by Jane Leavy
An imperative to include players representing all Six Nations increased political maneuvering during the Nationals' selection process, and last December— after months of tryouts—the Iroquois Traditional Council made a devastating decision: for the first time in Nationals history, a player's Native lineage would be a major issue, decided strictly through his mother. Once-acceptable adoptees, players with only small traces of Indian blood, and offspring of mixed marriages involving non-Native mothers were rejected. The Nationals' midfield was gutted when five players were cut loose for reasons of lineage.
Just as curious, some prime Iroquois players didn't try out for this year's team, opting to devote themselves to family, work, or their box teams. "There are players who should be on this team who aren't," Freeman Bucktooth says. "[Defender] Marshall Abrams—an All-America at Syracuse—chose not to play. I'm upset that some didn't try out, and I'm upset that some guys got cut. I told everybody: there are three guys who should be on the team because they add speed, and that's something we lack."
For someone like Roy Simmons III, who comes from a white, win-at-all-costs culture, such decisions seem inexplicable. "Here I am stupidly thinking we're going to send the best team," he says, "and it's not really going to happen." But though many of the coaches—such as Mark Burnam, who saw his brother bounced from the squad—share Simmons's frustration over the Traditional Council's ruling, they don't have the luxury of walking away. "I have to respect that," says Jemison. "That's the stance of the coach and the entire staff: we respect our tradition, and that's what we're going to go by. We can't bellyache, because then we're cutting our own throats."
What he means is, at a time when the Iroquois are struggling to protect their language and culture from the enticing encroachments of American life, when each Iroquois lacrosse player who goes to Syracuse represents, yes, a success story but also a flight risk—a man in danger of losing his Native ways—things such as lineage do mean more than the world's biggest lacrosse tournament. Iroquois tradition requires that chiefs make each decision with an eye on its impact seven generations from now (hence the N7 logo on Nationals gear); there's a reason Lyons calls Nike the team's partner, not sponsor. Today's Iroquois fear being subsumed, fear Culture USA more than Team USA, and the message We are still here will mean little if the we is allowed to grow fuzzy.
"There's a lot more weighing on us," Jemison says. "It's our identity." Which, not by accident, dovetails with the larger Iroquois lacrosse paradox: spiritually and socially the game is central in ways inconceivable for any sport in any other culture—but winning isn't. Some players, such as Smith and Cody Jamieson, may indeed be motivated to win titles, but the typical Iroquois sees lacrosse as the place to present himself to the Creator, not prove himself number one.
Desko, the Syracuse coach, understands this, at least enough to make allowances. Last fall his dazzling new midfielder, Jeremy Thompson, announced that he would miss more than a week of training because he had to fast for four days—no food, no water—in an Onondaga cleansing ritual that leaves participants weak and sometimes delirious. "And I'm sitting here going, Whooo. Interesting," Desko says. "But another coach? 'Screw that, fast on your own time! Miss practice and you're done!' But Jeremy's not doing it to take the day off. He's doing it because he wants to be a better Iroquois."
Thompson feels many of the pressures facing young Natives who try, as he puts it, to "live in two worlds." His great-grandfather was a chief, and Jeremy grew up steeped in tradition. "We weren't allowed to have the girls touch our wooden sticks; it's a medicine game for men, not women," he says. "If it was on the ground, my mom would leave it there."
With his summer job tutoring Onondaga kids in their Native tongue and his plans to resurrect the adolescent rite of passage known as vision quest—not to mention the long ponytail trailing down his back—Thompson, 23, seems the picture of Native American piety. But living according to his ideals has been a struggle. When his family moved from the Mohawk reservation to Onondaga, he was in the fifth grade and could barely read or speak English; he struggled in school and by 15 began bingeing on alcohol. Why not? That's what many of the men on the rez do.
Only 11.5 percent of Native Americans graduate from college. "We're always thinking back home is more important," Thompson says. "That's the problem we have nowadays in getting kids off and going to college. They don't want to leave the family or the reserve, and another big part is the drugs and alcohol. They have no way of finding themselves. We don't have that connection, the role models, somebody there to direct them the right way."
