Re-Imagining the Game: Field to Box Lacrosse
The popularity that Beers enjoyed in the late 19th century quickly faltered by the early 1900s. There was little income for both lacrosse players and clubs, and fights between players and spectators occurred in the years leading up to World War I.9 After the war, lacrosse as a sport began losing out to baseball and softball as the preferred summer sport. Major changes were needed to keep lacrosse alive.
In 1931, Montreal Canadiens owners Leo Dandurand and Joe Cattarinich helped endorse the box lacrosse league on the foundations of hockey: the revival of lacrosse would have new rules based on hockey and use the sport’s arenas during the summer and even use some of their teams’ names.10 The formation of the International Professional Lacrosse League (IPLL) consisted of an initial 6-team alignment: the New York Yankees (quickly moved to Cornwall), New York Giants, Boston Plymouths, Toronto Maple Leafs, and two teams from Montreal – the Canadiens and the Maroons. The introduction of box lacrosse occurred during the Great Depression. It provided players a chance for additional income and gave rise to the idea of sport professionalism in Canada. The previous ‘code of honour’ in amateur sports was broken as people tried to find income wherever they could. To “preserve the community,” team games offered a new stream of money.11
Organizers hoped to draw the same crowds visiting Indigenous teams brought in to Toronto and Montreal in the earlier decades.12 Although the IPLL did not have an all-Indigenous team, a substantial number of players were recruited for non-native teams. When the league folded by 1932, a new professional one emerged with the Buffalo Bowmans – an all-Indigenous team made up of Six Nations athletes. Players like Ross Powless and his son, Gaylord, helped bring much-needed attention to the sport. Following Gaylord and the Brantford Warriors Lacrosse team win of the Canadian Sr. A Lacrosse Championship in 1971, Gaylord became the face of lacrosse and later compared Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky as one of the greatest of his sport.13
For both Indigenous members converted to Christianity and their more traditional relatives, the lacrosse stick represented a shared unity of their culture and nationhood. The wooden lacrosse stick was almost exclusively made by Indigenous artisans, either in local shops or factories, and could be tailored to individual players. The wooden lacrosse stick was believed to be taken by players to the Sky World in the afterlife, and emphasis was placed on its wooden construction. When the prominent Indigenous Chisholm factory burned down in 1971, the rival Brine company seized the opportunity to promote mass-produced synthetic sticks. By the mid-1970s, professional lacrosse leagues fully adopted the synthetic sticks, thereby ending the closest visual Indigenous tie to the sport.14