‘Native to native … we'll recapture our spirits’: The world indigenous nations games and north American indigenous games as cultural resistance

For centuries, colonizing governments have utilized cultural policies to eliminate Aboriginal culture, to make ‘citizens’ out of Native peoples in part by forcing them to relinquish language, cultural practices and traditions and have encouraged them to embrace mainstream values and cultural practices. In the Canadian context, sport has been utilized by the Canadian government as a civilizing agent to assimilate Aboriginal peoples. This paper analyses the history of this process in Canada and explains how Aboriginal leaders inverted this process to achieve self-determination through sport, in particular through the North American Indigenous Games and the World Indigenous Games. In this sense, we argue, sport has been historically contested terrain, wielded to disempower and to empower Aboriginal peoples.