No ‘Museum Piece’: Aboriginal Games and Cultural Contestation in Subarctic Canada

Abstract

Purpose – Using the example of the Dene Games competition, this chapter examines the connections between contemporary sports and the games of the Dene (Athapaskan), a group of indigenous cultures inhabiting the subarctic regions of the Canadian Northwest Territories.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter is based on participant-observation and individual interviews conducted during attendance at the Dene Games gatherings over the course of several years.

Findings – I argue that the indigenous Dene Games gathering, where traditional games are organised as a contemporary sports competition, opens a space for the reconstitution of indigenous physical activity practices. The tensions that occur when participation in indigenous games articulates to the practical logic of competitive sports, identify the Dene Games as a space of active cultural contestation.

Originality/value – The chapter examines the articulation of historically disparate social practises. It views the hysteretic effects of a pre-existing indigenous physical activity practice as a point of reference for resistance to the normative constraints emanating from the organisational modality of contemporary sports, without offering up an explanation that relies on voluntaristic assumptions of agency. It adopts this perspective in order to avoid grasping the indigenous practice as the operationalised object of its own intervention, a ‘museum piece’.

Citation

Heine, M.K. (2013), "No ‘Museum Piece’: Aboriginal Games and Cultural Contestation in Subarctic Canada", Native Games: Indigenous Peoples and Sports in the Post-Colonial World (Research in the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 7), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1476-2854(2013)0000007005