Maori Rugby in 1920s France: Sport, Race, and Indigeneity

Abstract: In 1924–25, a rugby team from New Zealand toured France. They won each of their games by more than twenty points, and the French press lauded them as invincible. Two years later, a group of Maori rugby players, traveled to Europe to test their mettle against similar competition. These rugby showcases elicited quite distinct responses among the French sporting public. The first Invincibles tour was viewed as an example of the British imperial settler-colonial world and the indigeneity of several players was ignored or downplayed. By contrast, the racial politics of the Maori All Blacks tour was impossible to overlook. Each tour taught the French different things about rugby—mostly technical lessons—but even those were shaped by the prevailing racial biases of the age. French observers were unable or unwilling to see the different epistemological strategies employed by the Maori rugbymen, who were using the tour to assert their sovereignty and demonstrate their worth within and outside of the British colonial sphere and the New Zealander settler-colonial state.