After poor grades derailed his dream of playing for Syracuse, Thompson won two junior college national titles at Onondaga Community College and beefed up his transcript enough to gain admission to Syracuse last fall. But he also boozed plenty, and his dream of playing for the Orange with his younger brother, Jerome, died when Jerome ran into academic trouble. "He quit," says Jeremy. "He couldn't handle school." Then Jeremy's longtime girlfriend, whom he had planned to marry this summer, broke up with him.
"I'm a better person because she did that," he says. "I'm thankful. I realize what I put her through all those years I was out drinking, doing what I wanted to do. She's a good woman, traditional, Long House, had all those qualities that I want in a woman. And I shot that out the door."
Thompson started to get clean 18 months ago, but last fall the constant toggle between all-Native life on the rez and all-American college life sparked a short relapse. After that, however, he learned that negotiating both worlds, working toward a degree but not forsaking his traditions, was actually doable. "It's not like the old days," he says. "We have to go out." Loneliness helped him see it clearly: he could be the example he never had. This fall he'll be a senior at Syracuse, on track to earn a degree in communications.
"I'm on the verge," he says. "I found out these things are always going to pull at you, but I'm really digging in now; I feel like my days of fooling around are done. I'm down to business with learning our ways, our ceremonies, and lacrosse started to help me out. It's a sport I can always go to for medicine, for relief, to have fun.
"Another thing I found out about lacrosse: I'm doing it for the younger ones behind me now. I look at my life—how it was taken, where I fell off my track—and I want to be there and have a program for kids to find themselves, their spirituality, and find what they were put here for. That way, they're ahead of the game."
He's still young, they say. Quick of mind, light on his feet, zipping around town in a Prius, Oren Lyons begins his ninth decade utterly unimpressed by his own stature. One morning last January a teenager walked into a Syracuse restaurant carrying a defender's stick and, when introduced to Lyons, clearly didn't know that the man in front of him was a chief, a caretaker of the Iroquois way, a voice on indigenous and climate issues who has been heard by the United Nations General Assembly and Bill Moyers and the bright lights who gather each year in Davos. That was fine: Lyons had more important things to talk about.
"Don't forget to pokecheck," he said. "Any ball on the ground is yours, you know."
Because before he was anyone, Lyons was one of the best goalkeepers ever, and even old goalies can't help bossing defenders around. In 1996 he traveled with the U-19 Nationals to Edogawa, Japan, for the world championships. He was in the locker room before an exhibition against a college team when coach Freeman Bucktooth jokingly suggested he suit up. Lyons didn't laugh. He borrowed some equipment, grabbed his wooden stick, and headed for the goal.
He was 66 years old. The day was witheringly hot. Though manning the larger field net, Lyons positioned himself with one hand on his stick, box style. And then they started to come, the shots: breakaways, one-on-ones, rocketing in after every fake and juke the young athletes could muster. But for one half Lyons stood in, erasing four decades until he was at Syracuse again, with Jim Brown and Slugger Simmons ranging upfield. Lyons whipped his stick around like a nunchaku, deflected ball after rock-hard rubber ball, stuffed one
point-blank missile after another as sweat poured down his back.
"I've never seen a goalie play like that, with one hand on his stick in a six-foot net," says Drew Bucktooth. "Jumping up with his elbow, making saves? And he didn't have arm pads, so he's making saves with bare arms. He had to have 12, 15 saves and gave up just one goal. Had to be 100 degrees that day. I've never seen anything like it."
So, yes, Lyons is nearly evangelical when he speaks of the Onondagas' new partnership with a Swedish firm to make vertical greenhouses for cities, and dead serious about the Iroquois's role as a ravaged planet's prime steward. "The Haudenosaunee are the ones who give thanks to the earth," he says. "We take care of it, and we're doing it very well here. When you look around the world today and see what's going on? We're in deep's—. People have no idea. But we know."
