Since the 1970s lacrosse has become one of the fastest-growing sports in North America, and Haudenosaunee communities have worked at the international level to claim lacrosse as an important part of Haudenosaunee culture and tradition. Lacrosse is also known as the medicine game as it is part of a medicine ceremony named in creation narratives and the Great Law of Peace that binds the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Six Nations. The number of Haudenosaunee women and girls playing the sport has burgeoned since the 1980s. This book roots lacrosse as a Haudenosaunee sport both within and outside of these communities. It shows how the concept of rematriation—a culturally relevant framework that articulates the work Haudenosaunee peoples are doing to reconnect to the power imbued with matrilineal and matrifocal societies—situates Haudenosaunee women who play lacrosse within a complex understanding of contemporary, traditional, and medicinal lacrosse. Because they cannot seamlessly claim this as their medicine game, as the Haudenosaunee Nationals and other men’s teams do, Haudenosaunee women players must articulate some of the most nuanced understandings of tradition and medicine. These articulations connect to larger conversations within Haudenosaunee communities regarding the power that women hold and the rematriation of that power to define and uphold tradition. Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players demonstrates how the cycle of action and articulation—with the intergenerational help of female leadership—firmly roots lacrosse within Haudenosaunee cultural fabric.

Sharity L. Bassett is assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and associate director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM). She has been involved in collaborative research with Haudenosaunee communities in New York State, Ontario, and Montreal since 2011. She earned her PhD in global gender studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is a recipient of the faculty impact award through the Honors College and the Award for Outstanding Service for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at South Dakota State University.
Bassett is working with tribal nations to create interactive databases and curriculum using historical records and oral history. She is also crafting her experiences in various archival spaces into an autoethnographic work that analyzes the barriers to archival knowledges. Bassett teaches courses for UWM’s women’s and gender studies and American Indian studies programs, including Indigenous feminisms, Indigequeer theory and praxis, critical disability studies, and feminist research methods.