The pros and cons of Native-only sport competitions

By R John Hayes
Windspeaker Staff Writer

The Olympic motto - Faster, Higher, Stronger - deals with competition, and little else, but the motto of the North American Indigenous Games - Brave, Strong, True - has elements in it dealing with character. Does this reflect a fundamental difference between the way Aboriginal people approach sports and that of the mainstream? And how does the different focus of competition in the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal worlds change the way athletes approach sports and games?

"We need to go back to the beginning of the North American Indigenous Games movement, and the Olympic movement, and then take a look at what they've developed into," said Cara Currie, vice-chair of the Aboriginal Sport Circle. "We need to see what role games play in Native life and for Native people. Why is it that it is the mainstream sports system that validates you as a champion?

"Sport was not the central focus of community building in Native culture," she continued. "In sports now we get to be proud of the past, proud of the competition that developed out of inter-tribal warfare."

The last decade has seen the development of many Aboriginal-only competitions, and some with even more restrictive participation requirements, such as treaty-only and Métis-only competitions. There are drawbacks to the separation of competition, as Native athletes become successful and become champions without competing with any of the athletes who are not Native. And there are those who decry the ongoing separation of each sport into thousands of separate championships, each one essentially meaningless.

"Curling is the worst, with the left-handed senior businesswomen's provincial championship," laughed Scott Taylor, a sports writer with the Winnipeg Free Press, "but Aboriginal competition doesn't seem to me to be as reductionist as that. In soccer, you have the English championship and the championship of Holland and the Chinese championship, and on and on, and nobody suggests that that is a problem. Native people have pride in what they are. There's nothing wrong with Aboriginal competitions that I can see."

"On the one hand, we cover sports based on excellence," said John Short, a columnist with the Edmonton Journal. "Except sometimes." Short said that the divisions that started with age and sex are developing into much less general divisions, and that the exclusivity also trivializes the competitions.

"I never believed in separating kids," said Gord Russell of the Crystal Kids program in Edmonton, which deals with an approximately 90-per-cent Native inner-city clientele. "Kids are kids, and they should play together.

"One night out in Redwater [Alta.] at one of the last all-Native boxing competitions," he continued, "a kid asked me 'Why can't my friend box?' I had to tell him that his friend wasn't Native and so couldn't fight. The kid took his gloves off and said that he wasn't going to fight, either, then. Some of the coaches watching said that he had something there."

"Myself, I think, it's both ways," said Mel Parenteau, sports, culture and recreation coordinator of the Prince Albert [Sask.] Grand Council. "It helps with self-esteem, with their motivation to get better in their sports and in their daily living. On the other hand, it does effect some of the younger kids, who don't have an Aboriginal cultural background, and who don't understand the whole issue of Indigenous games.

"A lot of pretty good athletes are happy where they're at," he continued. "They're happy where the leadership is taking them. Hopefully, one of our kids will excel enough to reach the Olympics and do well there, but maybe he or she won't want to." Parenteau went on to wonder whether our obsession with getting the most out of athletes is what these competitions should be about.

"Most of the games started out as small tournaments, put on for fun between reserves of within regional councils," said a Native reporter with a Native media outlet, who asked that his name not be used. "Now, they've grown into some kind of huge alternative sports establishment, and the Native politicians have started to build a huge and expensive sports establishment which is based on a sham. The Indigenous champions aren't important. Participation is. But you have dozens of administrators scheming to win medals this summer in Victoria, as if it really matters how many medals Saskatchewan gets, and whether they beat Alberta.

"It's sick and, more important," he continued, "it misses the whole point of Aboriginal competition, which is to build good citizens in an Aboriginal environment, not to satisfy the medal-greed of some petty leader."

The competition effects Native kids in different ways, too.

"It all depends on how your coach develops you and makes you look at the game," said Randy Ermineskin, a former semi-pro hockey player who is now a junior high school physical education teacher in Wetaskiwin. "Some coaches are a little too aggressive and it leads to strife, and that kind of thing can damage kids. The whole point of separate competition must be to develop athletes with respect for the rules, for the opponents, for the game and for yourselves."

Ermineskin, who had help from some close friends and advisors when he had tough times playing junior hockey in Hobbema in the Alberta Junior "A" Hockey League in the mid-1980s, is trying to build a model for coaches so that his kids don't encounter the culture shock he dealt with.

Four-time Aboriginal Olympic cross-country skier Sharon Firth didn't come out of a segregated program, but still had trouble dealing with competition "outside."

"I started to compete at age 12 in Inuvik [N.W.T.], which is a very small town," she said. "My goal in life was to see the world and sport was the only way, but when I left Inuvik at 17, it was a really frightening experience. The good thing is that I had my sister with me, and I knew that my community was there for me, when I would go home.

"Sometimes people feel that, because they're Native, they can't do anything," she continued. Native skiers dominated Canada's team at Firth's first Winter Olympics, in 1972 in Sapporo, Japan, because of a well-funded Northwest Territories program, which has since been cut. Since then, the South has caught up, and Aboriginal competitors have not done as well nationally. Firth represented Canada in 1976 in Innsbruck, Austria, 1980 in Lake Placid, N.Y., and in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina, formerly part of Yugoslavia, in 1984.

"I've never participated in a Native-only competition of any kind," Firth said. "I think that the effect of that - whether they'd go on to higher competition or be satisfied with winning at that level - would depend on the kid, and on the coach. For me, I needed to compete on the world stage to meet my goals, and so it wouldn't have effected me very much, I don't think."

"The effects on the athlete are going to be based on what makes any athlete poor, good or great: coaching, sports psychology and something internal that makes some go forward and some stop," Taylor said. "What makes any athlete great? Some can overcome huge obstacles - Billy Mills somehow overcame all kinds of things. I would hope that Native championships would be a stepping stone to higher competition where the athletes would want to go on."

Currie, who is as supportive of Native competitions as anybody, did express concern that the different competitions would split already inadequate funding into even smaller slices.

"If we continue to separate resources, then most programs will suffer," she said. "And the recognition factor outside of the Native community is very small. The National Indian Athletic Association championships, which have been held since the 1970s, receive very limited coverage in the mainstream."

Taylor believes that that is not a factor of them being Native competitions, at least in Canada, but a part of the way Canada is.

"Sport is not a part of our culture in Canada," he said. "We don't spend enough money on it; we don't pay enough attention to it. In the States, they get two or three thousand people to watch high school basketball on a Friday night; here, not even the parents go. Sport is a great developmental opportunity, and in many ways, Canadians don't make use of it."

"Sport is the most successful form of building cross-cultural understanding," Currie said. "The Aboriginal Sport Circle has a role in helping athletes make the transition to mainstream sports."

Whether anybody pays attention, presumably, or not.