Members of the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team take to the field in an exhibition game in New York this week. The team missed their opening game at the World Lacrosse Championships in England after British authorities refused to honour their Iroquois-issued passports.Patrick E. McCarthy/AP/Newsday
I have a theory, though I can't prove it, based on several recent visits to the United States. Specifically, it's based on going through American customs as you get ready to board a plane for that country. And I wonder if the Iroquois lacrosse team that was stranded at the airport in New York this week is thinking the same thing.
On their way to England to play at the Lacrosse World Championships - a game the Iroquois invented, by the way - the 23 members of the team were prevented from boarding the plane because they insisted (as always) on using a passport by the Iroquois Confederacy. English officials were afraid the team would not be allowed back into America afterward, now that the airports have much stricter immigration rules. After some swift negotiations with the State Department and in particular Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an agreement for this particular event was worked out. Still, it was not enough. They missed their plane, and their chance to play. Getting in and out of America can be such a pain.
Ever since the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, crossing that imaginary border between our two countries has become increasingly difficult. Contrary to popular jurisprudence, at the border you are now assumed to be guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. Everybody now needs an official passport to go south. Even the Canadian Indian status card - I never left Canada or home without it - is no longer accepted to cross the 49th parallel, one customs agent informed me. Native people on their own continent must whip out their Canadian passports to prove who they are, in order to travel to Turtle Island.
I never knew Canadian native terrorists were such a threat down there, Tyendinaga's Shawn Brant notwithstanding. His claim to fame, if you remember, was blocking the 401 several years back, thus making a thousand or so white people late for work. Hardly an Osama bin Brant.
Of course, there's the memory of Oka. This very week was the 20th anniversary of that pivotal event in Canadian native sovereignty that made the name mean more than just a smelly cheese. To put it into perspective, once all the smoke settled the 78-day occupation and subsequent court challenges and inquiries caused more damage, including the life of a Quebec police officer, and cost almost half as much as the G20 conference. However, the siege did generate one okay made-for-TV movie and managed to make one lone army corporal with a steely gaze a star. Granted, irate Mohawks can be troublesome but the irony here was that most of the trouble-makers (as the politicians would call them) were coming up from the States to Canada, to join the party.
But I digress. I was talking about my theory. These U.S. customs officials are a dour bunch. I have travelled the world and I have to say they seem a little more sombre then most customs officials I've met. They sit there in their booths - I call them booth people - looking over your passport and information, asking you your reasons for daring to come into their country: What you are bringing with you? Where are you planning to stay? How much money are you bringing in, or how much have you spent? How long are you planning to stay? My accountant, my agent and my girlfriend don't know this much about me. And the booth people always have these seriously unimpressed looks on their faces. Ones that are not exactly welcoming you to their country. More like, "Guantanamo Bay isn't just for Middle Eastern people. We know you Canadians like going to Cuba, which by the way is a Communist country, in case you didn't know."
So this is my theory. It came to me as I was watching a bunch of people make their way through customs, all with varying levels of difficulty. "Geez, they should have had this in place 518 years ago. That would have solved a lot of problems," I thought. Trust me, I'm not the first native person to ponder this. Then I thought about the larger picture. What if there is a law of universal karma? And maybe reincarnation? And some celestial sense of irony? That would explain a lot.
So here it is: What if all these booth people, in charge of keeping the unwanted people of the world from stepping foot on the shores of America, were the reincarnated spirits of all the dead native people that have, over the centuries, been killed off in America by colonial expansion, manifest destiny, epidemics, the Trail of Tears, boarding schools, etc.?
Through some sort of eternal search for spiritual justice, they have returned from the beyond to protect their shores from invaders who are intent on hurting the people who already live there. They are trying to pick up the slack from five centuries ago.
I say this because if you look into the faces of these people of the booth, they do have a sort of disconnected, vacant look that is born either of processing several thousand people in an eight-hour shift or of travelling back from the dead. I know most if not all of them appear to be non-native, but if you can come back to the land of the living, you can probably fudge some personal appearance details. When you hunt buffalo, you must look like the mighty buffalo. I am sure all this means very little to the Iroquois lacrosse team. They are stuck at an airport in New York. Maybe they could canoe.