Memorial Day weekend is the perfect opportunity to get together with family and friends to celebrate the burgeoning summer: a three-day weekend full of great food, great music, and, depending on your interests, great lacrosse. 

For those who love the fastest game on two feet, Memorial Day weekend is the culmination of the NCAA lacrosse season. This year’s event will feature powerhouses Syracuse, Cornell, Maryland, and the outsiders from Penn State, who rallied from down 6 against Notre Dame this past weekend to punch their ticket to the Final Four. It will be only the Nittany Lions’ third appearance in the final weekend of the lacrosse season.

Lacrosse has, for most of the modern era, been a Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic game played by the elite prep high schools and colleges of our United States. In its most recent years, the game has spread to the Rockies and beyond, with the University of Denver becoming the first college team west of the Mississippi to win a national championship when the Pioneers achieved the feat in 2015. Today, lacrosse is booming in England, Ireland, Japan, Australia, and Israel. 

But long before that, before national titles were won and stats were kept, back when lacrosse sticks were still made of wood, the game belonged to the Six Nations tribes who invented it on this continent nearly 1,000 years ago. Formerly known as the Iroqouis, the Six Nations comprise the Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Tuscarora Nations. Today, they’re known as the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee for short.

Some of the best to ever play the sport have been born and raised inside the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Cody Jamieson of the Mohawk Nation led the Syracuse Orangemen to a national title in 2009, scoring the game-winning goal in sudden-death overtime. Sid Smith, an indigenous defender born in Six Nations, Ontario, was also a major part of that Syracuse championship team. Tehoka Nanticoke, Austin Staats, Cory Bomberry, the Powless family, and many, many others have paved the way for young members of the Confederacy to find success in the modern era of the sport.

But none have had perhaps as deep an impact on the game itself as the Thompson brothers from the Onondaga Nation, who lit the lacrosse world on fire in the 2010s. Lyles, Miles, and Jeremy each left his mark on the game in a way that continues to be honored to this day. Lyles, specifically, is considered to be one of the greatest to ever play the sport. He holds the record for most points ever scored by a player and won the Tewaaraton Award, the nation’s highest honor for collegiate players, in 2014 and 2015. The trophy itself is a bronze sculpture featuring a Mohawk native playing lacrosse.

“It’s traditional that we’re given [a lacrosse stick] in our cradleboard as a youngster, as a young little boy growing up you’re given one,” explained Jeremy of the Thompson clan. “When we leave this place, this earth, we’re given it in our coffin. So as you can see, from birth to death, it’s with us, spiritually.” 

Lacrosse will feature in the Olympic Games for the first time since 1948 when the event takes place in Los Angeles in the summer of 2028. As of today, the Haudenosaunee, who are ranked as the third best team in the world, are on the outside looking in. To participate in the Olympic Games, a nation must satisfy two major criteria: recognition by the international community and the creation of a National Olympic Committee. The Haudenosaunee possess neither. 

The International Olympic Committee has its reasons for including lacrosse in the games but excluding its creators. There is a valid concern that the Haudenosaunee’s presence could lead to separatist movements and auxiliary nations around the world to seek similar exemptions to participate in future editions of the Olympics. But that fear overlooks the special reality of lacrosse, its inventors, and a rich tradition within America’s sporting culture. 

This is not the first time the Haudenosaunee have faced hurdles in its mission to achieve an even playing field at the international level. The Haudenosaunee have struggled to take part in the World Lacrosse Championship and the Lacrosse World Games, a six-on-six competition created in anticipation of the game being included in the 2028 Olympic Games. In 2010, the Haudenosaunee qualified for the World Championships in England but ultimately did not play in the event after the British rejected their passports. Members of the U.S. government offered the Haudenosaunee expedited U.S. passports but the team refused, insisting on traveling and playing as their own nation. 

“I would never play for Canada or the U.S.,” Lyle Thompson told the New York Times. 

The former president Joe Biden and former prime minister of Canada Justin Trudeau backed the Haudenosaunee’s 2028 Olympic bid with a joint statement in January of this year, only days before Biden ceded the White House to President Trump. 

“Given the unique and exceptional circumstances of the Haudenosaunee’s historic connection to this sport, and their Men’s and Women’s teams continuously ranked participation in international competitive lacrosse for almost half a century, we believe that a narrowly scoped exception is appropriate,” read the statement signed by both men.

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An Olympics in America featuring the return of a sport created in present-day America but without the participation of its unique founders would miss a pivotal point of the games—to bring together the whole world in top-level competition while celebrating the differences, both vast and minute, that differentiate the peoples of the world. Watching the Haudenosaunee lacrosse players walk across the Olympic stage with the Hiawatha Belt flag waving in the California breeze would be a small but not inconsequential moment bridging the ever-present gap between the United States and its people before.

“Lacrosse is a medicine game, first, before it was a secular game,” says indigenous lacrosse legend Rex Lyons. “It was for the vitality, the health and wellness of the community, the nation, the families, and the clans.” Speaking to the game’s healing power, Lyons pointed to news that lacrosse is now being played in Iran of all places. “There’s still hope for the world. They’re playing our game in Iran, that’s the medicine.” 

If there was ever a place that needed medicine, it’s Los Angeles. The IOC should see this moment as the opportunity it is and allow the Haudenosaunee to play.