Choreographed settler colonialism: Alexandra Giancarlo, ‘Indigenous dance, sport-for-development, and settler colonial (de)choreographies in the Indian Residential School System’, Leisure, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Choreographed settler colonialism: Alexandra Giancarlo, ‘Indigenous dance, sport-for-development, and settler colonial (de)choreographies in the Indian Residential School System’, Leisure, 2024

23Sep24

Abstract: The Department of Indian Affairs and church counterparts who administered Canada’s Indian Residential School System promoted Euro-Canadian physical activities to reform and replace traditional Indigenous physical culture practices like the Sundance and the potlatch. Administrators used Western forms of movement to compel obedience to Euro-Canadian culture, including spirituality. An observer wrote that the students ‘must not sing, dance, beat a drum, or pray in the Indian way. They may dance in the manner of the White people …’ (Sheridan, ca. 1930s). The use of sport for such social engineering, usually by colonial state and church missions, has been called sport-for-development. This paper examines how these institutions conceptually framed, and put into practice, their interventions into Indigenous physical cultures using the terrain of the body. I argue that the Indian residential school system imposed ‘settler colonial choreographies’ in a domestic sport-for-development process.

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