In recent years, a plethora of research has emerged that has examined Indigenous youth’s sport participation in Canada (Findlay & Kohen, 2007; Forsyth & Heine, 2008; Hayhurst et al., 2015, 2016; Manzon-Gartner & Giles, 2016; Mason & Koehli, 2012; Mason et al., 2018; McHugh et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2010; Wilk et al., 2018). For Indigenous youth who choose to participate in sport, there is plenty of research that underlines how sport is beneficial for supporting emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health (Halas et al., 2012; McHugh et al., 2019; Saskamoose et al., 2016; Tang et al., 2016). And yet, Indigenous youth’s participation in sport has also been found to be limited, as a systematic review of physical activity levels in Indigenous populations in Canada and the United States found “more than one-third of [Indigenous] children/youth report physically inactive levels of activity” (Foulds et al., 2013, p. 598). What is pressing to consider is that much of the research on Indigenous youth’s sport experiences has predominantly focused on the barriers they face in accessing opportunities for participation. This research is often supported by a deficit-based rationale, and framing, of Indigenous youth that mostly positions youth as lacking something that contributes to their nonparticipation (Hayhurst & Giles, 2013). This prevailing discourse thus suggests that institutional interventions (such as sport programs) have the “power” to support youth development and well-being. Along these lines, many sport programs that target Indigenous youth well-being also discursively suggest that youth “lack the agency” to create change for themselves (Sharpe et al., 2019). Indeed, what remains underexplored is the idea that nonparticipation might actually reflect Indigenous youth’s agency and refusal of colonial institutions, such as sport.
To address these issues and possible oversights in research on Indigenous youth’s participation in sport, we have written this paper to illuminate an understudied possibility: Indigenous youth are fully aware of the colonialism that exists in Canadian sport spaces and have thus deliberately refused to participate. In making this argument, our paper makes three novel contributions to the literature. First, we connect Indigenous theories of refusal to Indigenous youth sport participation in Canada. Second, we examine the researcher’s role in reproducing (and therefore having the potential to refuse) colonialism in sport studies. Third, and finally, we draw from examples of Indigenous refusal of sport.
A key argument we put forth in this paper is the contention that combining the theory of refusal and the context of sport as a tool for the assimilation of Indigenous peoples may shed light on the multiple and nuanced ways refusal may be overlooked to better understand the experiences of Indigenous youth’s nonparticipation in sport. In advancing this work, we review four areas of literature relevant to Indigenous youth and their refusal to participate in Euro-Canadian sport: (a) theories of refusal, (b) the context of Euro-Canadian sport as a tool of assimilation, (c) current understandings of Indigenous youth’s nonparticipation in sport, and (d) the limitations of sport participation research methodologies. Next, we offer examples of Indigenous refusals of sport through the Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team (INLT), and Thorpe et al.’s (2020) research with wāhine rugby athletes. We conclude by discerning the central tensions of the topic and areas for future study. This paper is a call for researchers to explore refusal, not only as an act of agency by Indigenous youth, but also as a methodology that researchers can use in refusing to reproduce colonial and paternalistic representations of Indigenous youth.
Theories of Refusal
The theory of Indigenous refusal, as articulated by A. Simpson (2007, 2014), can be applied to Indigenous youth sport as a political act of refusal of settler colonial structures. A. Simpson (2007) offered “refusal” as an alternative to political “recognition,” with the latter being a political ruse that masks ongoing colonial violence. In turn, Coulthard’s (2014) work on recognition asserted that the recognition of Indigenous nationhood and subsequent rights by the Canadian state overlooks the true goals of reconciliation, while further reproducing colonial power relations. Refusal of “[t]he practices and techniques of institutional recognition, of bringing peoples presumed alterity into the ambit of the state through the devices of treaty, of contract, later of citizenship itself” (A. Simpson, 2017, p. 29) is therefore a useful political tool to resist empty state recognition.
