The Creator's Game returns to a classic political question in colonial contexts: What forms of resistance and life meet material and symbolic theft and trickery in “new lands”? The book's anchoring in the philosophy, practice and economy of lacrosse offers an extensive account of an answer: by foregrounding Indigenous organizing and resurgence in Canada from the nineteenth century to the near present, the book extends its analysis beyond an account of state power or formation.

Downey begins this history with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) creation story as retold by Delmor Jacobs of Six Nations of the Grand River. With this ancient narrative and theory of origins, we encounter a woman generating life, the cooperation and autonomy of animals, the axis of good and bad (“good twin / evil twin”) —what some might see as some of the standard fare found in creation stories across the globe. But within this story of life, we also find something unique: sport. Known as the Creator's Game, lacrosse was brought from the Sky World to the earth by the first woman, Sky Woman, who introduced it to her grandchildren (the aforementioned twins) to resolve conflict (7). Jacobs explains that lacrosse, originally a stick-ball game, required that hands not touch the ball. Lacrosse sticks were made from spiritually loaded trees and tied to the spiritual, familial and political life of the sky and earth worlds (167, 191). As the twins staged one of their most dramatic conflicts through this game, it is considered a mode of resolution so powerful that it can guarantee life beyond the earthly world to the ancestors in the Sky World (11). With that, Downey sets the tone for all that follows: the political life of this practice; its deep metaphysical, medicinal and political purpose; its repackaging as “sport”; and its appropriation by Canada as a national sport, which is then rebranded as a symbol of white masculinity and civilization and used as a tool of assimilation for Indian students in residential schools.

Downey draws from multiple sources to tell this story. He augments his work in the archives with oral histories and his rendering of an imagined present, introducing his readers to both himself as the book's author and to a trickster figure, “Usdas,” who acts throughout the book to cue in readers to the location and timeframe of each chapter as well as the key organizing issue or conflict to follow. This playful figure, in Downey's hands, is also suggestive of trickery—of colonial deception and wrongdoing and of Indigenous responses to that wrongdoing.

Not only was an Indigenous sport taken out of its context and then claimed as the “national sport” of Canada, Indigenous peoples were limited from play in 1867 and then barred entirely from competition in 1880 (43). This racialized and colonial exclusion was justified first by arguments that Indigenous peoples were perceived to be professionals and thus had an unfair advantage in a sport that was to be played by amateurs and then by arguments that they were too rough, that they played an “Indian style of the game” that was too savage, disordered and “ungentlemanly” (80). In spite of this ban, Indigenous players participated in exhibition games, including spectacular displays for white consumption during a visit to Queen Victoria in 1876 and at World's Fairs. Downey offers glimpses into the ongoing, grounded effects of these visits to communities, countering the perception that these players were colonial pawns of settler consumption.

When box lacrosse was introduced to professional teams during the Great Depression, Indigenous teams were assembled by Sḵwx̱wú7mesh national Andrew Paull, the great political organizer on the Northwest Coast, and we can see how sport, economy and labour intersected to push back against the state's exclusions. Paull learned to play lacrosse in residential school and then became the foremost organizer of the Northwest Coast teams; he was also a key player in the longshoreman's union, peopled by Vancouver Indians who worked long days on the docks and then immediately went to practice at night. Their teams were excellent but outsized by white players, so Paull imported bigger players from Six Nations whose size and skill offset the speed and skill of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and, in doing so, founded international alliances and affinities that persist to this day. Paull then used the occasion of trips to Ottawa for games to bring up land grievances in British Columbia (chapter 3).

Lacrosse moved further away from its Indigenous origins with the hockey-influenced form of box lacrosse. Downey's careful eye parses the implications of this new Depression-era, indoor crowd pleaser, which was played with shorter periods, fewer players on each side and checking and which had a higher entertainment value. This form of the game reintroduced Indigenous players to the mainstream and integrated teams; it also offered monetary benefits for Indigenous players playing in defiance of the ban on sport on the “Lord's Day.” Revenue from these games helped to send the condoled chief Deskaheh (Levi General) to the League of Nations to fight for Haudenosaunee recognition as a nation-state, outside of Canadian settler impositions in their communities in the 1920s.

The Creator's Game then moves to the nation-building implications of lacrosse for communities, as the Haudenosaunee create the Iroquois Nationals in 1983 in order to compete internationally—an act of sovereign independence from Canada and the United States. Women organize shortly thereafter, but their participation is hotly debated in the Confederacy as disrupting a spiritual alliance between men and sticks; sticks hold the power and life of trees, and women, as extraordinarily powerful figures in Haudenosaunee life, are deemed dangerous to the game. Downey goes a long way toward demonstrating how the gendered role of Indigenous spectatorship is inflected with influence in the Haudenosaunee social and political life of the sport in the 1980s and 1990s. This material is so suggestive and yet seems brief; readers will want more, and one hopes this work will stimulate further research.

The Creator's Game closes with the Iroquois Lacrosse Association (now the First Nations Lacrosse Association) and the refusal of passports at the 2010 World Lacrosse Championship in Manchester, and the flourishing of the women's team in the present. Downey's meticulous and conceptually rich work offers scholars of politics and settler colonialism a crucial link between Indigenous nationhood and lacrosse that allows us to think of history, metaphysics and meaning beyond the settler states that have claimed the sport and the lands for its own.