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Settler Colonial Sport Venues: An Edmonton/Amiskwaciy History
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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SSHRC IG awarded 2021. Overnight on July 24, 2020, a teepee was erected and a sacred fire lit on a triangular patch of grass on Amiskwaciy territory, also known as the Rossdale Flats in downtown Edmonton, Alberta. Ten days later, 170 tents were pitched, providing shelter and community for 300 people. "Camp Pekiwewin is an anti-police violence, prayer, and relief camp with a harm reduction approach for houseless people/people who sleep rough, led by Indigenous 2spirit, women and femme folks working in solidarity with Black, LGBTQ2S and settler allies" (Mihwâw, 2020). This Indigenous occupation of the overflow parking lot for the baseball stadium across the street graphically illustrates the central challenges this project seeks to address: What are the settler colonial legacies of some of Edmonton's current sport and recreation infrastructures? What were their conditions of possibility, and what have been the effects of these built spaces? And under what conditions have these sporting and recreation spaces become places of reconciliatory efforts? This project will spatially historicize the emergence of sport venues and recreation spaces in three key locations in central Edmonton -- the Rossdale Flats and the city's main baseball stadium, the Walterdale Flats and the Kinsmen Sports Centre, and the McCauley neighbourhood and Commonwealth Stadium. Using both archival research and discourse analysis, the project will trace how these three particular locations evince the complex shifts and social relations wrought by settler sport development. Typically, city and sporting origin stories "construct a framework for [national] identity and a sense of belonging and legitimacy on these territories without having to confront the ongoing practices of colonization within society and within sport today" (Fortier, 2016, p. 3). This project will attend to Fortier's challenge.
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- Date created
- 2020-01-01
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- Type of Item
- Research Material
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- License
- © Davidson, Judy. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document is embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2026.