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Indigenous fishing rights in the PNW

In 1994, United States District Judge Edward Rafeedie made a historic ruling: Members of the Skokomish Indian Tribe are entitled to harvest half of the shellfish on cultivated beaches around Puget Sound and Hood Canal, including those on private beaches.

He based his decision on a series of hunting and fishing treaties signed by the US government and 20 tribes who lived on the Salish Sea and the Columbia River between 1854 and 1856. The resulting treaty rights became the foundation of modern life for the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. As the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission puts it, under these treaties, “The United States recognized tribes as sovereign nations and the rightful owners of the land.” But 165 years later, and more than two decades after Rafeedie’s ruling, Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest are still struggling to exercise their rights.

“We live under the shadow of ongoing and continuous threats as sovereign nations,” Joseph Pavel, the director of Natural Resources for the Skokomish Tribe, tells me. “We’ll be out there [harvesting] and a neighbor will come out armed and start hollering.” The threats are so serious that Pavels says tribal members will not harvest shellfish on private beaches at night, when the tides are out, for fear of being harassed.

“There are individuals that are actively contacting some of these waterfront owners and offering to harvest the [shellfish] ‘before the goddamn Indians get them,’” Pavel says.

Tribal members don’t need the permission of private citizens to harvest clams and oysters according to the treaties and 1997 ruling, but they prefer their cooperation — such a relationship often proves mutually beneficial between tribal members and the non-Indigenous community, which can share the abundant shellfish. Those “carpetbaggers,” as Pavel refers to them, “harvest everything they can get off a beach.”

“We don’t do that. We make sure that we leave a standing stock,” Pavel says. In other words, the tribal harvesters are not in the business of depleting a natural resource so thoroughly that it becomes inaccessible to the people who depend on it.

Photo: The Old Major/Shutterstock

Attacks on Indigenous fishermen are disturbingly commonplace in the Pacific Northwest. Willie Frank, a Nisqually tribal council member, is Billy Frank’s son, the legendary Nisqually fishing rights activist who was arrested 50 times during the height of a series of protests demanding that the federal government recognize treaty rights, known as the Fish Wars. He’s been fishing on six acres along the Nisqually River known as Frank’s Landing since he was a teenager.

“We still deal with a lot of racism on the Nisqually when we’re fishing,” he tells me. “Over the years, our net has been pulled in, it’s been cut, fish have been taken out of there by non-Native folks. There are people out there who don’t believe tribes should have the right to use our [traditional] net.”

Frank speculates that the aggression stems from the misapprehension that their nets catch all the fish before the sport fishermen can get to them (one of his goals is to have a five-minute video on the history of Indigenous fishing methods that fisherman watch before they can acquire a permit). Regardless, harassment that prevents Indigenous people from fishing is a direct violation of their rights, and it can have a disastrous impact on their well being. For many tribes, protecting and maintaining treaty rights is a main pillar of their mission as sovereign nations — and skeptical, and sometimes outright racist, citizens are far from the only threat to tribal treaty fishing rights that Indigenous fisherpeople face.

Indigenous people are environmental stewards.

Photo: Edmund Lowe Photography/Shutterstock

Indigenous people have long been positioned as forceful and determined environmental advocates: During demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Indigenous protesters and residents of the Standing Rock reservation became known as water protectors. Indigenous people are also leaders in the seed saving movement, an effort to restore pre-contact agricultural practices and promote biodiversity.

In 1974, the Boldt Decision solidified this role. The ruling allocated 50 percent of the annual catch to treaty tribes and ordained the tribes as resource co-managers, alongside the state, tasked with protecting the wildlife and its natural habitat so that it endures for future generations (the 1994 Rafeedie Decision built on Boldt’s ruling by clarifying that tribes could harvest in the “usual and accustomed places, except those … that were specifically set aside for non-Indian shellfish cultivation purposes,” which would allow them to access private beaches). Today, the Skokomish tribe alone runs water quality monitoring, habitat and watershed restoration, and fisheries management programs. Most tribes in the region are engaged in the same projects; for instance, the Nisqually Tribe’s salmon recovery program operates the Clear Creek Hatchery, which Willie Frank credits with replenishing the Nisqually River with Chinook salmon.

“We protect 80 miles of lands from Mount Rainier to the mouth of the Nisqually river,” Frank says. “We always try to buy property up and down the Nisqually River. We don’t want big housing developments going in there. We don’t want businesses or anybody else trying to buy the land that’s going to fight with the tribe about clean water and protecting the water.”

