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.