ABSTRACT
Sport has been, and continues to be, a very significant component of Indigenous lives. Sport was central to life on missions, reserves, and settlements in Australia, and at residential, boarding, and industrial schools and on reserves in Canada and the United States of America. The denial of basic human rights, including very limited educational opportunities that focused on non-academic education with a low ceiling for employment, followed by chronic underinvestment in secondary and higher education, resulted in delayed entry of Indigenous scholars to universities. The challenges continue with reframing the concept of sport history. The vast majority of sport historians work through the lens of post-contact sport without acknowledging physical activities that were inseparable from life prior to settler colonial states and continue to have cultural influence into the present. Indigenous methodologies demonstrate how many sport historians have pigeon-holed their work into one dimension of the grand narrative of settler colonialism.
