Though many Americans might be aware of the Olympian and football Hall of Famer Jim Thorpe or of Navajo golfer Notah Begay, few know of the fundamental role that Native athletes have played in modern sports: introducing popular games and contests, excelling as players, and distinguishing themselves as coaches. The full breadth and richness of this tradition unfolds in Native Athletes in Sport and Society, which highlights the accomplishments of Indigenous athletes in the United States and Canada but also explores what these accomplishments have meant to Native American spectators and citizens alike. ø Here are Thorpe and Begay as well as the Winnebago baseball player George Johnson, the Snohomish Notre Dame center Thomas Yarr, the Penobscot baseball player Louis Francis Sockalexis, and the Lakota basketball player SuAnne Big Crow. Their stories are told alongside those of Native athletic teams such as the NFL?s Oorang Indians, the Shiprock Cardinals (a Navajo women?s basketball team), the women athletes of the Six Nations Reserve, and the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School?s girls? basketball team, who competed in the 1904 World?s Fair. Superstars and fallen stars, journeymen and amateurs, coaches and gatekeepers, activists and tricksters appear side by side in this collection, their stories articulating the issues of power and possibility, difference and identity, representation and remembrance that have shaped the means and meaning of American Indians playing sport in North America.

This text offers a considerate and critical account of the Native American sporting experience. It challenges popular images of indigenous athletes and athletics exploring social categories, particularly gender and race and their implications.

This collection of essays examines how sport has contributed to shaping and expressing Native American identity-from the attempt of the old Indian Schools to "Americanize" Native Americans through sport to the "Indian mascot" controversy and what it says about the broader publ...

Giving back is a crucial part of Native American culture (Kidwell, 1990), and can be a motivator for youth to leave their Native communities to obtain an education (Reyes, 2016). There is logical connection between giving back and Native American athletics as sport can be a catalyst for social capital, but it has only briefly been studied in this context among the Native American community (Ali-Christie, 2013). The dominant narratives of Native Americans are as peoples of the past or individuals facing insurmountable odds and destined to be another statistic of ill-health and loss. The purpose of this dissertation is to better understand giving back amongst Native American athletes and to produce a counter-narrative to the deficit perspective by highlighting the voices of three successful Native American athletes using documentary film as a research medium. TribalCrit framed this research because of its emphasis on the importance of the Native American experience and storytelling. Public and visual sociology are also important to this work because of the need to showcase these findings in a way that is more accessible to the larger public and provide representation for Native people. Several storylines were developed based on the comprehensive data collection alongside three Native American athletes. The storylines were: (a) Sports are Family, (b) Sport is a Vehicle, (c) Giving Back is Greater Than Sport, (d) Giving Back is Gratitude, and (e) Role Model Role. On the surface, sport appeared to be everything to these athletes but ultimately what mattered the most to them was giving back to their community. These findings can help us better understand the dynamics of the Native community beyond the grim statistics linking Natives to alcohol abuse, drug problems, diabetes and other health issues. This work can also provide the community with personal stories of success and ensure the continuation of the circle of giving back.

Sports are an integral part of American society. Millions of dollars are spent every year on professional, collegiate, and youth athletics, and participation in and viewing of these sports both alter and reflect how one perceives the world. Beamon and Messer deftly explore sports as a social construction, and more significantly, the large role race and ethnicity play in sports and consequently sports’ influence on modern race relations. This text is ideal for courses on Sport and Society as well as Race and Ethnicity.

Amid controversies surrounding the team mascot and brand of the Washington Redskins in the National Football League and the use of mascots by K–12 schools, Americans demonstrate an expanding sensitivity to the pejorative use of references to Native Americans by sports organizations at all levels. In Indian Spectacle, Jennifer Guiliano exposes the anxiety of American middle-class masculinity in relation to the growing commercialization of collegiate sports and the indiscriminate use of Indian identity as mascots. Indian Spectacle explores the ways in which white, middle-class Americans have consumed narratives of masculinity, race, and collegiate athletics through the lens of Indian-themed athletic identities, mascots, and music. Drawing on a cross-section of American institutions of higher education, Guiliano investigates the role of sports mascots in the big business of twentieth-century American college football in order to connect mascotry to expressions of community identity, individual belonging, stereotyped imagery, and cultural hegemony. Against a backdrop of the current level of the commercialization of collegiate sports—where the collective revenue of the fifteen highest grossing teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has well surpassed one billion dollars—Guiliano recounts the history of the creation and spread of mascots and university identities as something bound up in the spectacle of halftime performance, the growth of collegiate competition, the influence of mass media, and how athletes, coaches, band members, spectators, university alumni, faculty, and administrators, artists, writers, and members of local communities all have contributed to the dissemination of ideas of Indianness that is rarely rooted in native people’s actual lives.

“Neither the highly commercialized nature of professional sports today nor the more casual attitude prevailing in amateur activities captures the essence of Indian sport,” writes Joseph B. Oxendine. Through sport, Indians sought blessings from a higher spirit. Sport that evolved from religious rites retained a spiritual dimension, as seen in the attitude and manner of preparing and participating. In American Indian Sports Heritage, Oxendine discusses the history and importance in everyday life of ball games (especially lacrosse), running, archery, swimming, snow snake, hoop-and-pole, and games of chance. Indians gained nationwide visibility as athletes in baseball and football; the teams at boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were especially famous. Oxendine describes the apex of Indian sports during the first three decades of the twentieth century and chronicles the decline since. He looks at the career of the legendary Jim Thorpe and provides brief biographies of other Indian athletes before and after 1930.