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Baseball was introduced to Korea in 1905 by Philip Gillette, a YMCA-affiliated American missionary. The sport spread to schools through games played against the YMCA team. However, baseball games were banned until the end of World War II due to the Baseball Control Proposal, enacted in 1932, and the war mobilization effort due to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Immediately following the end of World War II, baseball was restored in Korea along with the desire of the Korean people to establish an independent country. The US Military Government tried to propagate the idea that their governing system was based on “liberty,” unlike the empire of Japan, by hosting cultural projects such as the “Jomi Baseball Game”. From this perspective, cultural forms, such as a baseball, were inseparably linked to the political strategy of the US Military Government during the outset of the Cold War, which led to the establishment of a liberal democratic independent country.

Eva Dawes Spinks (1912–2009) was an outstanding Canadian high jumper in the 1930s. The present paper traces her early life, successful athletic career, and her decision in 1935 to join a group of athletes on a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union organized by the Workers’ Sports Association of Canada. Upon her return, Dawes was suspended by the Women’s Amateur Athletic Union of Canada. She retired from competition and became involved in the Canadian campaign to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Much later, Dawes adamantly denied any political involvement. The purpose of this paper is to examine and possibly explain the incongruity between the historical evidence and Dawes’s later denials. More broadly, it is a discussion about the relationship between history and individual memory.

This paper serves as a re-reading of the historical record concerning the participation of a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) team in the lacrosse championship of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games. Indigenous and deconstructionist methodological frameworks provide historians with strategies for reopening archival texts to ironic interpretation in the hope that we may better recognize the efforts of Indigenous peoples to confront and challenge colonial hegemony. Accordingly, this paper first evaluates the uncritical acceptance of a Kanien’kehá:ka lacrosse player roster comprising unconventional names into the official Olympic record. Second, a re-reading of archival texts allows us to reopen history to ironic interpretation, exposing the possibility that Kanien’kehá:ka players used humor and laughter to resist, subvert, and, ultimately, deny colonial hegemony. We may begin to support the larger missions of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization by revisiting our histories, and thus giving testimony to the past.