Haudenosaunee want to take part in the Olympic Games with the national lacrosse team

Lacrosse, says Rex Lyons, is a medical sport. Each game is a ceremonial event, deeply rooted in the spiritual world of the indigenous tribal nations of North America’s east coast. If you really want to understand lacrosse, you have to get involved in a world in which everything is animated by a spirit: the plants, the animals, the stones, the trees, the water – perhaps in the end even the members of the International Olympic Committee The Haudenosaunee medicine men have never explicitly commented on this special case.

Rex Lyons, the son of a spiritual leader from his tribal nation, was once a professional lacrosse player. Now he is a trainer, manager and something like the chief marketer of a dream. The Haudenosaunee – also called the Iroquois by European immigrants – want to take part in the Olympic Games with their national lacrosse team. The sport will be part of the official Olympic program in Los Angeles in 2028 for the first time in 120 years. Lyons thinks it would be appropriate to go back to the roots of this game and let the creators play along. “Lacrosse is our gift to the world,” Lyons said.

But if there really is an Olympic spirit in the IOC environment, then it has so far remained deaf and mute when it comes to this issue.

It is often claimed that the Haudenosaunee – pronounced: Haudenoschohnie – invented lacrosse, but Rex Lyons wouldn’t go that far. It is more likely that a higher power, whom he calls “the Creator,” passed the game idea to his people over a thousand years ago. This idea then proved to be timelessly good. Think of lacrosse as a mix of field hockey, hurling and a little bit of Harry Potter’s Quidditch. The game is played with a hard rubber ball that is passed through the air with net bats and, at best, thrown into the opponent’s small goal. The game is fast-paced, it’s physical, and it’s definitely an asset to the Olympics. It is now played in around 100 countries, including Germany. “It’s the fastest growing sport in the world,” says Rex Lyons, which is hard to verify but certainly sounds good.

It is obvious that not everyone can take part in the Olympics. The 206 National Olympic Committees (NOK) are generally eligible to participate. The Haudenosaunee would need a special permit. Rex Lyons can think of at least three good arguments for such an exception. On the one hand, there are significantly more NOCs than the UN has member states, so other teams are also more or less exceptions at the Olympics, such as Palestine or the international refugee team. Secondly, Haudenosaunee considers itself a sovereign tribal nation, it issues its members their own passports, has its own national flag and, last but not least, a national lacrosse team. At the World Championships this year, the Haudenosaunee Nationals won the bronze medal, behind Canada and the United States but ahead of Great Britain and Germany. That’s the third – and from Lyon’s point of view perhaps the most important – reason for an Olympic extravaganza: the sporting quality. “We are number three in the world at the moment,” says Lyons. Without the Haudenosaunee, some of the best lacrosse players would be missing from the Olympics.

Their fight for recognition also includes the fight to take part in international sporting events

The Haudenosaunee are actually a confederacy of six tribal nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora and Onondaga. Their territory extends from the northern parts of New York State to beyond the Canadian border. Dehoñtjihgwa’és, as lacrosse is originally called, have been playing here since before the United States and Canada were founded. Since the first European sailing ships found their way to this part of the world, the history of the Native Americans has been a struggle for recognition. And this includes – perhaps not first and foremost, but also not least – the fight for participation in international sports competitions.

It has been a journey so far with many downs and some ups. In 1983, Lyons was one of the founding members of the Haudenosaunee national lacrosse team, which was allowed to compete in international tournaments for the first time in the early 1990s, including world championships. At the 2010 World Cup in Great Britain, the host country did not accept Haudenosaunee passports as valid travel documents. Native Americans are typically dual citizens of their tribal nation and of the United States or Canada. The British authorities made entry with US or Canadian passports a condition for participation in the World Cup. The British were concerned with their entry regulations, but the Haudenosaunee were concerned with the principle. They decided not to compete at the World Cup.

Even when the World Games took place in Alabama in 2022, Rex Lyons’ team was initially expected to be left out. The International World Games Association cited in its decision that the Haudenosaunee are not an internationally recognized sovereign nation. They themselves see it fundamentally differently – and in this case they received unexpected support. 50,000 people from around the world signed a petition protesting the exclusion of the Haudenosaunee from the World Games. However, by the time the organizers of the games changed their minds, the schedule was already full. The Irish lacrosse team then withdrew its participation at short notice in order to free up a spot for the Haudenosaunee. “Without them, none of us would be at the World Games,” said the Irish.

Of course, it was extremely helpful for Lyons’ dream when someone said at the White House Tribal Nation Summit at the end of 2023: “Your ancestors invented the game, and they have perfected it over the course of a millennium. Their circumstances are unique, they should be granted an exemption to take part in the Olympics.” That someone happened to be Joe Biden, the US President.

One of Biden’s closest advisers added that if this campaign is successful, then it wouldn’t just be the Haudenosaunee flag flying at the Olympics, it would be the flag of indigenous peoples around the world. The White House is very confident that it can convince the IOC of this point of view. However, this confidence turned out to be unfounded.

In early summer of this year, Biden even met personally with Rex Lyons. “At the request of the president,” as Lyons emphasizes. Biden traveled to Syracuse, the city closest to the Haudenosaunee reservation. “It was a very big moment for us to have so much support from the White House,” Lyons said by phone. But he also knew from the start that if his cause was to have a somewhat realistic chance, then everything would have to be completed before Joe Biden leaves office on January 20th. Because: “Donald Trump’s mindset contradicts everything we dream of,” says Lyons.

At the same time, the working methods of an IOC president apparently contradict the schedule of a descendant of Native Americans. Rex Lyons, the man who was visited by Joe Biden, says: “Unfortunately we haven’t had the opportunity to sit down with Thomas Bach and talk about it yet.”

The IOC argues that the Haudenosaunee players could compete for the USA or Canada

When asked, the IOC said: “According to the Olympic Charter, only National Olympic Committees recognized by the IOC can send teams to the Olympic Games. This means it is up to the two affected NOCs (USA and Canada) – in coordination with the World Lacrosse Federation and the national associations – to decide whether they want to accept Haudenosaunee players on their respective teams, depending on which passports these players have .”

But for the Haudenosaunee it’s not about playing in the jerseys of the USA or Canada, but rather under their own flag, with their own team, as a nation. They want recognition.

Rex Lyons admits that we are dealing with a “political hot potato” here, which one would of course be happy to translate as hot political potato, but that would probably be inadmissible. It is clear to him, says Lyons, that an exception for the Haudenosaunee would probably mean that sooner or later other indigenous communities from other states would also be interested in participating in the Olympic Games. And then the question arises: Where do you start and where do you end? On the other hand, isn’t the Olympic sports world already full of contradictions? And would it really be more or less a contradiction if the IOC simply fulfilled the dream of the Haudenosaunee Nationals for Los Angeles 2028 – and still left other dreams unfulfilled?

If anyone is still in doubt, Rex Lyon has another argument ready: the national flag of the Haudenausonee, which he would like to see flying at the Olympics, shows a white tree on a purple background. “Our symbol is the peace tree,” says Lyons, so that everyone knows: “When we come, we come in peace.”