Engaging (with) indigeneity: decolonization and Indigenous/Indigenizing Sport History (original) (raw)
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Sport in History, 2022
The Empire’s subaltern peoples and its justification in coloniality are strangely absent from British sport history, despite a key strand of the field being grounded in links between Empire, masculinity and sport: in this the subject reflects gaps and silences in British social history more generally. This paper that is both theoretical and historiographical explores this absence and considers ways that it might be addressed. It first sketches the coloniality of sport history as epistemology and ontology through an exploration of the field’s methodological national whiteness as redacting the agency and voice (past and present) of Indigenous and colonial subaltern peoples and implicating sport history in a continuing Imperial Archive. Although necessarily broad brush the paper concludes by examining aspects of the field that disrupt methodological nationalism and methodological whiteness to suggest ways of rethinking and recasting historians’ practice to suggest decolonial methods for British sport history that rupture in analyses of sport the constraints of the nation as anachronism and Whiteness as a fundamental characteristic of British history.
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This article examines the field of sport for development (SFD) while considering Indigenous resurgence amidst Canada’s neoliberal settler-colonial landscape. While sharing challenges encountered within their practice, program staff from the Promoting Life-skills in Aboriginal Youth program revealed high levels of constructive self-criticism and reflexivity. There are three emergent themes, the adoption of which appeared essential for transforming the sector in recognition of Indigenous resurgence: growth and pace; Indigenous agency and knowledge; and political engagement. Grounded in settler colonialism and resurgence, this paper also reflects on the field of SFD and what it would mean to decolonize the practice. The article concludes by asking if non-Indigenous scholars can study SFD by subverting the colonial status quo that is also reproduced in this research field.
Entangled Histories and Transformative Futures: Indigenous Sport in the 21st Century 1
Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, 2021
This chapter provides a survey of several different Indigenous contexts to highlight longstanding historical and emergent engagements with sport forms, which reveal complex genealogies and shifting meanings across time and space. Delving into colonial legacies and indigenous practices, I first explore surfing in the Pacific and lacrosse in Native North America as two customary sports with longstanding Indigenous traditions that have been transformed over time and are thriving today. These coexist with other Indigenous sport activities that have also been revived as part of resurgent efforts toward recognition and symbolic expressions of sovereignty. I then examine how Native communities engage some of the sport forms with colonial legacies, claiming them as their own, imbuing them with meaning, and in some cases transforming them. Finally, with attention to the shifting gender balance in sport participation broadly, I consider the relationship between (gendered) culture and (gendered) sport. Indigenous peoples use sports as avenues toward recognition, opportunity, and as a way of narrating community achievements to themselves and others, even as they navigate colonial, racist, and marginalizing social dynamics and institutional structures toward new futures.
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Icy morning dew upon my bare feet and legs is my lasting memory of playing rugby on Saturday mornings in O ¯ po ¯tiki, a small Eastern Bay of Plenty town in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The wet was cold and exhilarating, and with the right skill it enabled evasion of wanton captors as they slid one way, as you went the other towards greener pastures. The feeling I remember was one of liberation, in those moments where speed, deception, dew and inertia combined to open up the space for a headlong dash to the waste-oil marked try-line. Red with cold, Ma ¯ori boy feet speckled with blades of colonial green, glued with dew, made from water that wept down from the nearby Rauku ¯mara mountain range to the west and wafted up from the Pacific Ocean to the east. In the 1970s and 1980s, rugby was a central part of the O ¯ po ¯tiki community ; a community comprised of approximately equal-parts descendants of 'settler' ancestors and indigenous ancestors who earlier travelled westwards across t...
Sociology of Sport Journal
In this paper, which is a revised and modified version of the 2019 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Alan Ingham Memorial lecture, the author shares four views, contributions, and opportunities that sports sociologists might consider useful in how to decolonize as well as indigenize our discipline together. The need to actively engage in the theory and practice of how to decolonize while understanding what it also means to work toward becoming an accomplice, activist, ally, or co-resistor are important threads underpinning the nature and scope of this paper. The author concludes with a plea to sports sociologists that decolonizing our minds is as much a collective effort as it is an act of reconciliation while maintaining the promise of inclusion, equity, and human rights. As sports sociologists, understanding what it means to be in “good relations” with Indigenous Peoples is fundamental to how we continue to build on and improve our discipline together.
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Beyond Reconciliation: Calling for Land-Based Analyses in the Sociology of Sport
Sociology of Sport Journal
This article examines the possibilities engendered by land-based analyses within the sociology of sport. We examine how “Canada’s” Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action on sport reproduce a logic of social inclusion, one which assimilates Indigenous athletes and Peoples into settler models of sport. To consider epistemological tools for unsettling settler sport systems, we turn to critical Indigenous scholarship on land-based analyses and pedagogies. To illustrate the possibilities of land-based analyses, we examine lacrosse, an Indigenous sporting practice with roots embedded in relational interconnectedness with the land. A land-based approach to sport offers opportunities for revising the assumptions, values, and ethics underpinning settler models of sport through, for example, emphasizing the importance of community, healing, and land stewardship.