A. Simpson (2014) discussed the different ways in which some Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke use acts of refusal to “interrupt and fundamentally challenge stories that have been told about them and about others like them, as well as the structure of settlement that strangles their political form and tries to take their land and their selves from them” (p. 3). As the foci of her book, citizenship and nationhood are starting points for understanding the tensions between Canada and Indigenous nation-states. She provided useful examples on how refusal can act as a political movement against state recognition. In response to the attacks on Haudenosaunee political sovereignty by the Canadian and American states, some Mohawk have engaged in different forms of refusal, including “a refusal to vote, to pay taxes, to stop politically being Iroquois” (A. Simpson, 2014, p. 7). Not only do some Mohawk refuse settler recognition of their nationhood, they also refuse other “gifts” of Canadian and American citizenship, such as state-issued passports. A. Simpson (2014) listed an example from April 2010 in which three Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke were flying back to Canada from the International Climate Change Conference in Bolivia on Haudenosaunee passports. They refused to use the government-issued emergency passports, and they were detained for 17 days before returning home on their own Haudenosaunee passports. This refusal of Canadian citizenship challenged the very construction of Canada as a governing state, including claims over Indigenous land and bodies through a monopoly on institutions.
Refusal has also been studied as a form of analytic practice for researchers. Ortner (1995) critiqued resistance studies that reproduce an “ethnographic thinness” caused by a lack of truthful representations of dominated groups by researchers. The “knowing” of dominated subjects “paradoxically destroys the object (the subject) who should be enriched, rather than impoverished” (Ortner, 1995, p. 184). Refusal can then be the objection to being objectified or becoming a mere research claim. As an example, A. Simpson (2014) critiqued research conducted on Mohawk that misrepresented them “in ways that stressed harmony and timelessness even where there was utter opposition to, and struggle against, the state” (p. 97). Although refusal existed, it was not represented in texts. A. Simpson (2014) described practicing refusal as a researcher by refusing to appropriate the experiences of her participants and questioning what the purpose of extracting information from participants was, especially if it did not further progress Iroquois sovereignty. In conducting interviews with members of her community, she encountered the “ethnographic limit” in which participants refused to continue being research subjects, so as not to “compromise the representational territory that [they] have gained for [them]selves in the past 100 years” (p. 78). Refusal is, then, a conscious act that can “tell us [researchers] when to stop” (A. Simpson, 2007, p. 78).
At the same time, and in advancing this contention, refusal may be embodied and silent. A number of authors have theorized refusal in different forms, such as nonreaction or silence. As Toppo and Parashar (2019) contended, “there are times when people do not react in ways that are expected of them and their non-reactionary nature or avoidance of words makes their silence more meaningful” (p. 124). Refusal is not to be mistaken with disempowerment—on the contrary, empowerment is not limited to explicit speaking out and obvious acts of protest against oppression (Parpart, 2009; Parpart & Parashar, 2019). In their work on women’s agency, Parpart and Parashar (2019) encouraged a re-envisioning of silence as a survival strategy and a mode for healing and resistance within an increasingly dangerous world for women, while also listing several examples of silence as effective protest against injustice across the globe. In Toppo and Parashar’s work on the silence of Adivasi women of Jharkand in northern India, they posited silence as a strategic “weapon of non-violent resistance [that] can be very powerful” (p. 131) within a patriarchal system. The authors concluded “that Indigenous/tribal communities are engaged in creative deployments of silence, having developed very sophisticated understandings of silence as mediating presence and not the mere absence of speech and sounds” (Toppo & Parashar, 2019, p. 137). Returning to nonparticipation in sport, we can reframe how Indigenous youth refuse to participate, to provide researchers with a new lens on the meaning of silence and nonreaction as a potential strategy to resist colonial systems.
