Tag: indigenous people

A People’s History of Sport in Canada aims to inject new histories into the narrative arc of Canadian sport history. Motivated by Azoulay’s (2019:289) notion of “potential history”, it “strives to retrieve, reconstruct, and give an account of diverse worlds.” Informed by intersectionality and a focus on the community level, this special issue will highlight sport as a social and cultural practice. The articles will explore the sport, recreation, and play experiences of the peoples of Canada in a way that reflects class, gender, ability, racial, and geographic diversity and intersections.

We are pleased and excited to announce that our guest speaker this fall will be Dr. Natalie M. Welch (she/her) of Seattle University. Dr. Welch’s talk is titled, “Modern Matriarchy: Native American Women in Sport”. Dr. Welch is an assistant professor at Seattle University teaching marketing and working in the MBA in Sport and Entertainment Management program. She is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and grew up in Cherokee, North Carolina.

This special issue seeks to probe, deconstruct, and contest current sport for development (SFD) discourse related to Indigenous voices, providing a more nuanced understanding in the SFD space. Indigenous peoples are holders of unique languages, knowledge systems and beliefs, and have a special relationship with land. Indigenous peoples hold their own diverse concepts of development, based on their traditional values, visions, needs and priorities.

To challenge the ongoing realities of settler colonialism, decolonization starts by becoming critically aware of institutional whiteness, heteropatriarchy, manifestations of racisms and how they work to maintain settler colonialism. This centers Indigenous Peoples’ interests, theory, methodology, pleasures, and desires, and rights since settler colonialism obscures them.

This special issue seeks to critically explore, encourage discussion, and contribute to the empirical study of the rights and welfare of Indigenous people, within and through leisure. The provision of culturally relevant and meaningful leisure opportunities for marginalised population groups such as Indigenous peoples, is a global phenomenon and chief priority for many governments.