The changes to the environment and wildlife caused by industrialization and the resulting effects of climate change are frighteningly clear. According to the EPA, around 485,000 Chinook salmon were reported to be in the Salish Sea in 2010, a 60 percent reduction in Chinook abundance since 1984.

Tyson Hawk Oreiro, the executive advisor for tribal affairs at the Washington State Department of Ecology and a member of the Lummi tribe, has been a commercial fisherman for 18 years, and his parents both fished in the Salish Sea before him. In his lifetime, he recalls fishermen pulling in boatloads of sockeye salmon, or walking 10 feet into the water to catch crabs, whereas today he has to go out at least 250 feet. Today, he says that most families “struggle just to find enough [fish] to make a living and feed their families.” That’s why it’s so urgent to restore the habitat, revitalize salmon runs, and operate flourishing hatcheries.

“So many communities in the Salish Sea are trying to stay committed, and stay positive. They’re pouring millions of dollars into efforts to replenish the salmon runs and counteract climate change,” says Oreiro. “We’re in the mitigation stage where we’re just trying to clean up what the generations before have done in regards to damage to the environment. It feels like the 11th hour in many cases. For the next generation of fishermen, we often think, is there going to be anything to catch? Is it going to be safe to eat?”

But to not fish at all would be equally “incomprehensible,” he says. Even with drastically depleted fish stocks, Indigenous people still have to fish, “because the act itself is a connection to our history and our traditions, [and] with the ancestral sense of who we are as a people.”

Photo: DarrenWagner/Shutterstock

Oreiro says that salmon is “ingrained in the Indigenous culture of the coastal Salish people,” through their creation stories, which refer to salmon as the first source of nourishment put into the oceans for humans during the making of the world. Lower Elwha S’Klallam artist and storyteller Roger Fernandes captures the importance of salmon this way: “Salmon is the center of the world [and] has great power to us beyond just being a fish we catch and we eat.” Fish are so essential to the survival, livelihood, and spirituality of the Indigenous people of the Salish Sea and Columbia River basin that these tribes sometimes collectively refer to themselves as the “Salmon People.”

“For me, being on that river on Sundays, setting my net and exercising my treaty rights, it’s like going to church,” Frank says.

Treaty rights affirm what Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest have known, as the common saying goes, for “time immemorial”: That fish and people can coexist in a relationship that allows both humans and wildlife to not just survive but to flourish and prosper. For thousands of years, Indigenous people maintained this relationship without mass extinction events or endangered species. But it’s only possible because they treat nature with care and respect, recognizing that the relationship between people and the land can be mutually beneficial. Oreiro recalls a mantra his grandparents repeated to him over and over: “There should never be any reason that our people should starve if we maintain a good relationship with our environment.”

What happens if treaty rights are rescinded or the salmon disappears?

Photo: Edmund Lowe Photography/Shutterstock

Any long-term disruption to treaty rights would be “traumatic,” according to Oreiro. “Treaties are the supreme law of the land. They supersede any policies that follow after those treaties were signed,” he says. “These treaty rights are not an acquired right of Indigenous people. They are an inherent right, that has been passed down by bloodlines, through the signatories of the treaties.”

Pacific Northwest tribes have kept their end of the treaty by exercising their rights while serving as co-managers of their resources. But they often face endless red tape and bureaucracy, not to mention dueling political perspectives, when they try to launch new environmental protection and restoration projects.

“Our biggest obstacle is inaction,” Oreiro says. “We’re still having arguments over whether or not climate change is real. That is definitely the biggest detriment to treaty rights.”

The current political climate also has Frank on edge. In 2018, the attorney general of Washington State challenged the Boldt Decision. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the tribes, but with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frank worries that these challenges will become more frequent, and without a sympathetic justice, there’s no guarantee that tribes will win those cases.

“Losing her is going to have an impact on our tribal sovereignty because I don’t know who the next person would be under Trump and the Republican senators,” he says. “The Trump administration has rolled back every water quality rule that the Obama administration set into place. Over the last four years, we’ve gone completely backwards.”

A confluence of factors make the threats to treaty rights especially dire right now: the Supreme Court might begin ruling in favor of challenges to treaty rights. A rise in white supremacist ideology could result in increased harassment against tribal fisherpeople. And surrounding all these issues like a black storm cloud is climate change, exacerbated by capitalism and industrialization, which will wipe out the salmon if political agendas continue to block meaningful action against it. All of these pieces combined endanger the Indigenous way of life, and the consequences of such an outcome would be apocalyptic.