Lacrosse is the Creator's game, a way to show gratitude for this same earth, and Lyons expects progress there too. The passport problem only energized him, made him sure that "either way, we still win," he says. If the Nationals are forced to stay home, they become a rallying point for indigenous rights; if the U.S. clears them to travel on their own documents, Lyons says, "it's going to be a recognition." And if the Iroquois play in England this week, Lyons is sure their days of finishing fourth will end. "We will medal," he says. And for anyone who figures the recent turmoil makes the Nationals ripe for defeat, he serves up a challenge.
Like Thompson, Lyons wears his hair in a long braid. But now he brings up an old Iroquois warrior style, a shaved head with a small patch of hair on the back. Asked the native term for it, he says, "Scalplock. To make it easier for them to scalp you." As his guest's bewildered, sputtering reply stalls at "but why would...?" his eyes gleam. Lyons grins and nods as the trap snaps shut.
"You want it?" he says. "You come and get it."
The Crash
Robert Sanchez
FROM 5280
THEY ALL HEARD IT: the buzz of the propellers, like a swarm of angry bees flying low over U.S. 6 through the central mountains. The plane was so low that it cast a gigantic shadow across the pine-covered landscape, and made people stop what they were doing and stare. The plane went right up to where that asphalt ended and 12,000 feet of rock stretched to the sky.
That was the plane that changed John Putt forever.
It was October 2, 1970, and the perfect, crisp fall morning had given way to an afternoon of endless blue sky. A snow had fallen earlier and the tree line around Evergreen was touched with spots of white. It was one of those Rocky Mountain days that made you glad to be alive. Thank God for Colorado.
And thank God for a reason to cut class early. Wasn't that what 12-year-old John Putt thought when that voice boomed over the loudspeaker at Evergreen Junior High School? Members of the Alpine Rescue Team, you 're needed. Now. There was a mission, and Putt was determined to be in on it.
Anticipation, excitement. That's what Putt felt. The joy of the moment. Whatever had happened, it must have been big. The folks at Alpine didn't call the youngest members out of class when grandma got lost hunting mushrooms in the woods. No, this was special—momentous. He could feel it.
He'd trained six months for his first call to action, for an opportunity to prove himself to the roughly 50 teenagers and adults who made up one of Colorado's only mountain-rescue outfits. Putt had tied knots behind his back in dark closets, searched for water, slept in snow caves, hiked until his feet bled.
Putt shot out of the classroom door. He was just a kid, really, a prepubescent boy heading to ... well, who knows what? Honor? Glory? Yes, that's what it felt like to Putt—all five feet three inches and maybe 100 pounds of him, a sliver of a boy with a tuft of unkempt brown hair sticking from his head. He headed down the hallway proud, his head held high.
He pushed open the school doors. It was nearly two miles to his house, and Putt ran the whole way. It was as hard and as fast as he'd ever run before. He reached home, but no one was there. Mom won't understand this, Putt thought to himself. He called his dad at work. I'm going on a mission, he said. I don't know when I'll be back.
Stay safe. That's what Putt's dad told him over the phone. But what did that mean? He grabbed his pack, and soon he was back on the road, running again. Three minutes, five minutes. A car passed and Putt waved it down. He hitched a ride to the Shack, the shed attached to an Evergreen church where the Alpine crew was mounting up. The last vehicles were blazing out of the lot. A National Guard helicopter had taken off. What about me? Putt asked, desperately. There was room in the back of a Suburban. Putt's heart leapt. Hop in, someone called to him.
March 26, 1969. The thump-thump-thump of the propeller blades boomed across the Spanish Peaks northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, as the pilot lowered his helicopter onto a windblown patch of earth.
Chuck Burdick, a 17-year-old from the Evergreen-based Alpine Rescue Team, was aboard, along with a handful of other rescuers, including Alpine members and several from a search unit based in Boulder. The early-morning fog had lifted, and Burdick found himself 200 miles from home, prepared for the worst.
Sturdy with thick shoulders and blond hair, Burdick was a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Denver and the burgeoning leader of Alpine Rescue—an all-volunteer mountain-rescue unit founded nearly a decade earlier. Among the younger members, Burdick was an unparalleled mountaineer. Although he wasn't from Evergreen like most of the other teenagers, he was a folk hero of sorts to the kids in the group. His technical knowledge was unmatched: he could tie any knot in seconds; he could read the most complicated topographical maps; he could rappel like a spider fetching its prey. One time, he zipped 70 feet across Bear Creek, just to show the newbies how it was done.
