Raven Plays Ball: Situating “Indian Sports Days” within Indigenous and Colonial Spaces in Twentieth-Century Coastal British Columbia

Abstract

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Canadian colonial agents (residential school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and government officials) introduced a number of Western-style sporting activities among Indigenous peoples through athletic clubs, church gatherings, and school physical fitness programs. In keeping with a Victorian conception of leisure, these elites understood sports in moral terms, believing that they would support “civilizing projects” intended to remake Indigenous socio-cultural spaces into colonial ones. Indigenous communities, however, used these same sports organizations to challenge, resist, and even displace colonial agendas. Inspired by J.R. Miller's treatment of Indigenous–non-Indigenous relations as a nuanced, multidirectional, often contradictory encounter, we argue that “Indian Sports Days” in coastal British Columbia from the 1910s–1940s were complex social spaces, reflective of both Indigenous and colonial perspectives.