Kowal and Paradies (2017) have applied A. Simpson’s theory of refusal by proposing the term “‘race refusal’ for instances where a person defies an attributed identity that clashes with their personal identity” (Kowal & Paradies, 2017, p. 107). For light-skinned Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are often assumed by others to be White, wearing identifiable “Indigenous” jewelry was a refusal of Whiteness (Kowal & Paradies, 2017). In claiming their Indigeneity, they simultaneously refused “assimilation, White sociality and everyday racialization” (Kowal & Paradies, 2017, p. 108). Race refusal, like A. Simpson’s state refusal, “fundamentally interrupts and casts into question the story that settler states tell about themselves” (A. Simpson, 2014, p. 177), such as the idea that Indigenous people can be “known” by settlers and assimilated into White society.
Through various theories of refusal, we can reimagine how Indigenous peoples may resist colonial systems and institutions, whether through refusing to be objectified by researchers, through silence or nonreaction, or through asserting their Indigeneity. Refusal can then be very much present in any Canadian institution, including sport spaces. Before discussing refusal in sport, we now look to provide a context for what Indigenous youth may be refusing in the Canadian context: colonial sport.
Background and Context: Euro-Canadian Sport as a Tool of Assimilation
In Canada, nongovernmental organizations such as Right to Play (2019) and Sport for Life (2021) have taken up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (2015) Calls to Action pertaining to sport and, as a result, “sport-for-development programs have become a popular avenue for the implementation of social justice initiatives blanketed in a discourse under the guise of ‘reconciliation’” (Arellano & Downey, 2019, p. 458). Sport for development researchers and practitioners assume that sport can act as a tool for social and even economic development, from promoting peace in war-torn countries, to empowering women and girls who have traditionally been excluded from sport spaces (Kidd, 2008). Indeed, sport can be a haven for healing, as shown when Native American activist athletes visited the Dakota Access Pipeline protest site in 2016 to play lacrosse with the protesters (Grossman, 2016). At the same time, Euro-Canadian sport has been used by settlers to invade Indigenous spaces in seemingly innocent fashion. A number of studies in the realms of sport participation for Indigenous youth frame such participants as “at-risk youth,” which then provides justification for sport for development interventions to exist under the guise of “improvement” (Galipeau, 2009; Hayhurst & Giles, 2013). Tuck and Yang’s (2012) work also addressed how studying Indigenous peoples as an “at-risk” population is a mechanism that settlers use to move to innocence. Research that seemingly “helps” Indigenous youth access sport can absolve settler researchers of decolonial work that focuses on land repatriation, which Tuck and Yang (2012) posit as central to the process of decolonization. This functions to justify further research and unsolicited remedies like sport programs, since “Indigenous students and families are described as on the verge of extinction, culturally and economically bereft, engaged, or soon-to-be engaged in self-destructive behaviors which can interrupt their school careers and seamless absorption into the economy” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 22). Similarly, A. Simpson (2014) has critiqued the “gifts” of settler colonial states that serve to mask ongoing colonial violence.
Euro-Canadian sport programming has been and continues to be positioned as one of the “gifts” from the settler state of Canada to Indigenous peoples—a gift with significant strings attached: the intention of assimilating Indigenous peoples into Euro-Canadian society (Paraschak, 2012). Forsyth (2020) recounted the history of sport in the residential school system, in which the goal was to Christianize and “civilize” Indigenous youth by stealing them from their communities and land, which also helped to advance settler land acquisition. Part of this education involved teaching Indigenous youth Euro-Canadian sports in the hopes of eliminating Indigenous values and replacing them with Western values of competition, discipline, individual achievement, and wealth. Not surprisingly, current day Euro-Canadian sport has been critiqued for being “Whitestream” and reproducing Western values, while benefiting Euro-Canadians and harming Indigenous participants and other racialized participants (Bains & Szto, 2020; Joseph et al., 2012; Paraschak, 2012). As a space ridden with race and colonial relations, mainstream sport has been used by Indigenous communities to resist settler colonialism. As an example, Robidoux’s (2012) work on First Nations hockey in Canada illustrated the ways in which “First Nations hockey has become something other than a regimented system of controls for these communities, and subsequently a powerful tool of community expression” (p. 13). As another example, for Skwxú7mesh (Squamish) players, lacrosse “contributed to a further articulation of pride, identity, and connectedness, all of which would foster a surge of Indigenous political activity and leadership in the early twentieth century” (Downey, 2018, p. 125). In sum, despite the history of Euro-Canadian sport and assimilation, refusal of Euro-Canadian sport as well as refusal within Euro-Canadian sport existed.
