginning in 2026, World Lacrosse expects to submit its qualification plan to the I.O.C. this fall. The good news for the Haudenosaunee: Even if the I.O.C. continues to bar their participation, the Nationals are eligible to play in the primary qualifying tournament for the 2028 Olympics, the men’s and women’s sixes world championships in 2027. A great performance there would further pressure the I.O.C. to reverse course. The bad news? The I.O.C. still might not budge. While their opponents would be competing for spots in Los Angeles, the Haudenosaunee could end up having played for nothing.
Another complication: Sixes is the Haudenosaunee’s weakest discipline; the men are currently ranked fifth in the world, the women seventh. The men’s and women’s Olympic tournaments will each feature just six teams. The United States, as host, is expected to get a guaranteed spot, with Europe, Asia and the Americas most likely splitting the remaining spots. Conceivably, that leaves only one opening for Canada and the Haudenosaunee to fight over. World Lacrosse could easily tweak its still-evolving qualification plan to open up another spot for the men in Los Angeles. But the ranking of the Haudenosaunee women might well leave them on the bubble.
The Haudenosaunee and World Lacrosse hope to start talks with the I.O.C. in the coming months. Though the I.O.C. could soften its position, an outright surrender — allowing the Haudenosaunee to play under their own flag — seems unlikely. It’s also hard to imagine the Haudenosaunee refusing the opportunity, even if it comes under the Olympic flag, to tell the world, We are still here. Or Wasserman and LA28 could broker a third-way solution — a spot for the Nationals in the opening ceremony, perhaps. But for now, Rex Lyons told me, the Haudenosaunee want to compete — and to make the I.O.C. “the hero,” by persuading it to live up to oft-invoked Olympic sentiments like “peace, friendship and healing through sport.”
Everyone in lacrosse wants its return in Los Angeles to be a celebration of its expanding place in North American culture; many feel the absence of the Haudenosaunee would make that impossible. Few want to speculate publicly on that worst-case scenario. Lars Tiffany, the American head coach who led the Haudenosaunee at the 2023 World Championships, told me that if Team USA plays the 2028 Olympics without them, USA Lacrosse should remove “Creator’s Game,” a 16-foot bronze sculpture depicting Indigenous players, from outside its headquarters in Sparks, Md. Some think that the United States and Canada — and, indeed, the entire sport — should defer to the Haudenosaunee and not play at all. “I say we don’t go,” says Chazz Woodson, the outgoing head coach at Hampton University and a onetime board member of USA Lacrosse. “I say that understanding there’s major ramifications” — that lacrosse will probably never make the Olympics again. “But that would be the right thing to do.”
Tom Hayes won’t be in Los Angeles in 2028. The former international lacrosse executive died, at age 82, in March 2022, before lacrosse achieved the full I.O.C. approval he pursued for two decades. But by the time I spoke with him the year before, Hayes had received enough winks and nods to feel optimistic — and the Haudenosaunee issue was already vexing him. Woodson’s nuclear option, choosing loyalty to the Haudenosaunee over the sport’s Olympic dream, seemed too horrifying to consider. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Hayes told me, before settling on the hope that the I.O.C. learns what lacrosse itself learned four decades ago: “If they want to have a better Olympics, the creator of the sport has to be involved.”
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