The Creator’s Game

Our daughter was five days old when we took her to her first lacrosse match.

We lived in a farmhouse next to Mohawk territory back then and, to mark National Truth and Reconciliation Day, our neighbour Jeff Nelson organized a pickup game for the kids in Kanesatake. 

It is one of the few clear memories I have from those early days of parenthood — sitting under the pines as rain drizzled onto the wooden bleachers, watching children of every size and description get lost in the Creator’s game.

Just a few months earlier, over 200 unmarked graves were found outside a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. That was followed by another grim discovery, hundreds more burial sites outside the old Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. It was yet another reminder that we live in a country founded on the kidnapping and forced assimilation of Indigenous kids.

But that day in September, as Mohawk aunties alternated between holding our baby and watching their kids fling the ball across a wet field, there was healing. 

“I just thought, what better way to be together on this day than to play our game,” Nelson said, at the time.

Some of the players were barely out of diapers but they scampered around teenagers twice their size, weaving the ball and squealing with joy. It was chaotic, of course. There were probably 30 kids running in every direction. 

But the teenagers herded the little ones and kept them in the game. It is a memory I will hold on to for the rest of my life.

***

When you type Kanesatake into Google News, you will not read about Jeff Nelson’s pickup lacrosse game. 

You might come across an article about a gunfight outside a cannabis dispensary or the latest chapter in an illegal dumping saga that’s brought nothing but misery to the territory. But you won’t see news that reflects the sense of community that thrives on Mohawk land. 

Which brings us back to lacrosse. 

The Warriors, Kanesatake’s youth lacrosse team, fell on hard times last year. After a season where the team struggled to win a game, some of the territory’s structural disadvantages were laid bare.

“Our program was up and down, on and off, dependent on the work of volunteers. Of course, they do their best with the time they have but it’s not an easy balancing act,” said Jeremy Tomlinson, director of the Kanesatake Health Centre. “Sometimes we didn’t have enough kids sign up because, well, we’re a community of just over 2,000. Then there were our facilities.”

Like so many Indigenous communities across Canada, Kanesatake does not have an arena. Instead, the kids play on a grass clearing under the pines. It’s a beautiful setting but not particularly useful given that the Warriors play their matches inside arenas with concrete floors. And if it happened to rain during practice, that made things even harder.

“Every time we would start playing a tournament, it’s like you’re learning a new game on the fly,” said Warriors coach Kyle Akwiroton Canatonquin. “The ball doesn’t bounce like that on our grass field. And if you can only get one practice a week because the other one got rained out, you’re at a huge disadvantage.”

Through the Health Centre, the team got a budget to start renting facilities and hire Canatonquin fulltime as a sports coordinator. They also invited non-Indigenous kids from neighbouring communities to help fill out the roster.

The adjustments worked. This season, the U11 Warriors won La Crosse Quebec’s provincial tournament. It was an accomplishment made all the more impressive because of how the team came together.

Stéphanie de Lafontaine isn’t Indigenous but her son Louka played hockey with some Mohawks from Kanesatake these past few years. When they invited her boy to join the Warriors in 2023, de Lafontaine didn’t know what to expect. 

“It didn’t take long for us to fall in love with the game and the community,” said de Lafontaine. “It’s magic. It’s such a beautiful sport and more kids need to know it. Because this is the sport of this land that we live on.”

There were some cultural differences to overcome. Most Mohawks in Kanesatake speak English as a first language while the white players tend to be francophone. And though the new players were all skilled hockey players, it took time for them to adapt to a game that can be far more physical.

Hockey limits contact between players until they’re teenagers but, from a young age, lacrosse allows a variety of hits and stick pokes that can be overwhelming at first. The game is also incredibly fast, requiring players to handle the ball while fending off defenders’ slashes and trying to get it to a teammate. 

And unlike hockey — where a black puck slides across a white surface — a new player’s eyes will struggle to track the ball as it barrels through the air.

“It was intense, I wasn’t used to the hitting at all,” said Jayden, who played hockey with Tomlinson’s son before joining the Warriors. “I thought maybe it would be like hockey but it’s completely different. The way you handle the ball, the passing, the hitting.”

Jayden’s dad, Dominic Petterson, says the boy’s eyes lit up when he realized he could start throwing body checks in practice.

“We don’t really speak English but when they screamed, ‘JJ’s a beast!’ we understood that,” Petterson said. “They went out of their way to make us feel welcome, to teach us everything they knew. JJ wasn’t treated like an outsider, they put him in the game more than most of the other kids. And none of the parents complained, none of the coaches complained, they just want the kids to have fun and win.”

Canatonquin says the “kids from out of town” ended up being some of the best players on his team. 