The very existence of nested sovereignty, or the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty within state sovereignty, is then a refusal of settler governance over Indigenous peoples, land, and ways of being. In sport, Indigenous youth who do not participate may be understood through this context of nested sovereignty, or a refusal of settler governance over their sporting spaces.The principle of indivisibility—that there can be only one sovereignty—inheres in patriarchal White sovereignty’s supreme authority to kill, in its capacity to create states of exception, to maintain bare life, to make live and to let live. These capabilities are ontologically incommensurate with Indigenous sovereignties. (p. 266)
Indigenous Youth (Non)Participation in Sport
Literature on Indigenous youth sport participation clearly demonstrates that Indigenous youth in Canada experience disproportionate rates of mental and physical illness, and physical inactivity among Indigenous youth in Canada acts as a contributing factor for their poor health outcomes (Findlay & Kohen, 2007; Mason et al., 2018; Wilk et al., 2018). This Western understanding of health positions sport as remedies to poor health outcomes; therefore, researchers have attempted to identify and address barriers to participation to inform health and sport policy.
Researchers have examined barriers to sport such as socioeconomic status and access to resources (Blodgett et al., 2010; Mason & Koehli, 2012; Mason et al., 2018); racism and discrimination (Blodgett et al., 2014; Mason & Koehli, 2012; Mason et al., 2018); inappropriate facilities, programs, and spaces (DyckFehderaue et al., 2013; Hayhurst et al., 2015), and have argued that gender and age can act as correlates to (non)participation (Findlay & Kohen, 2007). The narrative of “barriers” is deficit-based, as it implies that Indigenous youth and their communities have shortcomings and weaknesses that contribute to their poor health and inactivity (Hayhurst & Giles, 2013). Indigenous youth are all too often misrepresented as having inherently flawed lives and behaviors, instead of being celebrated for their strengths and interests (Rovito & Giles, 2016). There also exists a paternalistic assumption when researchers assume that all Indigenous youth want to participate in sport programs, especially those funded and provided by settler organizations. Importantly, there has yet to be any in-depth discussion of the idea that Indigenous youth may be actively refusing to participate in sport programs. Sharpe et al.’s (2019) work has clearly demonstrated that youth are not passive recipients of development programs, but rather youth are constantly negotiating the claims that these programs make, such as the “good” that they do for youth. Furthermore, youth who do explicitly refuse to participate in development programs are often depicted as “disruptive, ungrateful, inactive, and ‘problem’ youth,” which does not leave room to challenge the programs’ claims in the first place (Sharpe et al., 2019, p. 10). For sport programs that target Indigenous youth, claims that these programs support Indigenous youth well-being are highly contentious (Arellano & Downey, 2019).
Addressing barriers to sport does not provide a sufficient representation of how the structures of settler colonialism are inextricable from Canadian sport spaces. The process of colonialism has systematically and intentionally been used in attempts to eliminate direct threats to the colonial project, which include Indigenous sovereignty of culture, land, and body (L.B. Simpson, 2017). For example, the colonial gender binary that is ever-present in many sports has perpetuated the exclusion and violence against Two-Spirit and Queer Indigenous persons (L.B. Simpson, 2017), rendering them more vulnerable to health and social disparities (Lyons et al., 2016; Robinson, 2017).
