Full Description
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. 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.
Contents
Introduction: Identities, Opportunities, Inequities (C. Richard King); 1. Negotiating a Native American Identity through Sport: Assimilation, Adaptation, and the Role of the Trickster (Gerald Gems); 2. "Looking Backward:" The Life and Legend of Louis Francis Sockalexis (Daniel Barr); 3. "Simply Marvelous": The 1904 Girls' Basketball Team from Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School (Laura Peavy and Ursula Smith); 4. "Winnebago is a Great Nation!" George Howard Johnson's Life in Baseball; (Jeff Powers-Beck); 5. The Forgotten Irish-Indian: Ethnicity, Class and Football in the Life of Thomas Yarr; (William Bauer, Jr.); 6. Playing Football, Playing Indian: An History of the Native Americans Who Were the NFL's Oorang Indians (Charles Fruehling Springwood); 7. Women's Basketball on the Navajo Nation: The Shiprock Cardinals, 1960-1980; (Ann Cummins, Cecilia Anderson, and Georgia Briggs); 8. An Examination of Sport for Aboriginal Females on the Six Nations Reserve, 1968 to 1980 (Vicky Paraschak); 9. Suanne Big Crow: Her Legend and Legacy (Ellen J. Staurowsky); 10. A Notable Exception: Notes on Notah Begay, Race, and Sports (C. Richard King); 11. No Fall from Grace: Grace Thorpe's Athlete of the Century Campaign for Her Father (John Bloom); Epilogue (C. Richard King)
