Description
Bringing together the overlapping discourses surrounding Indigenous sovereignty in sports and dance studies, this talk delineates the mutable meanings of basketball at St. Francis Mission School from 1933 to 1972. Jesuit officials founded St. Francis in 1886, and the institution operated as an Indian boarding school until 1972 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota on the lands of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, who are Sicangu Lakota. The presentation discusses how St. Francis officials employed basketball to assimilate and convert Lakota people while shaping and disseminating discourses related to the institution’s alleged contributions to Lakota people and futures. These strategies constitute what the presenter refers to as settler colonial choreographies. Meanwhile, maneuvering within settler colonial stereotypes and institutional policies, Lakota athletes and audiences carved opportunities to enact their understandings, identities, practices, and sovereignties, document their experiences and contributions, and nurture their wellbeing, freedom, and futures. These are referred to as decolonial choreographies. As Tria’s analysis demonstrates, settler colonial and decolonial choreographies are not dichotomous or static; rather, they operate as interlocking and shifting phenomena, simultaneously present in the student performances. This talk makes interventions into academic scholarship, which has yet to adequately consider the fluid possibilities of basketball and other sports within Indian boarding schools; the athletic practice as a cultural performance; and the connections between the sport and Lakota sovereignty. This information matters, because it underscores the importance of basketball in bringing a positive and collective Lakota future into being.