Entangled Histories and Transformative Futures: Indigenous Sport in the 21st Century

Abstract

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.