Raven Plays Ball

Situating "Indian Sports Days" within Indigenous and Colonial Spaces in Twentieth-Century Coastal British Columbia

Bibliographic Data

ID5301371
AuthorsAllan Downey (0000-0003-3418-1754), Susan Neylan
Year2015
Volume50
Issue3
Pages442-468
Publication date2015-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0008-4107 • E-ISSN: 2292-8502
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cjh.ach.50.3.003
OpenAlexW2236033097
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited11

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Canadian colonial agents (residential school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and government officials) introduced a number of Western-style sporting activities among Indigenous peoples through athletic clubs, church gatherings, and school physical fitness programs. In keeping with a Victorian conception of leisure, these elites understood sports in moral terms, believing that they would support "civilizing projects" intended to remake Indigenous socio-cultural spaces into colonial ones. Indigenous communities, however, used these same sports organizations to challenge, resist, and even displace colonial agendas. Inspired by J.R. Miller's treatment of Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations as a nuanced, multidirectional, often contradictory encounter, we argue that "Indian Sports Days" in coastal British Columbia from the 1910s-1940s were complex social spaces, reflective of both Indigenous and colonial perspectives

Colonialism · Government (linguistics · Indigenous · Media studies · Miller · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · Ecology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society

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