As Tuck and Yang (2012) have reminded us, decolonization is specifically concerned with the repatriation of Indigenous land, as opposed to being an act of settler philanthropy. Many of the scholars who research Indigenous youth sport participation have reproduced this philanthropic discourse of sport as the gift or remedy by positioning Indigenous youth as “at-risk” subjects. Tuck and Yang (2014) suggested that “we as social science researchers can learn from experiences of dispossessed peoples—often painful, but also wise, full of desire and dissent—without serving up pain stories on a silver platter for the settler colonial academy, which hungers so ravenously for them” (p. 2). While we do not want to disregard the value of making sport and spaces more equitable for Indigenous peoples, we argue that refusal is a potential missing link in better understanding, and challenging, the very idea of “knowing” Indigenous youth and their participation in (or refusal thereof) sport. In the following section, we offer a critique of sport participation research methodologies that examine Indigenous youth nonparticipation in sport.
Limitations of Sport Participation Research Methodologies
Current understandings of Indigenous youth’s nonparticipation in sport are produced through research methodologies and methods that may not be constructed to consider refusal in the first place. In social science research more broadly, most representations of Indigenous peoples and other dispossessed peoples are exploited stories of pain (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Furthermore, as Tuhiwai Smith (2021) stated, “[t]he word itself, ‘research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (p. 1), as Western research methodologies often classify and essentialize Indigenous peoples, while claiming an objective gaze. We can apply this critique of social science research to sport studies as well, given the gap in sport sociology research that applies Indigenous research methodologies (McGuire-Adams, 2020). Indeed, in sport sociology research, “[v]ery little attention . . . has been given to reclaiming and reimagining how Indigenous Peoples’ experience, understand, resist, or contest sports from a decolonial position” (Whitinui, 2021, p. 7). In this section, we use examples of studies in which researchers have examined barriers that contribute to nonparticipation in sport for Indigenous youth to outline the limitations of Western research methodologies in examining refusal.
In the vast majority of qualitative research on sport experiences of Indigenous youth in Canada, researchers have used interview methods to gather data (McHugh et al., 2019). For example, Mason and Koehli (2012) identified barriers that Indigenous youth in Alberta face in accessing sport and exercise by using semistructured interviews. Interviews are, in fact, the most widely used data collection method within sport and exercise sciences, and therefore merit critical reflection (Smith & Sparkes, 2016). In Western approaches to interview methods, “the researcher is a central figure who influences, if not actively constructs, the collection, selection and interpretation of data” (Finlay, 2002, p. 212). However, Smith and Sparkes (2016) suggested that the active role of the researcher is too often erased within research reports, which in turn eliminates the social context of the interaction. A researcher who develops an interview guide may not even consider “active refusal” as a potential factor that affects participation in sport programs or research. Put differently, active refusal may not emerge in an interview as a key reason Indigenous youth do not take part in sport programming and pursuits because the research findings can be limited by the (usually Euro-descendent) researcher’s social position, methodology, and research questions. Smith and Sparkes (2016) further warned against assuming that verbal language can “transparently represent any presupposed inner psychological object of some kind” (p. 120). Refusal may not emerge within the verbal language of the interviewee, since there is no evidence that concepts such as resilience and refusal must be cognitive processes (Smith & Sparkes, 2016). The interviewee may also practice (ethnographic) refusal within the interview itself by choosing not to share (A. Simpson, 2014). Additionally, and following Kovach’s (2021) assertion on conversations, Indigenous methodologies have always involved conversations, which may be mistaken for “interviews”. Conversations as method involves “a combination of reflection, story, and dialogue” (Kovach, 2021, p. 56) and crucially, reflection and researcher positionality is needed throughout the research process. Researcher positionality will be discussed later in this section.
