Indigenous Peoples, Sport and Sustainability

This chapter explores how sport is connected to racist and colonial notions of Indigenous inferiority and European superiority and how such power dynamics manifest in contemporary Sport for Development programs aimed at Indigenous communities. It uses this as a point of departure to privilege Indigenous perspectives on sustainable development through sport, and does so in part by exposing the tensions within modernist notions of development as progress. Overall, it aims to offer an important reminder of the need for Indigenous voices, cultures and ways of thinking within the still burgeoning field of Sport for Development and the issue of sustainability in and through sport.