Oreiro predicts an “all-out economic crash in Indigenous communities in Washington,” if treaty rights were to be revoked or the salmon become extinct — both seem possible at this point. “Thousands of families will have no way to make a living,” he continues. “And we would have a whole generation that will grow up never holding the sacred being from our creation stories.”

In order to combat such an outcome, Joseph Pavel recommends a total shift in the mindset of how non-Indigenous people perceive the purpose of the Earth’s natural resources, and how they interact with the environment.

“People need to recognize that they’re being asked to make a commitment or a sacrifice for their resources,” Pavel says. “This whole country was, from my perspective, built on the exploitation and extraction of resources, without any investment. We made an investment in the capital that our Creator gave us, and you exploited that. And at some point there’s going to be payback, so you need to take some of that wealth and put it back into the resources.”

In the meantime, the Indigenous people of this region will keep doing what they have been doing long before the treaties were signed: protect nature in return for the bounty it has offered to help them endure so much hardship.

“I don’t want to be the generation that catches the last fish, sitting in a museum one day, showing my grandkids, ‘This is what your grandpa and your great-grandpa used to catch in the river,’” Frank says. “So we have to be the voice of the salmon and the voice of the water.”

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Baklava butler at Istanbul hotel

A hotel in Istanbul is now home to the world’s first baklava butler. At Shangri-La Bosphorus, a butler dressed in traditional Turkish clothing has the responsibility to serve guests the sweet, traditional dessert upon request.

When guests arrive, they will receive a decorative key that they can redeem at the lounge or restaurant for the butler’s service. The butler will then serve some baklava with Antep pistachio with some Maras ice cream on the side — a traditional Turkish ice cream made of clotted cream and cut from a vertical skewer.

Photo: Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts

The hotel told Lonely Planet, “It is part of our quest to create memorable experiences for our guests and delight them with moments of joy. The hotel wanted to present guests with a slice of history as baklava was served during the Ottoman Empire and in the Topkapı Palace kitchen as early as in 1473. Now a milestone in culinary history, baklava was officially registered as a Turkish dessert with a patent in 2005.”

And don’t worry, it’s not just coming out of the hotel’s freezer. The baklava is baked to order from a specialty shop in Gaziantep, which is considered the birthplace of the popular dessert. Unlike other baklava varieties, the kind made in Gaziantep uses only honey, filo pastry, butter, and crushed pistachio to fill the pastry.

You can even purchase individual boxes of the treat at $33 per box.

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St. Kitts and Nevis is reopening

As the weather turns a bit chillier, travelers will be relieved to know that they have more and more options for sunny vacations. St. Kitts and Nevis, a Caribbean nation comprised of two islands, announced today that it will reopen to international flights and travelers on October 31, 2020.

The island’s chief medical officer announced that travelers will be split into two categories — those coming from the CARICOM Travel Bubble and those who are international visitors. Travelers from inside the bubble must provide a negative PCR test while those coming from outside the bubble must stay in one of several COVID-approved accommodations. The CARICOM bubble consists of Barbados, Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Lindsay F.P. Grant, the tourism minister for St. Kitts, said in a statement, “We have been working diligently to prepare for this reopening to ensure that we are ready to welcome travelers by training and certifying local businesses and individuals in the health and safety protocols they are required to meet and be certified in to be permitted to operate.”

St. Kitts and Nevis closed its borders to international tourism on March 25.

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World's scariest forests

There is something spine-tingling about entering a dark, dense forest. As the sun is blocked out by a thick canopy or mist, and the trees’ twisted branches and roots seem to reach out and touch one another in a secret conversation to which we aren’t privy, it can be downright unsettling. The creaks and moans of heavy trunks moving in the wind, of animals rusting in the underbrush, make it scarier still. In some places around the world — from Mexico to Romania — these eerie wooded areas have also seen drownings, murders, even massacres, making you wonder if you should even visit them at all. For those brave enough, here are the scariest forests in the world.

1. The Black Forest, Germany

Photo: Andreas Zerndl/Shutterstock

The backdrop for the troubling fairytales of The Brothers Grimm like Hansel and Gretel, the list of legends attributed to these thick and dark woods are endless. From werewolves and witches to headless horsemen and nymphs who live underwater, Germany’s Schwarzwald has been the mythical site of many fantastical stories. These are commemorated in the region’s unique Carnival celebrations, where people dress as demons and frightening creatures.

