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After False Hope, Iroquois Team Remains in U.S.

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Thursday, 15 July 2010

After False Hope, Iroquois Team Remains in U.S. By THOMAS KAPLAN Published: July 14, 2010 For a few hours on Wednesday, the Iroquois national lacrosse team thought its passport brouhaha had been resolved, thanks to a one-time waiver from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton clearing the way for it to travel to the world championships in England using tribal documents instead of United States passports. Related But later in the day, the British government was said to have refused to grant visas to the team, even with Mrs. Clinton’s waiver, a potentially decisive setback for the team. “We are deeply disappointed, and urge our friends and supporters to reach out to the British government to seek reconsideration,” Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation, one of the six nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy, said in a statement. The team’s travel plans were first thrown awry last week when the British consulate asked for a written assurance from the United States government that the team would be allowed to re-enter the country using its tribal documents — an assurance that federal officials would not provide. They changed their stance on Wednesday when Mrs. Clinton authorized the special waiver. The State Department provided the Iroquois team with letters providing assurance of their re-entry, said P. J. Crowley, the department’s spokesman. Mr. Crowley told reporters in Washington that it would be up to the British government to decide whether to issue visas to the players based on those letters. But the Iroquois team described that decision as more of a formality, with the biggest hurdle — coming to an agreement with the State Department — having been cleared. That turned out not to be the case. The British Consulate decided that the letters from the State Department were not sufficient because ultimately they were not passports, according to a United States government official informed of the decision. “At this point there’s not a lot we can do,” Percy Abrams, the team’s executive director, said in a telephone interview. “We were given a set of demands, and then we met those demands — and then they were switched. That’s the way we feel.” The U.K. Border Agency said in a statement that the British government would welcome the Iroquois team, but only if their players “present a document that we recognize as valid to enable us to complete our immigration and other checks.” The statement did not discuss the letters issued by the State Department, and a spokeswoman declined to elaborate. Until Wednesday morning, when Mrs. Clinton authorized the waiver, State Department officials had noted that federal law does not allow a tribal document to be used in lieu of a United States passport for international travel. (Security is one reason: The Iroquois passports are partly handwritten and do not include any of the security features that make United States passports resistant to counterfeiting.) What the State Department did offer, however, were expedited United States passports for the team and its 20-person entourage. The Iroquois refused to accept them, saying that traveling to an international competition on what they consider to be a foreign nation’s passport would be an affront to their sovereignty. Mr. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, repeatedly emphasized Wednesday that the waiver granted by Mrs. Clinton was a one-time exception. He said that the team’s players — and all other American Indians — would be expected to travel on United States passports in the future. Mr. Crowley added that Mrs. Clinton had taken a personal interest in the Iroquois team, which has many players from New York, the state she represented as a United States senator. “She feels the same way that many Americans feel,” he said. “We want to see a team, which is by every indication one of the leading lacrosse teams in the world, have the opportunity to participate in the Olympics of lacrosse.” The Iroquois team, ranked fourth in the world, is scheduled to open the tournament on Thursday evening against England, a game the team now seems all but certain to miss. A number of elected officials have lobbied on the team’s behalf in recent days, including Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico and two Democrats from New York: Representative Louise M. Slaughter and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. A spokesman for Ms. Gillibrand, Glen Caplin, said Wednesday evening that the senator planned to ask the State Department to join with the Canadian government to work out any concerns the British or any other countries have about tribal passports, “so that this kind of situation never happens again.” The situation has been a costly one for the Iroquois team, which raised $300,000 to finance the trip to the tournament. Chief Lyons said the delays were costing the team some $25,000 per day. The filmmaker James Cameron, who has taken an interest in helping indigenous peoples, agreed to donate $50,000 to the team to defray those costs. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/sports/15lacrosse.html?_r=1

 

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