Burdick lived Alpine Rescue. When Alpine called in the middle of the night, his father would ring a doorbell attached to Burdick's room to wake him up. His Toyota Corolla was a rolling rescue unit, packed with a rucksack, a sleeping bag, a tent, extra batteries, and all sorts of radios. On those nights when he left home, his parents knew better than to ask if he'd be back for breakfast.
And now here he was, flying among the Spanish Peaks on a helicopter heading toward a narrow ridge. Atop one of the peaks was a Cessna 308 that had crashed five days earlier and killed everyone aboard. The recovery squad approached the wreckage. An hour or two later, someone found the Cessna's tail 300 feet below. Some of the men hustled down and found a gruesome scene. Burdick saw part of one man's frozen torso. None of the remains were recognizable.
The teenager worked quietly for the next few hours, removing remains and loading them. He hiked back eight miles with the rest of the team to the dirt road where they'd parked their cars. By the time Burdick was on the road home, it was early the next morning. Six bodies, only 250 pounds of remains. The road signs zipped past. Burdick was certain it wouldn't be the last tragedy he'd see.
The Suburban cruised along U.S. 6, which ran from Denver to the Continental Divide, past the old gold-mining towns of Georgetown and Idaho Springs. John Putt sat on the squad's equipment in the back of the SUV. There was chatter up front, a crackle on the radio. Ahead, he could see a column of smoke growing as they neared Mt. Trelease, one of the smaller mountains near Loveland Pass. The teens drove until it seemed the smoke column was right on top of them. The driver pulled off the road to where a makeshift command post had been set up.
The boys raced out of the vehicle. Putt followed with his 30-pound pack on his back. He was ready. It was just past 4:00 P.M.
Putt could see that Burdick had a map stretched across the hood of a car. A gaggle of people surrounded him: Lindon "Woody" Wood, Alpine Rescue's training director and head of the team's youth program; the Clear Creek County sheriff, Harold Brumbaugh; a number of Colorado State Patrol officers; and 18-year-old Bob Watson, another of Alpine's young leaders. They were swapping information.
Employees of the Loveland Ski Area and construction workers building the Straight Creek Tunnel—later named the Eisenhower Tunnel—saw a twin-engine propliner f
ly into the mountains three hours earlier. There was fire and lots of smoke. The workers ran up the highway and then hiked toward the crash, where they helped 11 victims off Mt. Trelease and got them to a doctor about 30 minutes away in Idaho Springs. Some were badly hurt; a few looked like they might die. Already, one body had been recovered at the crash site, but there had been an explosion and a fire was burning—beyond that, the information about what was going on at the scene was spotty. The Alpine team didn't know the plane's exact size or the number of passengers. Earlier, some survivors had told first responders there was a football team on board. At the crash site, football pads and gold helmets were strewn everywhere.
The information was relayed to Watson, who absorbed the news like an accountant. Bespectacled and skinny, with a mustache and scruffy hair, the high school senior was designated the team leader on the mission. He would be Burdick's number two and one of the more seni or Alpine members heading up the mountain. Calculated, confident, and tough, Watson was a walking contradiction—a hippie who was one of the most fastidious and safety-conscious of the Alpine members, the kid who wanted to work in medicine, but only after he spent a summer working on an oil rig in Alaska.
In all, there were 18 or so kids, many of whom were on their first mission. There was Putt and 16-year-old John Baroch—a boy who'd been hiking these mountains for as long as he could remember. There was 14-year-old Kevin Dunn and his 13-year-old brother, Mike. And there was 19-year-old Steve Greene, a devout Catholic who was studying physics at the University of Colorado Denver.
Watson lined up the teenagers along the mountainside, a rocky slope that ran a few dozen feet up then opened onto a ledge that extended into a thick forest. With their boots and packs, the teenagers looked like troops preparing to storm an enemy position. We are looking for survivors, Watson told them. Watch your step.