2. Isla de las Muñecas — Mexico

Photo: avf71/Shutterstock

Over 50 years ago, a man on this island was said to have seen the body of a young girl who had drowned here. He hung up the doll in her honor, but was so haunted by thoughts of her lifeless body that he continued to tie the dolls onto the trees in her memory. Today the frightening forest overflows with creepy dolls and their body parts, from disembodied heads to arms and legs pleading to be made whole. Many who come to take in the spectacle say the dolls are possessed, whispering to one another and even moving their eyes and body parts.

3. Hoia-Baciu Forest, Romania

Photo: Daniel Mirlea/Shutterstock

Allegedly named after a shepherd who mysteriously vanished, along with 200 sheep, the area is also called “The Bermuda Triangle of Transylvania.” Another tale recounts a five-year-old girl who disappeared here but was found again five years later, but it was said she had not aged a day. Visitors have reported feeling anxious when they visit the forest, experiencing nausea and even rashes. Locals are said to stay well clear of the misty forest and its eerily curved trunks and branches.

4. Aokigahara Forest — Japan

Photo: kt-wat/Shutterstock

A sign at the forest entrance reminds visitors that life is precious and to seek help if they need it. Sadly, this is the site of more suicide attempts — hundreds of them successful — than nearly any other place on Earth. Beyond this tragic fact looming over those who enter, the trees are so tightly packed together that it’s hard to see or hear anything, leaving even seasoned hikers disoriented. They’ll use string or other markings to ensure they can make their way out as it’s said that iron deposits below ground render compasses all but useless.

5. Wychwood Forest — England

Photo: Vic Powles/Shutterstock

According to lore, well over four centuries ago, the wife of the Earl of Leicester, Amy Robsart, broke her neck and passed away in unexplained circumstances. Much later, the earl was hunting in the Wychwood Forest and encountered her ghost, who told him he would soon join her in the hereafter. He was then said to have fallen sick and died. It is legend that that fate would befall others who see Amy Robsart’s apparition. Visitors to these allegedly haunted woods claim to feel hands touching them or to hear the clapping of running horses. With a name like Wychwood, these eerie legends certainly leave you wondering if these woods are best left unexplored.

6. Dow Hill Forest — India

Photo: Saurav022/Shutterstock

Many murders are said to have taken place in these ominous, mist-filled woodlands. Reports claim that those who enter feel they are being watched, and some have even spied a red eye gazing at them and have caught a fleeting glance of an apparition is an ash-colored dress. The most oft-heard rumor is of a headless boy walking on his way from the forest along “Death Road” to the Dow Hill Victoria Boys’ School, itself considered one the most haunted locations in India. Residents who live nearby say they hear sounds emerging from the school even when it is not in session.

7. The Forest of Broceliande — France

Photo: MattLphotography/Shutterstock

According to some Celtic legends dating back to the Middle Ages, this forest in the northern part of France was said to have a mystical aura. Some believe these woods are the ones described in the legends of King Arthur. The wizard Merlin was said to have been briefly imprisoned in an invisible tower here and is thought to be buried at a mysterious location widely called the Tomb of Merlin. Also here is the Val Sans Retour, or Valley of No Return, where it’s said that King Arthur’s sorceress half-sister Morgan le Fay trapped and held young knights who were not faithful.

8. Smolensk Forest — Russia

Photo: 1722964393/Shutterstock

This really was the sight of the Katyn massacre. During World War II, a mass grave with 20,000 Polish soldiers and military leaders secretly slaughtered by Joseph Stalin’s army was discovered. Only a decade ago, a plane carrying nearly 100 of the most important political and business officials of Germany crashed here, killing everyone on board. It was a shocking day for the people of Poland, for whom this foggy forest was already the site of a painful history. You can forgive them for believing that this patch of earth is cursed.

9. Epping Forest — England

Photo: H1nksy/Shutterstock

Part of the dense urban forest that London comprises, the nine-square-mile Epping Forest has long been the perfect place for criminals to lay low or to bury their murdered victims. Frighteningly, more than a dozen such victims have been discovered here in the last half-century. At least one murder took place in the forest itself, at the hands of a notorious highwayman Dick Turbin. Many of the trees here haven’t been cut in nearly 150 years, following legislation to protect the area, leaving them with weirdly deformed shapes. Add in reportedly creepy sounds and ghostly sightings, and this is one hair-raising walk through the woods.

