Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players: Visual (Non)Representation through two Documentaries

The documentary, Sacred Stick (2010), showcases lacrosse as a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) sport, through the Men’s Iroquois Nationals team.  Through the film, we learn that lacrosse was given to the Haudenosaunee as a ceremony for healing and settling disputes.  Nowhere in the film is there mention of Haudenosaunee women playing lacrosse, not because they do not, but because the subject is surrounded by an internal controversy over women playing.  Colonization has meant that Native communities must hold onto pieces of culture that keep them connected to tradition.  One such location for the Haudenosaunee is the medicine game of lacrosse as a ceremony only played by men, a tenant that is expressed with a high degree of unanimity.  However, the westernized version of lacrosse has become a location whereby Haudenosaunee women connect with tradition within settler nation states that work to disenfranchise and disembody them from their cultures, homelands, and corporalities.  Another documentary film series, Sports Matter: Salmon River Lacrosse (2015), highlights the young Haudenosaunee women who play their Native game.  In this presentation, I would offer an analysis of these two documentaries, as well as oral history accessed through interviews with Haudenosaunee women, conducted for my dissertation, revealing the ways in which this controversy over Haudenosaunee women playing is deeply gendered and tied to colonial impositions of western patriarchy and sexism.  I will demonstrate the ways in which Haudenosaunee women who play lacrosse simultaneously decolonize settler colonial space and deeply challenge sexism within their communities masked by the category of ‘tradition.’