The next wave
wpjohn2 - 6/4/2007
Neal Powless sits in Tsha’HonNonyen Dakwha, a five-year-old $7 million ice/lacrosse arena on the Onondaga
The next wave
wpjohn2 - 6/4/2007
Neal Powless sits in Tsha’HonNonyen Dakwha, a five-year-old $7 million ice/lacrosse arena on the Onondaga Reservation near Syracuse, N.Y., talking about the significance of lacrosse in his community. He says the game has been passed down from father to father in his family, that boys are given lacrosse sticks in their cribs. A photo of his grandfather, Chief Irving Powless Jr., hangs in the arena, next to one of Chief Oren Lyons, an international leader and member of the U.S. Lacrosse Hall of Fame, and another of an Onondaga team from the 1950s.
Later, Gewas Schindler takes an Inside Lacrosse film crew down the road to the reservation’s box lacrosse field, where he says Native Americans have been playing games for 100 years.
“As you get older you realize how important the game is,” Schindler says. “When you’re out there playing, you think about how you’re playing for the Creator. It’s the Creator’s Game. He gave us this game.”
Considering how rare it is in lacrosse for a current high school or college player to even have a father that played the sport, hearing about great-grandfathers underlines the importance of lacrosse in Native American cultures.
This legacy has produced some amazing lacrosse players: guys like Lyons (Syracuse), Powless (Nazareth) and Schindler (Loyola), and more recently, Delby Powless (Rutgers) and Marshall Abrams and Brett Bucktooth (Syracuse). But their impacts have been sporadic and spread out.
That’s in part because going to college isn’t always part of Native American culture. According to the American Indian College Fund, just 12% of Native Americans 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher (less than half the national average).
Part of it’s a cultural thing and part is distractions: The Bureau of Indian Affairs reports that Native Americans are six times more likely than other Americans to die of alcoholism.
“A lotta guys I went to elementary school with didn’t even get out of high school,” says Kent Squires-Hill, a sophomore middie for Onondaga Community College that grew up on the Six Nations Reservation in Ontario, Canada.
“There’s guys that could be the best lacrosse players in the world right now but they chose the wrong path,” says OCC sophomore attackman Cody Jamieson, another Six Nations product.
But Squires-Hill and Jamieson are part of the next wave of great Native players. Thanks in part to a large contingent of Natives, Onondaga won the junior college national title in 2006 with a record-setting undefeated team that won by an average score of 25-4. At press time this year, they were undefeated again and winning by an average score of 24-5.
At times, all six offensive players on the field are Native, led by Jamieson (a star in the summer Canadian box leagues that OCC coach Chuck Wilbur says will be a sure-fire DI All-America when he picks from a list that includes Syracuse, Denver, Ohio State and Rutgers), Squires-Hill (who heads to Syracuse for 2008), Jeremy and Jerome Thompson (who hope to play for Syracuse in ’09), Lee Nanticoke (Syracuse next year) and 