ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a survey of several different Indigenous contexts to highlight long-standing 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 co-exist 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 marginalising social dynamics and institutional structures towards new futures.
