Olympics XXIV: Lacrosse & Religious Freedom on the World’s Stage
by Ava Gross, 2025 Summer IRF Fellow
Just this time last July, the world was anxiously preparing for the debut of breakdancing in the 2024 Paris Olympics. A source of prolific conversation, many debated breakdancing’s legitimacy on the eve of its inaugural appearance, often citing the tradition that allows the hosting city to include a few sports of choice as evidence against its qualification. A highly anticipated announcement, this special tradition has international athletes waiting with bated breath to see if their sport will be added to the future Olympic program because it is not only an incredible opportunity for aspiring Olympians but a tremendous boost for the sport’s development. Replaced by the maiden voyages of flag football and squash, breakdancing will not be returning with its fellow veteran additions —lacrosse, baseball, softball, and cricket — to Los Angeles in 2028.
However, its absence does not mean these upcoming games are any less controversial. With the return of lacrosse, LA is not only posing as an international stage for the new six-on-six format, but also as a referendum on sovereignty, and by extension, the religious freedom of the originators of the sport, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Hiawatha belt
Positioned between upstate New York and Ontario, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, historically known to the French as the Iroquois Confederacy, was the first democracy in North America. Formed through the unifying efforts of the Peacemaker, a messenger of the Creator, who sought to end the fighting between the Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas, the union was officially confirmed with the creation of the Hiawatha belt (pictured on right), the first wampum belt, as a means of recording the agreement.
This set the precedent for wampum, purple and white beads that derive their name from the Algonquian words wampupeake or wampumpeag meaning “strings of white” or “muscle,” to become “a socio-religious symbol during rituals, a token of good faith during negotiations to resolve political or military differences, as currency, and especially to preserve a nation’s history or memories,” and serve as an integral element of all future Haudenosaunee diplomacy, including their treaties with the Dutch, the British, and the young United States. Communicating the nature of the agreement, the Hiawatha belt displays a symbolic pattern: the use of white beads, representing peace and prosperity, to articulate the five Native Nations and their newfound unity is contrasted against the purple beads, which represent the death, war, and tragedy that preceded the formation of their democracy. Exemplifying the political, religious, and cultural unification of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, each new wampum belt created follows the same system of symbolic patterns and is an essential facet of their peoplehood.
Like the origins of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy itself, lacrosse, one of the Onondaga Nation’s sacred traditions dating back over a millennium, was also a gift from the Creator. It is a method of recognition of the Creator and functions as an ancestral link between those playing on Mother Earth and those playing in the Creator’s Land. Today, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is represented by their professional team, the Iroquois Nationals, and competes against other international teams like Canada and Japan to maintain their dominating rank of third in the world. Naturally, one would assume that their presence on the Olympic stage would be a highly exciting opportunity provided by the inclusion of lacrosse in 2028. However, one would be mistaken. As it stands currently, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has barred the Iroquois Nationals from playing under their own flag and has recommended that if the players wish to compete, they can join either the Canadian or American teams.
While this may seem like the natural or convenient compromise, as the majority of Native Nations became US citizens with the passing of the 1924 Citizenship Act, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy did not. They rejected citizenship on the grounds of their sovereign nationhood, which is underscored by their numerous treaties with foreign European nations. As defined by Francis Paul Prucha, one of the foundational scholars on American Indian treaty agreements, treaties are “a formal agreement between two or more fully sovereign and recognized states operating in an international forum, negotiated by officially designated commissioners and ratified by the governments of the signatory powers.” Most recently upheld in Onondaga Nation v. State of New York (2005), a land claims case which enabled the Onondaga to regain possession of their ancestral homelands, both the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) and the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794), each accompanied by their own wampum belt, are still valid agreements between the United States and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Therefore, from the perspective of the 'international community'—a prerequisite set by the IOC for recognizing a National Olympic Committee—the Haudenosaunee Confederacy qualifies as a recognized entity. Barring them from the games as an independent competitor is the subsequent assertion that they are an illegitimate nation because their designation of sovereignty does not comport with IOC’s bias.
