Indigenous origins: the game as the nations describe it.

Many games, many nations

The game now called lacrosse is far older than any written record of it. Nations across North America played stick-and-ball games of their own, and the sources are careful to say these were different games with different sticks and rules. The Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame describes three basic forms: a double-stick game in the south-east, a single stick with a small pocket around the Great Lakes, and the Iroquoian stick of the north-east, which it calls the ancestor of today's field and box sticks.

What follows is each nation's account where the research found one in the nation's own words, and otherwise the museum or historian who reports it. One nation's account is not a statement about every nation.

The Haudenosaunee account

The Haudenosaunee Nationals, the team sanctioned by the Haudenosaunee Grand Council, say on their history page that Haudenosaunee means People of the Longhouse, and that the older name Iroquois comes through French from a Huron term they describe as derogatory. The page calls lacrosse one of the Haudenosaunee's most revered traditions and, spiritually, a medicine game. It gives no Indigenous name for the game and no date for its beginning.

The Onondaga Nation

The Onondaga Nation's own site gives the Onondaga name of the game as Ddehoñtjihgwa'és (also written Dehoñtjihgwa'és or Deyhontsigwa'ehs), which it translates roughly as "They bump hips". The nation describes the game as a gift from the Creator, played for the Creator, and says it is also called the Medicine Game because it is known to have healing power.

The Onondaga Nation describes how the traditional game was played: two groups, often divided by clan or as young men against old men; no clock, with play continuing until a score agreed beforehand was reached; hand-made hickory sticks; a leather ball; and two poles as the goal at each end. It also says women do not play the traditional game, because they are respected for giving life and for protecting this gift. That is the Onondaga Nation's statement about its own tradition.

As museums and historians report it

• The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. In its magazine, American Indian (Spring 2021), Vincent Schilling reports Rick Hill, who is Tuscarora, relating that warriors learned the game in the Sky World and that it became the Creator's favourite game. The same article gives Tewaaraton as the Mohawk word for lacrosse.
• The Smithsonian Folklife Festival says the Haudenosaunee, the game's first players in north-eastern North America, know it as a gift from the Creator.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia (Tabitha de Bruin and Jim Calder, last edited May 2017) says the game's rituals feature in Indigenous creation stories, especially for the Haudenosaunee, that it was a medicine game used to heal and to settle disputes such as rights to hunting grounds, and that players prepared to entertain the Creator. It spells the Mohawk name tewaarathon.
• The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, in its 2002 profile of the Iroquois Nationals, gives a Haudenosaunee name for the game as ga-chee-qua-is and describes it, as the Haudenosaunee see it, as a gift from the Creator played as a medicine game.

The spellings differ from source to source, and this page keeps each source's own spelling.

The Choctaw game: ishtaboli

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper, Biskinik, gives the Choctaw name for stickball as ishtaboli. In an article of 1 August 2024, Chris Jennings writes that it is also called the "little brother of war", because communities and tribes used it to settle disputes instead of fighting. The article says the game is played with two sticks, that the ball, the towa, may not be touched with the hands, and that each team defends a goalpost called a fabvssa. Teams now have 30 players; in the past, Biskinik says, there was no limit, and games sometimes had hundreds of players on fields more than a mile long.

An earlier Biskinik article, by Shelia Kirven on 5 July 2023, says Choctaws have played stickball for centuries and gives no date of origin. It says the game continued in Indian Territory until the early 1900s, when U.S. Marshals and Choctaw Lighthorsemen had to step in at a game and public play declined. By the 1970s the game had revived, with more rules and less aggressive play. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma formed its first official team in 2009 and began travelling to the World Series of Stickball in Mississippi, and a women's team, Tvshka Homma Ohoyo, followed in 2017.

The Canadian Encyclopedia gives a different Choctaw name, kabocha-toli, and an Algonquian name, baggataway. This page uses ishtaboli because it is the term the Choctaw Nation's own newspaper uses.

The Cherokee game

No Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians page was read for this site. The account here comes through a university project blog: on 25 February 2019 Professor David Stirrup of the University of Kent wrote that Eastern Band players Mike Crowe and Steven Michael Smith had explained their game, which the post calls Indian Ball and gives the Cherokee name Dilasgalidi. The post concludes that Indian Ball is not lacrosse but a different and much rougher game, also called "little brother of war".

The Ojibwe game

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, describing the events at Fort Michilimackinac in June 1763, calls the Ojibwa game baggatiway and describes it as a game similar to lacrosse. That episode is told on the early accounts page. No Ojibwe nation or Ojibwe-language source was read for this site, so this page gives no Ojibwe-language name.

How old is the game?

No nation, museum or encyclopedia page read for this site gives a dated origin, and this site does not give a year. The figures that circulate are estimates:

• History.com is reported, in a search summary we could not check against the page, to give about 1100 CE for the Haudenosaunee game. That figure is unconfirmed and no primary source for it was found.
• The journalist and author S. L. Price told PBS NewsHour on 26 November 2025 that the game was created about 1,000 years ago. That is his estimate.
• The joint statement of the United States and Canada on 17 January 2025 credits the Haudenosaunee with inventing the game nearly a thousand years ago. Like the other figures, it is an estimate, not a dated record.

Other accounts decline to put a number on it. The Choctaw Nation's Biskinik says only that Choctaws have played for centuries. A magazine article, seen only in a search summary, quotes Michael Slee of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian saying Cherokee stickball is as old as the mountains; that quotation is unconfirmed.

Stick making

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival holds a hand-shaved wooden stick with a woven rawhide and leather basket, made by the Benedict Lacrosse Factory at Akwesasne and collected for the Festival's 1989 American Indian program. The Festival notes that most sticks today are lightweight metal, but that wooden sticks are still made and used.

American Indian magazine (Spring 2021) profiles the Akwesasne Mohawk stick maker Jack Johnson, who learned from the master stick maker Alf Jacques and works with locally harvested hickory and rawhide. The article says a single stick can take up to ten months to make.

A scholar's view

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival calls the ethnomusicologist Thomas Vennum Jr., curator of its 1989 American Indian program, one of the foremost scholars of Native American lacrosse. It reports his view that the game's primary purpose was to honour or petition a god or spirit. That is Vennum's reading as the Festival summarises it; his book was not read for this site.

How Europeans first wrote about the game, and how it came to be called lacrosse, is on the early accounts page. The Haudenosaunee national teams and their place in international lacrosse are on the Haudenosaunee Nationals page.