Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Keywords

Settler colonialism, Indigeneity, Olympics

Abstract

In this essay I examine how Indigenous artists and performers leveraged Indigenous inclusion in Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games to refuse conditions that spectacularize Indigeneity for the consumptive appetite of settler-spectators. Their refusals, I suggest, called upon settler-spectators to reorient their placement on Indigenous land: to move from understanding themselves as citizens of a postcolonial nation-state celebrated through Olympic (inter)nationalism, to settlers (still) occupying unceded Indigenous territory. I critique how settler subjectivity and settler colonial relations have historically been produced through non-Indigenous people engaging with Indigenous people and political expression as spectators, enjoying the privilege and presumption of consuming and looking at Indigenous people and art. To be called into a different relation by Indigenous art and performance that refuses our spectatorship, we are called upon to relinquish our position as spectators, to identify ourselves as settlers, and to reorient ourselves temporally, spatially, and politically to Indigenous peoples and land. The positioning of Indigenous art and performance as refusals within and against the Olympics, the ultimate spectacle of statehood and inclusion, intensified their potency. Refusing and revising the spectacle, they playfully and powerfully unsettled settler-spectators and settler colonial conditions.

Publication Title

Streetnotes

Volume

25

First Page

194

Last Page

211

Required Publisher's Statement

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

Comments

Streetnotes (2016) 25: 194-211 Section II: Mosaics of Spectacle and Resistance ISSN: 2159-2926

Subjects - Topical (LCSH)

Olympics--Social aspects; Olympics--Political aspects; Indigenous peoples--Civil rights--British Columbia; Winter Olympics

Geographic Coverage

Vancouver (B.C.)

Genre/Form

articles

Type

Text

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

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