Watching the Kahnawake Mohawks (left) play the ancient game inspired George Beers (below) to suit up against them for the Montreal Lacrosse Club and write rules for lacrosse as we know it today.
A Question of Origin
The Mohawks, like the rest of the Iroquois nations, have always played the Creator’s Game.
The French followed suit when priest Jean de Brebeuf witnessed a group of Hurons — a First Nations community with its modern base in Wendake outside Quebec City — playing the sport in 1637. He thought the ancient sticks looked similar to the bishop’s staffs, “la crosse d’eveque” in French.
College Jean de Brebeuf, a Montreal prep school founded in 1928, has box and field lacrosse as fixtures in its physical education program.
“The priests were playing with the people at that time, and the tradition kept going,” said Brebeuf teacher and former Quebec U16 coach Philippe Lalonde. “When they built the school, it was really important that all the students tried lacrosse and played lacrosse.” French students who grew up on backyard ice rinks wearing skates changed to sticks and shoes when they started at Brebeuf. “You go to school, you have no idea what the sport is, and they throw you in the box with a lacrosse stick and teach you how to play,” Lalonde said.
34 LACROSSE MAGAZINE November 2013 >>
Pion, a Brebeuf alumnus, hopes his journey south will help pave the way for players of French-Canadian origin. “The most important thing is opening the American high school system to French players,” he said.
The Mohawk community of Kahnawake introduced English Montreal to the sport in the 19th century. George Beers’ father took him to see the Mohawks play lacrosse in Kahnawake (mistakenly called Caughnawaga at the time) in 1860. Beers was fascinated, and at age 17 suited up for the Montreal Lacrosse Club for its historic exhibition against Caughnawaga First Nations for the visiting Prince Edward of Wales, Queen Victoria’s oldest son.
That same year, Beers wrote and published standardized rules for the game. In April 1867, four months before the three provinces of Canada united as one nation, he published a letter in the Montreal Daily News titled “Lacrosse — Our National Field Game.” Lacrosse is Canada’s official summer sport. But Montreal’s cultural division of English, French and Iroquois halted the sport’s momentum in its birthplace. Slowly, that has changed. Though not at the skill level of Ontario or British Columbia, let alone the U.S., Quebec’s U16 and U19 Quebec field blend the skill sets of players from all three solitudes. “My under-16 Quebec team was francophone defensemen, west island English playmakers and Native finishers around the net,” Lalonde said. “The chemistry between those three groups of kids was amazing.” Boyd played on Lalonde’s U16 squad. “Everyone intertwined really well,” he said. “There really was no separate group like we thought there would be.”
A Complicated History
Field lacrosse coaches in Quebec know that to succeed, the solitudes have to come together. The province is divided by language laws, territory disputes and general animosity between the three communities. To understand this rift is to understand the region’s complicated history. The Iroquois mostly sided with the British during the French and Indian War (1754-63), although Kahnawake (a Catholic community) sided with the French. The Iroquois eventually drew Kahnawake back to the British side after they conquered Montreal in 1760. The 1977 Charter of the French Language established French as the official language and alienated many English and Native communities. Separation referendums in 1980 and 1995 widened the cultural gap, as did the FLQ crisis of 1970 and the Oka land dispute of 1990.
The Quebec license plate, with its none-too-subtle “Je me souviens” (I
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