le jeu de la crosse

The game was invented by Indigenous peoples of North America — Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Ojibwe, Cherokee, and dozens of other nations played versions of stickball long before European contact. The Haudenosaunee called it dehuntshigwa'es (men hit a rounded object) or tewaarathon (little brother of war). It was played across vast fields, sometimes miles long, with hundreds of players, and served spiritual, diplomatic, and military preparation purposes.

French missionaries and settlers in the 17th century observed the game and named it for what they saw: la crosse, the stick with a curved or netted end, resembling the crozier carried by Catholic bishops. Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary in Huron territory in the 1630s, left early written accounts. The French name le jeu de la crosse — the game of the hooked stick — displaced the Indigenous names in colonial records.

Lacrosse became an organized sport in Montreal in the 1850s, when William George Beers codified rules and promoted it as Canada's national game. The Montreal Lacrosse Club (1856) and Beers's 1869 book Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada formalized the sport. Indigenous players, who had invented the game, were initially excluded from organized competition.

Today lacrosse is growing internationally, with Olympic inclusion from the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy fields its own national team — sovereign, not competing under any nation's flag. The game the French named for a bishop's staff has returned in part to its original stewards.