"They may dance in the manner of White people:" Indian residential schools' assimilation through sport and student resistance

Keywords: residential schools; Indigenous cultural practices; race and racialization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 78

Abstract

'To missionaries charged with “civilizing” and Christianizing Indigenous children to attempt to fit them for Canadian settler colonial society, every aspect of Indigenous life needed to be dismantled and replaced with practices that cultivated Euro-Christian dispositions. The Department of Indian Affairs’ officials, and their missionary counterparts who administered Canada’s Indian residential schools, took steps to promote “modern” and “civilized” physical activities such as organized sports to inculcate Western values of individualism and, later, of cooperation and democracy (Forsyth 2020). In this, their efforts largely mirrored overseas colonial missionary sport programs. Because many traditional physical cultural practices were associated with Indigenous spirituality, such as the dancing present at pow-wows and potlatches, they were particular targets for elimination.

This presentation builds on the foundational work of Forsyth and others by examining heretofore little-used primary source material from missionary agencies and contemporary observers of the school system to consider the connections between religion, civic recreation enthusiasts, and the forced remolding of Indigenous physical cultural practices. I examine how government officials, and the religious orders who were responsible for the day-to-day management of the schools, used sports to subtly enact power upon the bodies of Indigenous children to mould them for modern-industrial Canadian society. Foregrounding student responses, this work also draws on oral testimonies, photographs, and other non-traditional archives to foreground students' adaptive and creative resistance strategies to this attempted cultural suppression.