As an example of quantitative work on participation, Findlay and Kohen (2007) used data from the Aboriginal Peoples Survey’s (Statistics Canada, 2003) children’s component and examined participation rates and factors that may enable and prevent youth from participating in sport in Canada. They found that “23% of children were reported to never participate” (p. 193), and they proceeded to explore reasons for their nonparticipation, including gender, residing on- or off-reserve, income, and education levels of parents. These data may be significant in providing researchers a clearer understanding of factors that influence participation rates, but it assumes that those who do not participate are lacking something. For example, the authors suggested that youth with parents with higher levels of education are more likely to participate in sport, demonstrating bias in the survey that suggests higher levels of education lead to more participation in sport. This implies that parents with lower levels or no education are lacking knowledge of the benefits of sport participation, when families instead may be refusing what the survey designers defined as “sport.” The authors noted that the definition of “sport” in this survey did not include traditional Indigenous physical practices, such as hunting, snowshoeing, or even walking as sport. The survey respondents who were reported to “never participate” in sport may very well be refusing to participate in Euro-Canadian sport, while remaining active in their own ways. Forsyth and Heine (2008), for instance, found that Indigenous youth who cannot afford mainstream sport activities will often participate in another form of activity, such as walking with friends to malls, and going to the park with family members to play their own forms of sport. Using statistics through a Western framework to research Indigenous peoples has been heavily critiqued as a problematic methodology, since statistics “miss the complexity of our [Indigenous peoples’] social relations in pursuit of broad macro-level patterns” (Walter & Andersen, 2013, p. 11). Furthermore, Walter and Andersen (2013) contended that Western methodologies within statistical research should be resisted, and instead, Indigenous methodologies should be applied to ensure that Indigenous ways of quantifying data, and determining what statistical information to include, are privileged.
As a third example of research methodology, participatory action research (PAR) has been used often with Indigenous participants, as it emphasizes collaboration with Indigenous participants and illuminates their voices as important knowledge producers (Castleden et al., 2008; Hayhurst et al., 2015). However, L.B. Simpson (2017) has reminded us that PAR is still a Western methodology in its nature, as the researcher(s) still have an influential role in data interpretation and reporting. In fact, many researchers who employ PAR only involve the community during the data collection process, and they neglect to meaningfully work in collaboration during all phases of the research, particularly during analysis and dissemination (Stanton, 2014). Considering that research is typically funded by the state, or state-sponsored institutions, even PAR projects “are inevitably interlocked in the set of historical contradictions between the colonial-capitalist state and the interests of Indigenous, colonized peoples” (Zavala, 2013, p. 66). Stanton (2014) further discussed the challenges of navigating colonial interests in PAR. The research questions and goals are often limited by the researcher’s and their institution’s agendas; importantly, what is considered “valid” to academia may not align with communities’ goals (Stanton, 2014). Additionally, time constraints and pressure to publish journal articles can make it challenging for researchers to create meaningful relationships with the communities with which they work (Stanton, 2014). Ultimately, research methodologies that exist within the constraints of colonial institutions are limited by researcher and institutional control. Wilson’s (2008) discussion of relationality in Indigenous research methods brought to light the importance of reciprocity, otherwise “one side of the relationship may gain power and substance at the expense of the other” (p. 79). Strategies for decolonizing research methodologies will be discussed in the conclusion of this paper.
With this in mind, we examine Hayhurst et al.’s (2015) PAR project, which involved illuminating the perspectives of urban Indigenous young women experiences of participating in a sport for development program administered by the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Center Society. Although this was a PAR project, researchers are still limited in what they can “know” based on what participants choose to share. In this way, and as Haraway (1988) attested, knowledge is always interpretive, partial, and/or incomplete. For example, Hayhurst et al. (2015) contended that the girls “did not appear to reflect on the ways in which mainstream discourses of health were colonial in nature or related to the historical, social, and economic context of [Indigenous] young women’s lives” (p. 964). This may reflect a lack of resistance or refusal, and we do not want to name refusal if it does not exist. However, Hansen’s (2019) work on the silence/speech dichotomy may be pertinent here. Instead of using dichotomous categories of silence/speech, or complicity/refusal, she recommends that in our analysis of silence and refusal, researchers should “develop several readings, of silence, speech, subjectivities and agency, and to put those readings in conversation with one another” (Hansen, 2019, p. 34). It may be insufficient to analyze research participants as either refusing or not. While good-intentioned, researchers who employ PAR should consider more nuanced readings of refusal to avoid misrepresenting Indigenous youth experiences.
