USLAcrosse Magazine:
I’m from the Onondaga Nation. I grew up on both reservations, the Onondaga reservation and Mohawk territory. My clan is the Hawk Clan, which is passed down from my mother.
Lacrosse truly is a medicine because of what it brings to each person, but also the sense of community it brings within everybody. Any birthday party I went to, it was lacrosse. There were mini-stick games going and folks were all out there.
Once I started playing against teams off the reservation, they stared a lot at us, being a Native team. We could always feel it. In 10th grade, we played a Maryland team to qualify for the Dick’s Sporting Goods tournament. I grabbed the ball out of an out-of-bounds play, and a parent, trying to get in my head, said a bunch of stereotypical things like, “Cut your hair.”