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Bear Grylls Explorer Camp opening

Even though camping season is almost over for most of us in the United States, it’s not too late to hone the skills you’ll need to be a rugged wilderness adventurer for next summer. The first Bear Grylls Explorer Camp is opening this month, teaching survival skills to small groups in the United Arab Emirates. Thanks to the success of the Bear Grylls Survival Academy, which opened in 2012 in the UK, Grylls is now setting up this UAE-based camp where people can learn outdoors skills in 24-hour adult and family courses, as well as eight-hour and half-day survival courses.

The camp will be located in Jebel Jais in Ras Al Khaimah and geared toward small groups. Course options are half day (three-to-four hours), eight hours, and 24 hours. Unfortunately, the camp won’t be run by Grylls himself, but by experts who previously trained at the Bear Grylls Survival Academy.

If you sign up, expect a crash course of basic survival skills, including how to build fires and emergency shelters in the wild. You’ll also be instructed on wilderness first aid, knife skills, sourcing food and water, navigation, and more.

Special camp accommodation is expected to open in 2021, in 20 recycled shipping containers. Once the accommodations open, guests will be able to take advantage of longer courses.

Photo: Bear Grylls Explorer Camp

The courses are planned to start on October 16 with social distancing guidelines in place. Prices start at $122 per person for the half-day experience.

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Leaders’ Pledge for Nature

This is The Climate Win, the most positive sustainability news around the world every week.

This week, 64 leaders from five continents signed onto a global pledge to reduce biodiversity loss. The Leaders’ Pledge for Nature, signed in advance of Wednesday’s United Nations Summit on Biodiversity, “commits to reducing biodiversity loss by 2030,” according to its website.

“We reaffirm our commitment to international cooperation and multilateralism, based on unity, solidarity and trust among countries, peoples and generations, as the only way for the world to effectively respond to current and future global environmental crises,” the governments state in the pledge.

Signatories include nations in the European Union as well as others spread across the globe, from Bangladesh to Belize and from Lebanon to Lesotho. The goals of the 10-point pledge are as diverse as its signatories. Unsustainable fishing practices and deforestation will be targeted as part of an effort to develop a more eco-friendly global food system and a circular economy. Each of the 10 points offers a particular focus on post-COVID recovery.

“Biodiversity loss is both accelerated by climate change and at the same time exacerbates it, by debilitating nature’s ability to sequester or store carbon and to adapt to climate change impacts. Ecosystem degradation, human encroachment in ecosystems, loss of natural habitats and biodiversity and the illegal wildlife trade can also increase the risk of emergence and spread of infectious diseases. COVID-19 shows that these diseases have dramatic impacts not only on loss of life and health but across all spheres of society,” the pledge states.

Notably absent from the pledge are Australia, Brazil, and the United States, each led by conservative leaders who have at best failed to ramp up conservation efforts and at worst have made reducing environmental protections a centerpiece of their administration.

Disproving any notion that this pledge is an affair of the left, however, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson not only became a signatory, but he has also emerged as one of its more vocal supporters. The BBC reported that in joining the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature, Johnson stated that the UK would increase its protected spaces from 26 percent of the country’s area to 30 percent — a measure experts say is necessary to maintain natural balance on the planet — by 2030. “If left unchecked, the consequences will be catastrophic for us all,” he told the BBC.

The pledge itself is both informative and inspiring. You can read it in its entirety.

More climate wins

The Leaders’ Pledge for Nature came on the heels of another major announcement from the European Union. The EU plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions 55 percent by 2030, according to a report in Eurovision. European Commission President Ursula von der Layen hopes to formalize the proposal by the end of this year. And that target could be increased. The European Parliament’s Green Party wants the EU to pledge a 65 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2030.

The New York Times reported this week that construction projects using wood are on the rise across the United States. This is beneficial to the environment because wood itself captures carbon from the air and stores it, and because it’s a renewable resource, wood doesn’t require nearly as much greenhouse gas emissions to produce as steel and concrete do.

Scientists have discovered a new “super enzyme” that actually eats plastic, according to a report in The Guardian. The super enzyme is a hybrid of two enzymes first discovered at a Japanese waste facility in 2016. When combined, the enzymes can eat plastic bottles and similar plastics and allow them to be fully recycled. The super enzyme could be ready for mass use within a year or two.

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Antigua and Barbuda remote program

Antigua and Barbuda is making life a little easier on remote workers by opening its doors to digital nomads. This week, the Caribbean island nation announced that it would allow remote workers earning at least $50,000 a year to live and work there for up to two years through its new Nomad Digital Residence Program.

