Native Americans and Sport in North America: Other People's Games (Sport in the Global Society)

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. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 Table of Contents 8 Series Editors’ Foreword 10 Introduction: Other Peoples’ Games: Indigenous Peoples and Sport in North America 12 1. ‘Nature’s Most Beautiful Models’: George Catlin’s Choctaw Ball-Play Paintings and the Politics of Indian Removal 20 Notes 33 References 35 2. The Legend of the Tarahumara: Tourism, Overcivilization and the White Man’s Indian 36 The Noble Savage 38 The Diseases of Overcivilization 39 Man the Hunter 40 A Healthy Diet 40 Superhuman Feats of Endurance 41 Time, Work and Discipline 42 Tourism and the Tarahumaras 44 Notes 46 References 47 3. The Mythical Jim Thorpe: Re/presenting the Twentieth Century American Indian 49 Thorpe’s Life and Accomplishments 50 Contemporaneous Representations of Jim Thorpe 51 Hollywood’s Jim Thorpe 58 Reading Between the Lines 59 The Text in Historical Context 61 The Hollywood Ending 64 Conclusion 67 Notes 70 References 71 4. Getting Beyond Imagery: The Challenges of Reading Narratives About American Indian Athletes 72 General Background 73 Theoretical Considerations and Methodology 75 Layers of Misappropriation 77 Jim Thorpe and the Athlete of the Century Selection Process 79 Indians ‘Playing Indians’ 85 Conclusion 88 Notes 90 References 92 5. The St Francis Mission Indians and the National Interscholastic Catholic Basketball Tournament, 1924–1941 95 Notes 110 References 113 6. Diamonds, Ovals, and Rings: Northwestern Shoshone Sports at the Washakie Colony of Northern Utah, 1903–1929 114 George James’s Fish Medicine Was Strong 114 Baseball 116 Horse Racing 119 Boxing 121 Notes 127 References 128 7. Using the Master’s Tools: Resisting Colonization through Colonial Sports 129 Background 130 Methods 132 The Only Show in Town 133 The Paradox of Superstardom 137 Hoop Dreams 140 Structure and Agency 142 Conclusion 143 Notes 145 References 146 8. Historical Interpretations of First Nations Masculinity and its Influence on Canada’s Sport Heritage 149 Interpreting Masculinity 151 Struggling to Survive in New France 152 The Coureurs de Bois and the Shaping of Canadian Masculinity 153 Defining Male Worth 155 Mythologizing of a Canadian Identity 156 Cultural Displays of Sport, Masculinity and Canadian Identity 159 Conclusions 161 Notes 163 References 165 9. Interactions Between the Mississippi Choctaw and European Americans Through the Sport of Toli 167 Toli and the Mississippi Choctaw 169 Toli at the University of Georgia 170 Violence and Integration in the Sport of Toli 171 Conclusions 174 Notes 175 References 175 10. ‘Native to Native . . . We’ll Recapture Our Spirits’: The World Indigenous Nations Games and North American Indigenous Games as Cultural Resistance 176 Hegemony and Cultural Resistance 177 Government Policy and Assimilation 178 Assimilation and Physical Culture 179 Cultural Resistance and Self Determination Through Sport 182 A New Vision for Aboriginal Sport: Proudly Native 184 North American Indigenous Games: Native to Native 186 The World Stage 189 The Politics of Self Determination 190 Notes 192 References 194 11. On Being a Warrior: Race, Gender and American Indian Imagery in Sport 197 A Brief History of Native American Sports Mascots 198 Race, Gender and Sports Mascots 200 The (Neo-Conservative) Return of the Native 202 Dave Shiflett 203 Richard Poe 203 David Yeagley 204 Conclusions 208 Notes 209 References 211 Index 214 "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"--Provided by publisher