Most lacrosse players tell the same story of falling in love with the game: It started with the stick. From the game’s traditional strongholds in Canada and the American Northeast and mid-Atlantic to 21st-century hotbeds like Colorado, Florida, Israel and Japan, male and female players alike recount that moment they first picked one up — whether titanium or wood, whether a standard 40-inch stick or a defenseman’s six-foot pole — and felt its potential for trickery, firepower, a bit of swagger. But nowhere does the bond with the lacrosse stick run deeper than in the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Located mostly in central New York and Ontario, its peoples — the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora Nations, formerly known collectively as the Iroquois — have been playing lacrosse for nearly 1,000 years. Though they adapted masterfully to the lighter, tougher, cheaper artificial materials that have revolutionized stick design over the past five decades, the wood stick retains its profound importance for the Haudenosaunee. Male newborns are often given miniature “cradle sticks”; men are buried with their favorite stick. The Onondaga attackman Lyle Thompson, 32, one of the greatest ever to play lacrosse, considered his childhood stick a living entity — “my best friend,” he calls it — and wept the day it broke. The use of a wood stick these days is mostly talismanic. The Haudenosaunee Nationals — one of the world’s best national lacrosse teams — started every game at the most recent men’s world field championships, in San Diego in 2023, by having a defender use a wood stick for one shift. Three weeks later, when a six-person Haudenosaunee delegation attended a private, high-stakes White House meeting with United States officials, they brought one of those sticks from San Diego. Their mission, in part, was to press their case for the Nationals to be included on the biggest international stage of all, the Olympic Games.