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Book title: Decolonizing Sport
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Editors: Janice Forsyth, Christine O’Bonsawin, Russell Field and Murray G. Phillips
Genre: Cultural Studies, History, Indigenous Resistance and Decolonization
Pages: 276
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Review:

Decolonizing Sport is the kind of book that makes you sit down and have a nice long educational experience. Decolonizing Sport is about sports through the years with history of how the Indigenous people learned to live with them.

I found this book to be very helpful on shedding some light on the history of the Indigenous sport history. I got this book because I was interested in what it had to say, and I was truly surprised with how much of it there was. This topic isn’t the most popular, but there’s still so much to be said about it, and it’s something that has been around for a lot of Indigenous history, going all the way back to colonial times. It’s such an interesting journey through history, finding out how Indigenous culture was, and still is, shaped by sports, and how they had to adapt over time. I appreciated the history of the Indigenous peoples in Canada, but what I also really loved was mentions of other countries, like Australia, the United States, and parts of Africa. Each country has so much uniqueness, and I loved how each was related to sports and using examples from their past to help illustrate that.

I also learned about the modern day sports, and how the Indigenous are still misrepresented and discriminated against. If I had to sum up this entire book, I would say that Indigenous people deserve better treatment when it comes to sports. Indigenous land being used without proper permission for building sports arenas, Indigenous athletes not being treated properly, and Indigenous being discriminated against, whether it be through people or even mascots. I’ve learned that this is all a product of the past, and that old stereotypes and ideologies are hard to get rid of. And in this book is how we can tackle those issues and fix these problems by decolonizing.

As for my reading experience, the only drawback I had with this book was the fact that I couldn’t mindlessly read it. To read this, you have to have to be ready to learn. If I had a physical copy, mine would most likely be filled with tabs and notes. At times when I was reading it I felt a little bit of a lull, and I found that the book wasn’t holding my interest. However, I would definitely still recommend it despite it’s rather niche (or at least what I feel is niche) audience.

Here’s the official synopsis from Fernwood!

Decolonizing Sport tells the stories of sport colonizing Indigenous Peoples and of Indigenous Peoples using sport to decolonize. Spanning several lands — Turtle Island, the US, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Kenya — the authors demonstrate the two sharp edges of sport in the history of colonialism. Colonizers used sport, their own and Indigenous recreational activities they appropriated, as part of the process of dispossession of land and culture. Indigenous mascots and team names, hockey at residential schools, lacrosse and many other examples show the subjugating force of sport. Yet, Indigenous Peoples used sport, playing their own games and those of the colonizers, including hockey, horse racing and fishing, and subverting colonial sport rules as liberation from colonialism. This collection stands apart from recent publications in the area of sport with its focus on Indigenous Peoples, sport and decolonization, as well as in imagining a new way forward.

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Bye!