Decolonizing Sport

edited by Janice Forsyth, Christine O’Bonsawin, Russell Field and Murray G. Phillips

Indigenous Peoples have taken physical recreational activity — sport — back from the colonizers. One of very few books to show the two edges of sport: it colonized but is now decolonizing.

Decolonizing Sport tells the stories of sport colonizing Indigenous Peoples and of Indigenous Peoples using sport to decolonize. Spanning several lands — Turtle Island, the US, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Kenya — the authors demonstrate the two sharp edges of sport in the history of colonialism. Colonizers used sport, their own and Indigenous recreational activities they appropriated, as part of the process of dispossession of land and culture. Indigenous mascots and team names, hockey at residential schools, lacrosse and many other examples show the subjugating force of sport. Yet, Indigenous Peoples used sport, playing their own games and those of the colonizers, including hockey, horse racing and fishing, and subverting colonial sport rules as liberation from colonialism. This collection stands apart from recent publications in the area of sport with its focus on Indigenous Peoples, sport and decolonization, as well as in imagining a new way forward.

pub date November 2023

$29.00 • Paperback • 9781773636344

Digital Formats • $28.99

6 x 9" • 256 pages • Rights: World subject categories sports & recreation / Cultural & Social Aspects social science / Indigenous Studies sports & recreation / History janice forsyth is a member of the Fisher River Cree First Nation and a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. As a recognized leader in Indigenous sport development in Canada, she was elected to the College of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017 for her contributions to research and advocacy. christine o’bonsawin is a member of the Abenaki Nation of Odanak and associate professor of history and Indigenous studies at the University of Victoria, located on Ləkʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ Territories. Her scholarship challenges the appropriation and subjugation of Indigenous Peoples’ identities in Olympic history, and she is co-author of Challenging Racist “British Columbia”: 150 Years and Counting. russell field is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management at the University of Manitoba and his research explores sport and social justice. He is the principal investigator of the SSHRC-funded project A People’s History of Sport in Canada, and founder and executive director of the Canadian Sport Film Festival. murray g. phillips is a professor of sport history at the University of Queensland. Previously serving as the acting director of the Poche Centre for Indigenous Health and president of the Australian Society for Sport History and editor of the Journal of Sport History, he is now president of the North American Society for Sport History. recreation; Indigenous hockey; Indigenous athletes; creator’s game; lacrosse; assimilation key content highlights

Sport, Colonialism and Decolonization • Beyond Competition: An Indigenous Perspective on Organized Sport • More Than a Mascot: How the Mascot Debate Erases Indigenous People in Sport • Witnessing Painful Pasts: Understanding Images of Sports at Canadian Indian Residential Schools • On the Absence of Indigenous Moving Bodies: Whiteness, Decolonization and Indigenous/Indigenizing Sport History • # 87: Reconciliation, Sport History and Indigenous Peoples in Canada • Taken at Face Value: The Legal Feasibility of Indigenous-Led Olympic Games • Canoe Races to Fishing Guides: Sport and Settler Colonialism in Mi’kma’ki • Moments of Transcending Colonialism? Rodeos and Races in Lethbridge • “Men Pride Themselves on Feats of Endurance”: Masculinities and Movement

Cultures in Kenyan Running History • Stealing, Drinking and Non-Cooperation: Sport, Everyday Resistance in Aboriginal Settlements in Australia • Let’s Make Baseball! Practices of Unsettling on the Recreational Ball Diamonds of Tkaronto/Toronto

• Subjugating and Liberating at Once: Indigenous Sport History as a Double Edged Sword pub date July 2023

Paperback • 9781773632254 • $27.00

Digital Formats • $26.99 6 x 9" • 320 pages • Rights: World subject categories political science / Public Policy / Immigration social science / Emigration & Immigration law / Emigration & Immigration