Michael Heine, The University of Western Ontario, Co-Investigator
Janice Forsyth, University of Alberta, Principal Investigator
Audrey Giles, University of Ottawa, Co-investigator
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Established in 1951, the Tom Longboat Awards are the highest recognition in sports awarded to Aboriginal athletes in Canada. The Awards, administered annually by the Aboriginal Sport Circle, recognize Aboriginal athletes’ accomplishments in high-performance sports while seeking to increase public awareness of Aboriginal athletes’ contributions to the Canadian sport system – and their contributions are many. Since 1951, more than 250 Aboriginal athletes have been named regional and national Tom Longboat Award recipients, demonstrating a long and proud tradition of Aboriginal excellence in Canadian sport.
There is no doubt that these athletes rank among the very best in the country – yet their stories are missing from the national narratives on Canadian sport. The public and scholarly literature is largely silent on the subject, resulting in a pattern that has contributed to the “symbolic annihilation” (Kidd, 2000, p. 173) of Aboriginal sporting experiences in Canada. Given the significance of sport as a prominent site for cultural negotiation and contestation, we need to examine the stories of Aboriginal athletes who have been excluded from the dominant discourse on sport in order to understand and critique the ramifications of these forms of exclusion for Aboriginal athletes as well as the Canadian sport system.
This project has two main objectives: 1) to expand our understanding of the factors that enable and inhibit Aboriginal participation in Canadian sport, and 2) to create a more balanced understanding of what it means to be an Aboriginal athlete in the Canadian sport system. We will achieve these objectives by collecting, documenting, and analyzing the sporting experiences of Aboriginal athletes who received a Tom Longboat Award from the year of its inception in 1951 to 1998, and by disrupting the existing discourses on Canadian sport through the construction and dissemination of counter-narratives on Aboriginal experiences in Canadian sport.
Our analytical perspective will be multidisciplinary in nature, informed by readings in critical sport studies, native studies, history, sociology, and discourse analysis. Our data collection method will be the individual semi-structured interview. We will conduct approximately 60 interviews with male and female Tom Longboat Award recipients throughout Canada.
The proposed research program will extend the body of literature on Canadian and Aboriginal sport, Canadian history and sociology, Native studies, and critical cultural studies. Such a contribution will create a more balanced understanding of Canadian sport history and foster a deeper appreciation of what it means to be an Aboriginal athlete in Canadian sport. Further, our research will play an important role in identifying the circumstances that both enable and inhibit Aboriginal participation in sport, and can thus be used in the development of policies and programs that are better able to meet the needs of Aboriginal people in sport. In short, we hope to change what is currently understood to be the ‘face’ of Canadian sport to instead be more representative of a broader array of ‘faces’ that have been and continue to be a part of the Canadian sport system.
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