“I feel like their presence drove the team,” the coach said. “They came from AAA hockey, these are competitive, hard working players who picked up the game fast. Our kids saw these out-of-towners getting so good so fast that it pushed them to up their game as well. All of a sudden everyone’s performing a lot better, working a lot harder, having more fun together.”

De Lafontaine said she was warned, early on, that her son would be treated differently by parents and coaches from other teams as well as by officials because he was on a team full of Mohawks. The eruption of racist taunts and jeers from white parents directed at Indigenous children is a well-documented and persistent problem in youth sports across Canada. 

“There was a tournament in Mascouche where parents were calling us “Mohawk fuckers” and all kinds of awful things,” de Lafontaine said. “Those people were nasty because I think they believe Kanesatake is a community of savages. And that’s absolutely not the truth, nothing could be further from the truth.

“When we run into the (Mohawk) coaches or parents at the store, it’s big hugs and big hellos. They try to speak to us in French and we try to speak to them in English. They’ve taught us Mohawk words, Mohawk names. Oh my God it takes practice but you learn it and it’s such an enriching experience.”

Canatonquin said the game de Lafontaine is referring to was probably jarring to the non-Indigenous kids but it’s something that Mohawk children have to get used to at a young age.

“There were parents in the crowd that wanted to fight us,” he said. “I saw the parents yelling at our kids and you could see it confused some of our (white) players. They were going, ‘Hein, c’est quoi ça?’ And you kind of have to show them how to deal with that. It’s a lot for the kids to handle but the handled it really well. The parents too.”

Tomlinson was approached by parents of one of the non-Indigenous Warriors after a game and says he could see they were rattled by the hatred they saw.

“They said ‘How is this still happening in 2024?’ It was a real gut check moment,” Tomlinson said. “To have parents from outside our community recognize the discrimination our kids face, it was powerful. And to have them stand shoulder to shoulder with us, that was important too. I couldn’t have written a better start to this rekindling of the lacrosse program in Kanesatake.”

If anything, Tomlinson said, that solidarity made the Warriors a better team. Throughout the summer, they won consistently but struggled against Terrebonne — the most dominant team in the league. All year long, it seemed they couldn’t catch a break against their rivals.

A week before the provincial championship tournament, the Warriors had Terrebone on the ropes but wound up losing by one goal. He said merely realizing they could compete with “a powerhouse” changed the way his kids thought of themselves. 

“The coaches, we didn’t yell at the kids after the game or come down on them,” Canatonquin said. “We just said, we had that game and we can beat this guys. And next week, when we get to the provincials, we’re going to win. They worked their butts off all year and that game showed us just how good we’d gotten.”

It seemed like fate, in the end, that the teams met again one last time in the provincial finals.

“That was our best performance,” Canatonquin said. “Coming into the season, you never expect a championship, you just want the kids to be competitive. They were competitive all season long but that last game, that’s where everything came together.”

For de Lafontaine, the experience of being part of the Warriors was life changing.

“We were on a boat this summer and we came across an Indigenous gentleman. He saw our Kanesatake Lacrosse hats and his face just lit up,” she said. “He was so proud that we were part of the team, he would have given us the shirt off his back. He was practically throwing flowers at us. 

“When Louka plays hockey, one of the (Mohawk) parents comes to watch our son play. When I see the Mohawks being bashed in the news, I don’t know what these people are going on about. The Mohawk community couldn’t be more welcoming.”

***

I’ve been thinking about the lacrosse match from three years ago.

At the time, we thought we’d be raising our daughter on Mohawk territory, that she’d be enrolled in a daycare where workers speak to the children in Kenien’kéha and maybe one day she’d play lacrosse under the pines with her friends.

A few months after that match, we moved back into the city. 

I was raised just outside of Kanesatake, went to high school with Mohawks, worked in construction with their dads and lost countless softball games to teams from the rez. Our relationship was always superficial. We’d be cordial, laugh at each other’s jokes but when the day was done they went back to their world and we continued living in ours.

There was always this suspicion that we weren’t welcome on the rez or that, if we went, some terrible misfortune would befall us. So we kept our distance.

We shouldn’t want that for our children. Or theirs.

It’s no surprise to me that the people breaking those barriers today are Mohawks like Jeremy Tomlinson, Kyle Canatonquin and the parents who keep lacrosse alive in Kanesatake. It’s just a game, yes, but for the non-Indigenous kids and their parents, it’s a radicalizing experience.

“Our kids, their kids, sometimes it feels like we’re just teaching them how to follow rules,” Tomlinson said. “Rules about screen time, rules about school, rules about games, all that stuff. But what we’re trying to teach them, at least in lacrosse, is values. You don’t need rules when you know what’s right and what’s wrong.

“Getting our kids together, letting them learn from each other, letting them make mistakes and being there for them, those are the values of this community. I’m glad we get to share them.”