From the New York Times, a story on the Iroquois Nationals quest for a shot at the world championship lacrosse tournament. I interviewed the team’s coach and players in the past. The Iroquois Nationals are one of the only Native sports teams I’m aware of who have made an impressive mark on an international level. Now, there hopes for a world championship are at stake because of some decision makers in the U.S. Homeland Security who are keeping the Indian athletes in this country because bureaucrats are refusing to honor the tribe’s passports. The passports have been honored for decades. Read on:
By THOMAS KAPLAN
The Iroquois national lacrosse team was hoping to spend Monday getting acclimated in England as it prepared for its first game in this year’s world championships.
Instead, the team was stuck in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, missing the visas needed to travel abroad. And the stakes are bigger than a game: what began late last week as a documentation dispute with the British consulate became on Monday a debate over American Indian sovereignty.
Playing international sports, it turns out, is a lot more complicated when players have to convince the State Department that their passports are legitimate.
“There have been hurdles every step of the way,” said Ansley Jemison, the team’s general manager.
The Iroquois team, known as the Nationals, represents the six Indian nations that comprise the Iroquois Confederacy, which the Federation of International Lacrosse considers to be a full member nation, just like the United States or Canada. The Nationals enter this year’s tournament ranked fourth in the world.
The Nationals’ 50-person delegation had planned to travel to Manchester, England, on Sunday on their own tribal passports, as they have done for previous international competitions, team officials said.
But on Friday, the British consulate informed the team that it would only issue visas to the team upon receiving written assurance from the United States government that the Iroquois had been granted clearance to travel on their own documents and would be allowed back into the United States. Neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security would offer any such promise.
“Lacrosse is our game — we are the originators, we invented the game, there are 60 countries that play our game,” said Denise Waterman, a member of the team’s board of directors. “And now we can’t go to a tournament that’s honoring our game? It’s almost unbelievable that this is happening.”
Spokesmen for the Department of Homeland Security and the British consulate said that they would not comment on specific cases. A spokeswoman for the State Department would only say that the Iroquois team has been offered expedited United States passports, but they declined that offer.
“It would be like saying the Canadians are having travel difficulties and the U.S. says we’ll make you U.S. passports and you can go over,” Ms. Waterman said.
Only a few Indian nations issue their own passports, said Robert J. Miller, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who has written extensively about federal Indian law. He said that he had never heard of the United States government objecting to the use of such a document.
Neither has Robert Anderson, who was associate solicitor for Indian affairs in the Interior Department during the Clinton administration and now directs the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington School of Law.
“The tribes will probably say, ‘Hey, we’ve got the authority to do this,’ ” he said.
But the State Department said Monday that federal law does not allow a tribal document to be used in lieu of a United States passport when traveling outside the United States. A spokeswoman said that an October 2008 internal directive emphasized that policy, though it noted that other countries had sometimes recognized such documents.
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on Monday to express his dismay that the players were being prohibited from traveling with their tribal passports.
“It’s a matter of tribal sovereignty and respecting the rights of the Native American population of this country,” he said in a telephone interview.
Representative Dan Maffei, a Democrat from upstate New York, said that the federal government’s refusal to recognize the Iroquois passports had the potential to be an “embarrassing situation” for the United States.
“This is a true issue of principle,” he said. “Whether or not their principle is right is not for us to decide.”
The Iroquois team said that even if its situation is resolved immediately, the players will not be able to arrive in England until Wednesday at the earliest, leaving little or no time for practice before their first game — against England, in the tournament’s opening contest — on Thursday night.
The delay has been an expensive one. It was difficult for the Nationals to raise the $300,000 for their trip to the world championships, and the delay in traveling to England — and the arrangements that had to change as a result — has already cost the team more than $20,000, Ms. Waterman said.
The team was able to secure practice time at Wagner College on Staten Island, where players worked out on Sunday and Monday. Meanwhile, some members of the team who had never been to New York City used their free time on Monday to visit Times Square.
“We’re making the best of it,” Mr. Jemison said.
