SAN DIEGO — Like many other boys from his tribal community, Jeremy Thompson from the Onondoga Nation was given two gifts at birth: The cradleboard his parents carried him in, and a lacrosse stick. When he dies, that stick will be buried alongside him.
"From birth to death, it's with us," Thompson said.
Since 2006, the 36-year-old has played for the Haudenosaunee (pronounced hoh-DEE-noh-SHoh-nee) Nationals, a professional men's lacrosse team that represents the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Upstate New York and Southeastern Canada.
This week, the Nationals are visiting San Diego to compete in the World Lacrosse Men's Championship. On Wednesday, they beat Japan 10-5, which advanced them to face Canada in a semifinals game Thursday.
Going into this week's championship, Haudenosaunee was ranked third behind the United States and Canada, so it competed against the top five teams in its initial round of games.
Even though they lost games against the United States and Canada in the first pool of qualifying rounds, Thompson said the team is much more prepared than it has been in previous years.
"We showed that in games against Canada and the U.S.," he said. "In the past with those games, they had a big lead on us, whereas this time, we're able to hold our ground against those two big opponents."
Lacrosse was originally played as early as 1100 A.D. by people from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a group of six member nations that includes the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondoga, Oneida, Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) and Tuscarora.
Also known as tewaraaton — a Kanienʼkehá:ka word for lacrosse meaning "The Creator's Game" — it was played for fun, as a traditional form of medicine for all who played and watched it, and as a way to resolve conflicts between communities. Instead of the rubber balls, plastic sticks and helmets used today, the original players were equipped with wooden sticks with a netted leather head and deerskin balls.
Around 1840, the game was appropriated by European settlers in Canada. It was included in both the 1904 and 1908 Summer Olympic Games with teams competing from the United States, Canada and Great Britain. For a few decades after, lacrosse was included as an exhibition at the Olympics, but it was not included in subsequent games as it lacked international participation.
A version of the game called "sixes" — a shorter match played with six players instead of 10 per team on a smaller field — may return to the Olympics when the games return to Los Angeles. World Lacrosse spokesperson Christy Cahill said sixes was created in 2018 to help spread the sport to new countries across the globe since fewer players and less equipment are needed.
If sixes is accepted by the Olympic Games committee in Los Angeles, then events organized by World Lacrosse would play a role in determining the roster of teams to compete in 2028.
Despite being the original players of lacrosse, Haudenosaunee teams were shunned by non-Native lacrosse organizations for years, and initially barred from participating in World Lacrosse games. That changed in 1983 after the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee formed the Iroquois Nationals Men's Lacrosse Team and World Lacrosse finally granted membership to the team, allowing them to compete as a sovereign nation.
The team has won three World Lacrosse bronze medals since playing in its first championship series in 1990, including the third place win during the 2018 series in Netanya, Israel.
Earning official recognition didn't prevent the racial discrimination players sometimes encountered from opposing teams.
Haudenosaunee Nationals player Tehoka Nanticoke, a Mohawk from Six Nations of the Grand River near Toronto, has been playing lacrosse since he was 3. He's played for a variety of tribal teams, and club, college and professional teams, including the Buffalo Bandits, a team in the National Lacrosse League alongside the San Diego Seals.
Nanticoke said he has received racist comments from other players about the color of his skin and traditionally long hair.
"You're just trying to show this game that is created from our people, it was a gift from our Creator, and not many of these kids know that, not many of these kids are taught the history of the game," he said.
But Stone Jacobs, a 22-year-old Mohawk player from Kahnawake outside Montreal playing at the international level for the first time, said the discrimination has eased over the years.
There has also been an effort by World Lacrosse to share the sport's history.
"It's very central to the story of lacrosse and talked about very frequently," she said. "It would be very rare for an international or other lacrosse event to happen without a lot of talk and celebration of the roots of lacrosse in Indigenous communities."
The heightened awareness might also be due in part to stronger media representation, such as the 2012 film "Crooked Arrows," the story of an Indigenous lacrosse team that plays in a prep school league tournament.
Another contributing factor, Jacobs said, is the work the Haudenosaunee Nationals and their tribal nations have done to shift the attitude toward Indigenous players. When traveling out of country to represent their community, the team uses passports issued by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in lieu of ones from Canada or the United States, a symbol of their tribal sovereignty.
"Just the support around the team and using the Haudenosaunee passport, I think they've really done a great job of raising awareness that it's the game that we created and started," Jacobs said.
Last year, the team changed its name to remove the word Iroquois, a French variant on a Huron word meaning "snake" that is considered a derogatory term by many Six Nations people. In switching to the Haudenosaunee Nationals, Thompson said it allowed them to reclaim part of the community's traditional language.
In his 11 years playing the sport professionally, Thompson said he has seen the lacrosse community grow to be much more inclusive.
"It's a small-knit family and I feel like it's growing as we travel," he said.
