I love it! A great day for the game we love. Certainly, putting the Olympic rings on the game of lacrosse would easily fill a 20,000+seat stadium in LA in 2028 and the six-on-six format will be appealing for TV.
Of course, this brings up the long-simmering issues around the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) National's potential participation in the Olympic Games without formal IOC approval as as an Olympic nation. A good background article is found here:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/22/ir ... ed-states/
The much bigger issue is the legal evolution of the IOC's stance on indigenous nationhood. While the idea of nationhood may be very appealing from a current social (and anti-colonial) perspective to recognize the enormous contributions of Native communities, their sports and their sense of tribal identity, it's a very tricky structural and socio-political can of worms to grant native populations their own IOC nationhood, as (1) those indigenous athletes are already citizens of existing IOC-recognized nations, and (2) the 1996 Olympic Charter change ruled that NOC recognition can "only be granted after recognition as an independent state by the international community".
If you start granting international sovereignty to one tribe of people who are not a recognized international state, the aboriginal peoples in all countries may wish to soon play under their own indigenous flags, rather than their national flags. There are about 400-500 million people in the world who are broadly considered indigenous people depending on who does the counting, with about 70% of them living in Asia and Australasia, including:
-Ainu people of Japan
-Assyrians of the Middle East (Aramaic speaking Christians)
-The Kazakhs, Mongols, Tajik, Tibetans, Ugyur, and Eurasian Nomads of Kazakhstan, eastern Russia, and China
-The Miao and Hmong of southern China, Laos and Thailand
-The Shan and Karen peoples of Burma /Myanmar
-The Chakma of Pakistan
-The Kurds of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey and parts of the former Soviet Union
-Maori of New Zealand
- Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia
Here in our own hemisphere, there are several large groups of indigenous people:
-Many different Native American/First Nations/Metis tribes in USA and Canada
-Inuit and Aleutians of Canada and circumpolar Europe
-Mayans of Guatemala and Mexico
-Aymaras of Bolivia and other indigenous tribes of South America
In Africa, you also have a number of large indigenous groups, including:
-Khoe-San / Khoisan/Kung San of the Southern Afrixa(South Africa, Botswana, Angola, Namibia)
-Berbers of Morocco
-Hadzabe People of Tanzania
-Mbuti or Bambuti (Pygmies) of Congo
-Maasai in East Africa
-Bantu and other ethnic minorities in Somalia
-Ogoni in Nigeria
-Tuareg people of Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso
-Sahrawi of the Western Sahara
In Europe, you have the Saami people of Northern Scandinavia.
Do athletes from all these groups now get to choose to compete for their ancestral tribe instead of their current nation of citizenship? And, if you start granting IOC nationhood status to indigenous groups, then do we then have to grant IOC nation status to other linguistic or ethnic status (such as a Basque Olympic Team with players from the Basque regions of Spain and France and its Basque diaspora elsewhere? All of a sudden, the whole structure of the IOC could be splintered into sub-identity chaos that could potentially de-stabilize the whole Olympic movement...
While the IOC is global organization in name, it has a hard enough time managing the existing 206 or so National Olympic Committees (NOCs), the Organizing Committees who stage the games (OCOGs) Sport Federations and Sponsors under the IOC family umbrella...
And let's face it, Nationalism is the primary financial fuel behind the Olympic Movement...