Community’s help needed for lacrosse research

Framing the Creator’s Game opened at Optica last fall in Montreal’s Mile End, putting the members of Kahnawake’s 1876 lacrosse team in a hall of fame all their own.

Thirteen banners were hung in the shape of an arena, each one showing a photo of team members who travelled to England to play the first exhibition games of lacrosse on European soil before the Queen.

The photos, taken in Montreal by William Notman, a famous photographer of the time, were likely commissioned by George Beers - a reputed racist and the man responsible for the mass appropriation of lacrosse as “Canada’s first national sport.”

The exhibition revealed the importance of archives by telling the real story of lacrosse to an audience who had never heard it. But telling that story required a lot of research, and the plot thickened with each piece of information and racially prejudiced journalism that turned up.

Only eight years before that overseas game, sports reporters insisted “There (was) no need to give the unpronounceable names of the Indians’ even after victories.”

In later years, when the players were finally credited, the spellings of their names were inconsistent and no other information was printed. Even if it had been, inconsistent naming made trusting any source based outside the community difficult.

Paul Seesequasis’s Indigenous Archive Photo Project has been recording community memory and Indigenous history for a decade, launching research projects in communities across Canada.

The MOMENTA exhibition was an extension of that research, and through it, the desire and the necessity to activate the project for and with Kahnawa’kehró:non came naturally.

A proposal was put together based on collective research by Paul and myself as the MOMENTA educational assistant. An art piece based on lacrosse and Kahnawà:ke Shakotiia’takéhnhas Community Services action plans was proposed to the Montreal Arts Council (the CAM) and was approved in late June 2025.

However, the project continued to shift. The art piece became a travelling photo installation in partnership with the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center (KOR), which became a conference event, and now with the help of Sharing Our Stories is becoming a publication.

The flexibility of the CAM grant is allowing for the money to be used for the creation of the publication that will attempt to resolve some of the historical inaccuracies that exist, and to pay community members for their time sharing knowledge about the 1876 team and their effect on the community.

The research phase of the project is ongoing from now until June. If you would like to contribute, you can write to [email protected]. We would love to hear from you!

[email protected]