STICKS, BALLS, AND RAILWAY TIES: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY ON THE RESEARCH AND WRITING OF THE HISTORY OF LACROSSE By BARBARA K. ADAMSKI Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Carolyn Redl & Dr. Angela Specht in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta November 2010 Sticks, Balls, and Railway Ties—Adamski 1 Table of Contents Abstract!.........................................................................................2 Keywords!......................................................................................2 Preamble!.......................................................................................3 Background!...................................................................................6 History of lacrosse in Canada!...................................................18 History of lacrosse in British Columbia!...................................32 Conclusion!..................................................................................44 Appendix 1!...................................................................................50 Sticks, Balls, and Railway Ties—Adamski 2 Abstract The history of the sport of lacrosse is difficult to trace, largely because documentation of the sport’s development is relatively sparse. In addition, many contradictions exist within the currently available documentation. As is the case with many historical accounts, accuracy is dependent upon several factors, such as researcher/ narrator bias, public sentiment, resources available at the time of research, and others. This autoethnography discusses the author’s own experiences in the researching and writing of “truth” surrounding the history of lacrosse, both as a freelance writer producing narrative non-fiction for general-interest magazines, and as a Master’s student completing a degree in integrated studies and therefore subject to many of the constraints of academic writing. The essay delves into the history of lacrosse in British Columbia and explores how a game originally popular in what was then known as Upper Canada ventured to the country’s west coast, as well as the challenges the author faced in researching and documenting that voyage. Keywords academic writing, autoethnography, British Columbia, creative writing, lacrosse, history, narrator bias, transcontinental railway Sticks, Balls, and Railway Ties—Adamski 3 Preamble The process of researching and writing a paper for an academic audience differs from the process of writing a creative non-fiction piece for a general audience. For one, creative non-fiction allows the writer a greater degree of flexibility, particularly when it comes to inserting the writer or the writer’s personality into the work. Kim Etherington, in Becoming a Reflexive Researcher: Using Our Selves in Research, discusses some of the constraints involved in academic writing, constraints that in her opinion sometimes make academic texts a dull read. For example, Etherington notes that academic research is very much an impersonal activity, and that many researchers distance themselves from their work. This, in turn, can create a distance between the writer and his or her audience, which can have a negative effect on the reader’s experience. As Etherington writes, “Without sight of the person at the heart of the work I feel no relationship with the writer, even if I am interested in the topic (25). Etherington points to a significant difference between the genres of academic and creative writing: the creative writer, particularly if writing for publication as opposed to writing for oneself, strives to make a connection to his or her reader. While academic writers also strive to make a connection with their readers, their focus is more on accurately and objectively presenting facts, statistics, and results of experiments, depending, of course, on each individual researcher’s field of study. With creative writers, facts are still important, but equally important is the telling of the story. Creative non- fiction writers often become a part of the story through their voice and through their Sticks, Balls, and Railway Ties—Adamski 4 interaction with characters and settings. Academic writers, on the other hand, try to be objective, to go unnoticed, often through the use of the passive voice and by citing the works of their colleagues rather than discussing their own thoughts or displaying ownership of their thoughts. For example, in many fields, writers are discouraged from using the first-person pronoun. My final project for completion of the Master of Arts in Integrated Studies (MAIS) program is an interdisciplinary look at the history of lacrosse in western Canada through the framework of creative writing and with particular consideration to the narrator reliability, the degree to which the reader can trust the narrator (Coulter & Smith, 577–590). If I am to question other narrators, however, I must question my own reliability as narrator, for I believe that all writers bring biases into their work. My essay takes the form of an autoethnography, which Sarah Wall, in the abstract to her paper, “Easier Said than Done: Writing an Autoethnography,” defines as “an intriguing and promising qualitative method that offers a way of giving voice to personal experience for the purpose of extending sociological understanding” (38). She also cites Sparkes, who says that authoethnographies are “highly personalized accounts that draw upon the experience of author/researcher[. .] (21). Through documentation of my own experiences as a researcher and writer of lacrosse history, I hope to add to the current body of literature on lacrosse, particularly with regard to “modern lacrosse,” which was developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century and was relatively unchanged until the sport moved indoors in the 1930s and became known as “box lacrosse.” Sticks, Balls, and Railway Ties—Adamski 5 Some academics believe that autoethnography and personal narrative are one and the same. Others, writes Wall (citing Holt, 2001 and Sparkes, 1996), “use autoethnography as a means of explicitly linking concepts from the literature to the narrated personal experience” (39). She goes on to describe examples of autoethnography as being used as a way of telling a story that invites personal connection rather than analysis (Frank, 2000), exploring issues of personal importance within an explicitly acknowledged social context (Holt, 2001; Sparkes, 1996), evaluating one’s actions (Duncan, 2004), or critiquing extant literature on a topic of personal significance (39). This autoethnography discusses my own experiences in the researching and writing of “truth” surrounding the history of lacrosse, both as a freelance writer producing narrative non-fiction for general-interest magazines, and as a Master’s student completing a degree in integrated studies and therefore subject to many of the constraints of academic writing. My essay delves into the history of lacrosse in British Columbia and explores how a game originally popular in what was then known as Upper Canada ventured to the country’s west coast, as well as the challenges in researching and documenting that voyage. My autoethnography straddles the fence between personal narrative and a more formal academic writing style, which often created internal conflict for me, for I constantly had to weigh the pros and cons of using footnotes versus citations, of a reader- Sticks, Balls, and Railway Ties—Adamski 6 friendly style as opposed to a formal academic style that avoids the first-person pronoun. In the end, I compromised, relying on footnotes as much as possible, but including a proper reference list to assist in verification of quotations and to provide avenues for further reading. My style in this essay is not as casual as accepted in a consumer magazine, but is, I hope, reader-friendly and interesting to the non-academic reader, while still meeting the requirements of the MAIS program. Background In 2005, I pitched a story on lacrosse to a Canadian magazine, The Walrus. I knew very little about the sport at the time. What made my idea timely (and therefore salable) was the fact that the city of New Westminster, where I live, was contemplating removing the original, somewhat-dilapidated, wooden lacrosse floor that was built in the 1930s during box lacrosse’s heyday, and replacing it with a more modern surface. The community was outraged, and a group was formed to raise money to replace the planks of the only wooden lacrosse floor still existing in Canada. To flesh out my pitch, I added other “facts” about the sport of lacrosse. I was given the assignment based on that query and began to conduct my research. It wasn’t long before I discovered several myths about lacrosse, many of which have survived to this day. I realized that my original query was based upon a mythical history of the sport, and that even several encyclopedia entries on lacrosse reflected these inaccuracies. For example, it is often erroneously reported that French missionary Jean de Brébeuf gave the sport its name because of the stick’s similarity to the bishop’s crosier. Sticks, Balls, and Railway Ties—Adamski 7 The journals in which he allegedly documented that “fact,” however, mention nothing of the sort. Furthermore, crosse is merely French for “stick,1” as in crosse de hockey (hockey stick), and the word itself predates Brébeuf, as does the phrase jeu de la crosse2 (game of la crosse). My discovery of this and other inaccuracies