It is also worth discussing how researcher positionality must be accounted for when conducting work with Indigenous youth. As a researcher, locating oneself within the sociorelational contexts is necessary, especially to accept that all knowledge is subjective and to “recognize other truths” (Kovach, 2021, p. 111). As Kovach (2021) contended, Indigenous perspectives on self-location within resistance research more specifically are crucial to consider to “remind us that self-location anchors knowledge within experiences, and these experiences greatly influence interpretations” (p. 111). As researchers interested in Indigenous youth sport participation, it is imperative to locate our social positions (understood as one’s status, position, or power) and self-locations (understood as where one sees oneself). Engaging in reflexivity can unveil our motivations for doing this work, as well as our commitment to challenging the ways in which we are embedded within colonial processes. As McGuire-Adams (2020) asserted, “it is necessary to understand how colonization has personally affected oneself to then resist ongoing colonization and foster decolonization” (p. 38), especially within one’s research methodology. As settler and Indigenous researchers theorizing about refusal, we hope to apply the knowledge shared by Indigenous scholars to productively contribute to sociocultural studies of sport in a way that emphasizes how Indigenous youth may directly refuse both sport and academic institutions. We suggest that discussing refusal in this way may be a useful framework to refuse colonial institutions on a wider scale. Additionally, this takes youth’s nonparticipation in research and sport as seriously as their participation. We hope to apply and encourage other researchers in sport sociology to apply Whitinui’s (2021) idea of being an accomplice in decolonial work by “moving from researching ‘about and for’ Indigenous Peoples to implementing decolonizing theories ‘with and by’ Indigenous Peoples to actively deconstruct, dismantle, and/or disrupt colonial (mis)perceptions” (p. 12).
Examples of Indigenous Refusals of Sport
What might Indigenous refusal look like in sport? In this section, we discuss an example of refusal previously discussed by A. Simpson (2014). The INLT refused to participate in the 2010 World Lacrosse League Championship in Manchester, England, because the United Kingdom did not recognize their Iroquois Confederacy-issued passports as legitimate. More recently, the World Games, a multisport event organized with the International Olympic Committee (The World Games, 2020) had issued a statement excluding the INLT from participating during their international lacrosse competition in Birmingham, Alabama, in July 2022 (Deer, 2020b). It was unclear why the team was excluded, since it was ranked third in their final placement (Deer, 2020b). After a call to boycott the 2022 World Games, the INLT received immense international support, which included Ireland Lacrosse voluntarily vacating its team’s position in the competition (Ireland was ranked 12th), thus opening up a spot for INLT (Deer, 2020a). INLT’s earlier refusal to participate in the 2010 competition, and its call for others to refuse, contributed to a powerful movement toward asserting their own team as representing a sovereign nation.
