Deja Vu

National Pastime

Tags:

England,

George Catlin,

lacrosse,

Native Americans,

politics,

sports

2010: The Iroquois national lacrosse team is one of the best in the world but, as the New York Times reports, because many Indian nations don’t issue passports, the United Kingdom is questioning their visas and delaying travel to the World Championships in Manchester.

The Iroquois team, known as the Nationals, represents the six Indian nations that comprise the Iroquois Confederacy, which the Federation of International Lacrosse considers to be a full member nation, just like the United States or Canada. The Nationals enter this year’s tournament ranked fourth in the world.

The Nationals’ 50-person delegation had planned to travel to Manchester, England, on Sunday on their own tribal passports, as they have done for previous international competitions, team officials said.

But on Friday, the British consulate informed the team that it would only issue visas to the team upon receiving written assurance from the United States government that the Iroquois had been granted clearance to travel on their own documents and would be allowed back into the United States. Neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security would offer any such promise.

“Lacrosse is our game—we are the originators, we invented the game, there are 60 countries that play our game,” said Denise Waterman, a member of the team’s board of directors. “And now we can’t go to a tournament that’s honoring our game? It’s almost unbelievable that this is happening.”

1834: In Letters and Notes on the North American Indians, George Catlin was one of the first travelers to the West to record a rowdy game played by the Choctaw Indians that involved hundreds and hundreds of players, a ball, and hand-held nets.

It is no uncommon occurrence for six or eight hundred or a thousand of these young men to engage in a game of ball, with five or six times that number of spectators, of men, women, and children surrounding the ground and looking on. And I pronounce such a scene, with its hundreds of nature’s most beautiful models, denuded, and painted of various colors, running and leaping into the air, in all the most extravagant and varied forms, in the desperate struggles for the ball, a school for the painter or sculptor equal to any of those which ever inspired the hand of the artist in the Olympian games or the Roman forum…

The sticks with which this tribe play are bent into an oblong hoop at the end, with a sort of slight web of small thongs tied across to prevent the ball from passing through. The players hold one of these in each hand, and by leaping into the air, they catch the ball between the two nettings and throw it without being allowed to strike it or catch it in their hands.

Soon after dark, a procession of lighted flambeaux was seen coming from each encampment to the ground where the players assembled around their respective byes, and at the beat of the drums and chants of the women, each party of players commenced the “ball-play dance.” Each party danced for a quarter of an hour around their respective byes in their ball-play dress, rattling their ball sticks together in the most violent manner, and all singing as loud as they could raise their voices, while the women of each party, who had their goods at stake, formed into two rows on the line between the two parties of players and danced also, in a uniform step—and all their voices joined in chants to the Great Spirit, in which they were soliciting his favor in deciding the game to their advantage and also encouraging the players to exert every power they possessed in the struggle that was to ensue. In the meantime, four old medicine men, who were to have the starting of the ball and who were to be judges of the play, were seated at the point where the ball was to be started and were busily smoking to the Great Spirit for their success in judging rightly and impartially between the parties in so important an affair.

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