Native Americans and Sport in North America

Description

Taking examples from the United States and Canada, this comprehensive text offers compassionate and critical accounts of the Native American sporting experience. It challenges popular images of indigenous athletes and athletics; it explores Native American participation in and appropriation of EuroAmerican sports; and it unpacks social categories, particularly gender, race and heritage and their implications for understanding Native Americans and sport in North America. Contributors discuss the interplay of power and possibility, difference and identity, representation and remembrance that have shaped the means and meanings of American Indians playing sport. Included in this book are discussions on:

• continuity and change, the place of sport in the survival and adaptation of indigenous beliefs and behaviours
• the play of power and the power of play within indigenous communities, intercultural spaces, and American popular culture
• the contradictions and conditions of possibilities sport has offered American Indians
• the politics and poetics of identity
• the axes of difference structuring the indigenous sporting experience, particularly, gender, race, and nationalism
• representations and stagings of Indianness in the context of sport.

Contents

1. Becoming Indian, Erasing History: George Catlin’s Choctaw Ball-Play Paintings 2. The Legend of the Tarahumara: Tourism, Overcivilization, and the White Man’s Indian 3. The Mythical Jim Thorpe: Represntations, Significations, and Implications 4. The Return of the Vanishing Indian: Imaging Indigenous Sport at Century’s End 5. Native Sports at the Washakie Colony of Nothern Utah, 1906-1929 6. High School Sport on the Navajo Nation 7. First Nation Masculinity and its Influence on Canada’s Sport Heritage 8. Interactions Between Mississippi Choctaw and European Americans through the Sport of Toli 9. ‘Native to Native…We’ll Recapture Our Spirits’: The World Indigenous & Nations Games and North American Indigenous Games as Cultural Resistance 10. The Return of the Native: Sport and Indigenity in Postmodern Times

Author Bio

C. Richard King, associate professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, has written extensively on the changing position of Native Americans in post-Civil Rights America, the colonial legacies and postcolonial predicaments of American culture, and the racial politics of sport. He is also the author/editor of four books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (a CHOICE 2001 Outstanding Academic Title) Postcolonial America, and The Encyclopedia of Native Americans and Sport.