In other words, refusal can be born out of intentions, no matter the scale of action. For the wāhine athletes, and Indigenous peoples more generally, it is necessary to reconsider what resistance looks like, especially through a lens of refusal.is not necessarily about domination and resistance, although there is some of that going on. It is about people having desires that grow out of their own structures of life, including very centrally their own structures of inequality, and it is about ethnographic writing that brings these to the fore. (p. 81)
Conclusions
Applying refusal to Indigenous youth sport participation can offer three new directions for researchers. First, researchers can engage in refusal by challenging their own intentions and refusing to participate in settler colonial knowing of and misrepresenting Indigenous youth experiences. This might be done by not re-telling the deficit-based narrative of Indigenous youth who do not participate in sport. An emphasis should be placed on critiquing sport as an institution of power to avoid misrepresenting the individuals who are—or are not—involved (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Second, to challenge the coloniality of research methodologies in the institution, chosen methodologies should be “concerned . . . much more with the context in which research problems are conceptualized and designed, and with the implications of research for its participants and their communities” (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021, p. 286). Relationality in methodology is needed to challenge power dynamics in Western methodologies, as well as to prioritize Indigenous notions of self-determination and sovereignty (Wilson, 2008). Meanwhile, if researchers are granted access to conducting research with Indigenous communities/individuals, refusal can serve as part of their research methodology—for example, by asking Indigenous participants questions about refusing sport, and considering silence as refusal, as opposed to noninformation. Third, researchers can offer a new lens for other sport sociology researchers in understanding the many ways in which Indigenous youth actively refuse the apparent gifts of settler nation-states, such as sport. Researchers might look to Indigenous research methodologies (Kovach, 2021; McGuire-Adams, 2020; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021; Walter & Andersen, 2013; Wilson, 2008) to understand Indigenous youth nonparticipation in sport.
If/when Indigenous youth are indeed refusing sport, we must look to Indigenous-led initiatives that may be more appropriate for youth. Arellano et al. (2019) stressed the importance of Indigenous resurgence in land-based programming, which centers Indigenous sport (i.e., hunting, fishing, and snowshoeing). Indigenous resurgence also exists simultaneously with refusal, as Arellano et al. (2019) wrote, “[w]hile resurgence involves a process of cultural revitalization, it is also deeply political, requiring the dismantling of existing structures of colonialism by reinvigorating Indigenous systemic alternatives” (p. 393). Researchers and practitioners concerned with Indigenous youth sport participation should consider the ways Indigenous youth may be refusing settler sport through participating in sport spaces that are governed by Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, sport practitioners and policy makers can support by facilitating sporting spaces for Indigenous resurgence. Instead of requiring nested sovereignty within settler-colonial governance (A. Simpson, 2014), Indigenous sport spaces can follow Kuokkanen’s (2012) “relational self-determination,” which recognizes “the interdependence and reciprocity between all living beings and often are articulated in terms of responsibilities [to each other] rather than rights [over one another]” (p. 230). In other words, all relationships require self-determination. Relational self-determination refuses the misconception that self-determination means further colonial territorialization of communities (Kuokkanen, 2012). Relational self-determination offers a foundational framework for sport organizations wishing to collaborate in relation with Indigenous communities, to ensure “the freedom and ability to exercise their autonomy and self-governance when it comes to their economic, social, and cultural development through sport” (Hayhurst & Giles, 2013, p. 515). Kuokkanen (2012) posited that the outcomes of this autonomy are always affecting other beings (human and nonhuman), and so a relational approach to self-determined Indigenous sport is needed to honor these relationships.
For settler researchers concerned with decolonization, refusal offers a lens and practice that directly confronts settler colonial sport spaces, as well as the “knowing” of Indigenous peoples.pushes us to limit settler territorialization of Indigenous/Native/community knowledge, and expand the space for other forms of knowledge . . . . Refusal makes space for recognition, and for reciprocity. Refusal turns the gaze back upon power, specifically the colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies to be differentially counted, violated, saved, and put to work. (p. 7)
Acknowledgments
This research paper was funded by the SSHRC insight grant titled “A Comparative Exploration of Sport for Reconciliation in Indigenous Communities in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia” (2020–2025; Principal Investigator: Dr. Audrey Giles, University of Ottawa; Co-Investigators: Dr. Lyndsay Hayhurst, York University; Dr. Daniel Henhawk, University of Manitoba; Collaborators: Dr. Jeremy Hapeta, University of Otago; Dr. Rochelle Stewart-Withers, Massey University; Dr. Steven Rynne, University of Queensland).
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