Governing Indigenous Sports and Recreation, 1972-2008: Citizenship Regimes, Nation-Building, and the Politics of Ambivalence

This article examines the governance of Indigenous sports in Canada over the past 40 years. Drawing from the notion of citizenship regimes, it looks at the different institutional arrangements, rules, and understandings that have guided and shaped Canadian sports policy. Through a comparative analysis of the Native Sports and Recreation Program (1972-81) and the North American Indigenous Games (1990-2008), it demonstrates a shift from strategies of governance based on social citizenship in which state agencies aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples under federal programs as disadvantaged members of the national population to market citizenship, providing services that target at-risk communities at a distance through short-term, project-oriented partnerships. In the midst of these changing citizenship regimes, I examine the different ways in which Indigenous groups have been able to make claims for self-determined sports and recreation infrastructure based on specific understandings of nationhood and belonging.