Treaties, by nature, are living agreements that are constantly sustained by the affirmation of their signatories. In the case of the Haudenosaunee, the treaties’ continuity stands as verification that their nationhood, which is institutionalized by the intersection of their social, cultural, religious, and political means, is legitimate. This is best represented by their deployment of Forest Diplomacy, the specific process by which they have negotiated all of their relations with both European nations as well as Native Nations throughout time. A sacred and methodical ceremony, Forest Diplomacy includes the use of wampum, the smoking of the peace pipe, and intentional ritual to formulate peace agreements between two warring parties. Produced and affirmed by religious means, the treaties themselves endure as forms of religious expression. Therefore, the nationhood of the Haudenosaunee is not only indexed, but enabled and acknowledged by major international powers, as a product of their religiosity.
The immediate response to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's claims is often that modern nationhood does not work this way—that sovereignty cannot be grounded in religion because it is a political designation. However, rejecting these claims relies on the same logic that once empowered colonial doctrines like the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius(“nobody’s land”), both rooted in Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 Papal Bull Inter Caetera, which served as a foundation for European colonization. By framing Native Nations as “savages” lacking “true religion,” their lands were deemed unoccupied and thus open to Christian settlement and conquest.
In the present case—between the Haudenosaunee and the International Olympic Committee—dismissing a possible religious freedom violation reflects the same restrictive logic about what does and does not count as “religion.” But why shouldn’t this be seen as a religious freedom issue? If the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is a sovereign nation, and that sovereignty is both shaped by and expressive of their religious beliefs, then their exclusion—despite meeting other basic criteria—raises serious questions. If this does not constitute a religious freedom violation, then what precisely distinguishes “religion” from its entwinement with politics, law, and governance?
Article 9 of The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples guarantees the “right to belong to an indigenous community or nation, in accordance with the traditions and customs of the community or nation concerned. No discrimination of any kind may arise from the exercise of such a right.” The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is not only a sovereign nation by virtue of their treaties, but has the right to be one as they themselves express it. Unfortunately, the IOC is not respecting this right as they are actively discriminating against the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for their version of contemporary sovereignty.
This argument is furthered when put in conversation with Article 12, which specifically uses religion as an adjective to communicate that “rights to religion are framed by, and folded into, more expansive considerations of cultural self-determination, where economic, ecological, juridical, and political matters can also have spiritual or religious facets and urgency.” For Native Nations, religion as they practice it is not driven by the familiar delineated Protestant ethic of private individualization, separate from the other aspects of life. As Suzan Harjo put it, “religion was so basic and fundamental and atmospheric and contextual that for the most part, people didn’t discuss it. It was assumed that no one would try to interfere with the Native people being the Native people.” When it comes down to it, excluding the Haudenosaunee Confederacy from the Olympics, whether one wants to understand it as a religious freedom violation or not, opens the conversation of how far people are really willing to go in support of Indigenous peoples. Will the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples actually be upheld, or will it somehow become inapplicable at this moment?
As lacrosse returns to the Olympic Games in 2028, the International Olympic Committee has the opportunity to honor the sport’s true origins and the sovereign Nation that brought it into being. For the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, lacrosse is not just a game—it is a sacred gift from the Creator, played as an expression of spirituality, diplomacy, and cultural identity. To demand that they conform to modern, state-based definitions of nationhood in order to participate is not a neutral bureaucratic decision; it is a direct denial of their religious freedom and their right to self-determination. The IOC need not ask the Haudenosaunee to compromise their sovereignty to make space for them—it must instead expand its framework to reflect a world where legitimacy comes not only from modern borders, but from historical continuity, spiritual grounding, and cultural distinctiveness. Anything less would not be neutrality—it would be complicity in the ongoing exclusion of Indigenous sovereignty and spiritual identity.
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