09/17/2026
This summer, the Land kept calling.
From Mackinac Island to Fond du Lac. Toronto and Six Nations to Anchorage. Rivers, mountains, old rocks, wood being shaped into lacrosse sticks, and a spruce root hat woven by the hands of our relatives.
I don’t know if this summer was a teaching or a reminder. Maybe both.
I have always been a city person. But the older I get, the more deeply I come to understand who I am as an Alaska Native man, the more I find myself drawn toward the Land. Toward the water. Toward the stories held in a place. Toward understanding what our relatives knew because they lived in relationship with it.
And I keep coming back to this:
To love lacrosse is to love the Land.
The games we now call lacrosse did not exist separate from the places where they were played. The Land offered the field. The trees offered the wood for the sticks. The natural world offered what was needed for the ball, the netting and the game itself.
The Land has always been part of the game.
And almost everywhere we traveled this summer, when we took even a little time to look beneath the surface, there were Indigenous stories already there. In the names of places. In the water and the rocks. In language, songs, belongings, food and dance. Different peoples, different homelands, different relationships, but always place.
I am incredibly grateful for everywhere this work has taken us. Even more grateful that Creator keeps pulling us beyond the airports, hotels, fields and gyms and reminding us to go outside. To listen. To learn whose Land we are standing on and what stories have been carried there long before us.
As we settle into fall and another season of PNW NATIVE LACROSSE , that feels worth carrying with us.
The Creator’s Game is not only played on the Land.
It comes from it.
And our responsibility is to remember the relationship.