The program offers special resident status to remote workers who can prove they have the means to support themselves — and any family members who may be joining them — for the duration of their stay. Successful applicants will be able to take advantage of all the country’s natural beauty, including its 365 beaches.

Prime Minister Gaston Browne wrote in a statement, “As a multicultural society, our people have been welcoming visitors to our country for almost a hundred years. We know how to look after guests and make them feel at home. That’s why we are rated as one of the top tourism destinations in the world.”

The visa costs $1,500 for a single applicant, $2,000 for a couple, and $3,000 for a family. Applying is easy with a simple form to fill in.

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Alaska Airlines COVID-19 tests

After United Airlines announced last week that it would offer COVID-19 tests for travelers to Hawaii through San Francisco International Airport, Hawaiian Airlines rapidly followed suit with drive-through testing facilities near San Francisco and Los Angeles airports. Now it’s Alaska Airlines’ turn to ease travelers’ lives with pop-up clinics where they can get tested.

The airline will offer COVID-19 testing for travelers to Hawaii and Alaska, which also has a 72-hour testing requirement, through a pop-up clinic in Seattle, WA, starting October 12. Getting tested will cost $135 with results available in two hours. Alaska Airlines passengers will be able to receive priority testing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM.

As Alaska Airlines flights to Hawaii resume from more US cities, there will be more testing facilities to accommodate travelers. A press release announced future clinics in Portland, OR; Anchorage, AK; and Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego in California in the coming weeks.

These new protocols are being introduced due toHawaii’s plan to lift the mandatory quarantine on October 15 for visitors who present a negative result of a COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours of arrival. Travelers will also be asked to complete a health form before making their way to Hawaii.

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Hotels.com needs ‘Creature Critics’

Since the pandemic began, more travelers than ever are looking for pet-friendly accommodations. Searches for pet-friendly hotels on Hotels.com have increased by 300 percent in recent months, but there’s one problem — all the hotel reviews out there are written by (and for) humans. That’s why the website is launching a new team of “Creature Critics” to help review the world’s best pet-friendly hotels.

The application site reads, “With pet travel on the rise, there has never been a greater need to have fluffy felines and cute canines, compiling a list of ‘pedigree’, pet-friendly hotels.”

Hotels.com is hiring three pets and their owners to be part of the new initiative. Each pet owner paid will receive 10 free nights on Hotels.com (valued at $150 per night) to test out the best pet-friendly accommodations in the country and report back on their experience.

The site is looking for pets and owners with a “taste for Hotel Life, have bags of personality, and (most importantly) can fit in a hotel room. Sorry horse girls.” You can, however, enter with a hedgehog, rabbit, or other small creature.

To apply, just upload a picture of your pet to Twitter or Instagram with the #CreatureCritics tag and follow @hotelsdotcom. You should also add a caption telling Hotels.com why you deserve to win. Entries must be submitted before October 9, 2020.

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Irish and Iroquois lacrosse teams

The fate of the 2021 Olympics is still up in the air, but athletes are already looking ahead to the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Alabama. Unfortunately, the Iroquois Nationals — ranked number three in the league — wasn’t included on the list of men’s lacrosse participants because they don’t belong to a sovereign nation, organisers said. It’s worth noting, too, that the Iroquois actually invented the sport.

Lyle Thompson, an Iroquois Nationals player, said to NPR, “It was a disappointment and sort of boiled my blood. All my life lessons really come from the game of lacrosse. Playing in those medicine games, those traditional medicine games and using a traditional wooden stick.”

Indeed, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which the team represents, originated the sport.

A petition to include the Iroquois Nationals got over 50,000 signatures and caught the attention of the Games’ organizers. They recognized their mistake, but since the roster of teams was already full, they couldn’t do anything to change the situation.

To make room for the Iroquois Nationals to compete, the Irish lacrosse team bowed out of the tournament. Sonny Campbell, a player for Ireland Lacrosse, said, “None of us would be going to Birmingham, Ala., in the first place if it wasn’t for the Iroquois and giving us the gift of their medicine game. We support them, and if it means we’ll give up our spot, then so be it. But the Iroquois, they need to be there.”

The Nationals expressed their appreciation for the selfless move, and Thompson vowed not to squander the opportunity. “The Iroquois Nationals are going to put together the best team the world has ever seen,” he said, “and representing not just the Iroquois Nationals, but Ireland lacrosse also.”

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