Native American Lacrosse

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Native American Lacrosse

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

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