Native Athletes in Sport & Society

Native Athletes in Sport & Society
Author: C. Richard King
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780803227538

Though many Americans might be aware of the Olympian and football Hall of Famer Jim Thorpe or of Navajo golfer Notah Begay, few know of the fundamental role that Native athletes have played in modern sports: introducing popular games and contests, excelling as players, and distinguishing themselves as coaches. The full breadth and richness of this tradition unfolds in Native Athletes in Sport and Society, which highlights the accomplishments of Indigenous athletes in the United States and Canada but also explores what these accomplishments have meant to Native American spectators and citizens alike. ø Here are Thorpe and Begay as well as the Winnebago baseball player George Johnson, the Snohomish Notre Dame center Thomas Yarr, the Penobscot baseball player Louis Francis Sockalexis, and the Lakota basketball player SuAnne Big Crow. Their stories are told alongside those of Native athletic teams such as the NFL?s Oorang Indians, the Shiprock Cardinals (a Navajo women?s basketball team), the women athletes of the Six Nations Reserve, and the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School?s girls? basketball team, who competed in the 1904 World?s Fair. Superstars and fallen stars, journeymen and amateurs, coaches and gatekeepers, activists and tricksters appear side by side in this collection, their stories articulating the issues of power and possibility, difference and identity, representation and remembrance that have shaped the means and meaning of American Indians playing sport in North America.

American Indian Sports Heritage

American Indian Sports Heritage
Author: Joseph B. Oxendine
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780803286092

“Neither the highly commercialized nature of professional sports today nor the more casual attitude prevailing in amateur activities captures the essence of Indian sport,” writes Joseph B. Oxendine. Through sport, Indians sought blessings from a higher spirit. Sport that evolved from religious rites retained a spiritual dimension, as seen in the attitude and manner of preparing and participating. In American Indian Sports Heritage, Oxendine discusses the history and importance in everyday life of ball games (especially lacrosse), running, archery, swimming, snow snake, hoop-and-pole, and games of chance. Indians gained nationwide visibility as athletes in baseball and football; the teams at boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were especially famous. Oxendine describes the apex of Indian sports during the first three decades of the twentieth century and chronicles the decline since. He looks at the career of the legendary Jim Thorpe and provides brief biographies of other Indian athletes before and after 1930.

Athletic Coaching

Athletic Coaching
Author: Gregory A. Cranmer
Publisher: Communication, Sport, and Society
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Coach-athlete relationships
ISBN: 9781433147661

This book conceptualizes coaching as a communicative endeavor, provides a framework from which to understand coaching effectiveness, and explicates four common perspectives (instructional, organizational, group, and interpersonal) utilized by communication scholars to examine coaching.

Mascot Nation

Mascot Nation
Author: Andrew C. Billings
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252050843

The issue of Native American mascots in sports raises passions but also a raft of often-unasked questions. Which voices get a hearing in an argument? What meanings do we ascribe to mascots? Who do these Indians and warriors really represent? Andrew C. Billings and Jason Edward Black go beyond the media bluster to reassess the mascot controversy. Their multi-dimensional study delves into the textual, visual, and ritualistic and performative aspects of sports mascots. Their original research, meanwhile, surveys sports fans themselves on their thoughts when a specific mascot faces censure. The result is a book that merges critical-cultural analysis with qualitative data to offer an innovative approach to understanding the camps and fault lines on each side of the issue, the stakes in mascot debates, whether common ground can exist and, if so, how we might find it.

Native American Son

Native American Son
Author: Kate Buford
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0375413243

Chronicles defining moments in the career of the preeminent American athlete, from his contributions to college football and gold-medal wins at the 1912 Olympics to his role in shaping professional football and baseball, in a portrait that also discusses his private struggles and political views.

Redskins

Redskins
Author: C. Richard King
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 080328845X

The Washington Redskins franchise remains one of the most valuable in professional sports, in part because of its easily recognizable, popular, and profitable brand. And yet “redskins” is a derogatory name for American Indians. The number of grassroots campaigns to change the name has risen in recent years despite the current team owner’s assertion that the team will never do so. Franchise owners counter criticism by arguing that the team name is positive and a term of respect and honor that many American Indians embrace. The NFL, for its part, actively defends the name and supports it in court. Prominent journalists, politicians, and former players have publicly spoken out against the use of “Redskins” as the name of the team. Sportscaster Bob Costas denounced the name as a racial slur during a halftime show in 2013. U.S. Representative Betty McCollum marched outside the stadium with other protesters––among them former Minnesota Vikings player Joey Browner––urging that the name be changed. Redskins: Insult and Brand examines how the ongoing struggle over the team name raises important questions about how white Americans perceive American Indians, about the cultural power of consumer brands, and about continuing obstacles to inclusion and equality. C. Richard King examines the history of the team’s name, the evolution of the term “redskin,” and the various ways in which people both support and oppose its use today. King’s hard-hitting approach to the team’s logo and mascot exposes the disturbing history of a moniker’s association with the NFL—a multibillion-dollar entity that accepts public funds—as well as popular attitudes toward Native Americans today.

Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back

Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back
Author: Jessica Luther
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1477322175

Triumphant wins, gut-wrenching losses, last-second shots, underdogs, competition, and loyalty—it’s fun to be a fan. But when a football player takes a hit to the head after yet another study has warned of the dangers of CTE, or when a team whose mascot was born in an era of racism and bigotry takes the field, or when a relief pitcher accused of domestic violence saves the game, how is one to cheer? Welcome to the club for sports fans who care too much. In Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, acclaimed sports writers Jessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson tackle the most pressing issues in sports, why they matter, and how we can do better. For the authors, “sticking to sports” is not an option—not when our taxes are paying for the stadiums, and college athletes aren’t getting paid at all. But simply quitting a favorite team won’t change corrupt and deplorable practices, and the root causes of many of these problems are endemic in our wider society. An essential read for modern fans, Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back challenges the status quo and explores how we might begin to reconcile our conscience with our fandom.

Indian Spectacle

Indian Spectacle
Author: Jennifer Guiliano
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2015-04-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813572746

Amid controversies surrounding the team mascot and brand of the Washington Redskins in the National Football League and the use of mascots by K–12 schools, Americans demonstrate an expanding sensitivity to the pejorative use of references to Native Americans by sports organizations at all levels. In Indian Spectacle, Jennifer Guiliano exposes the anxiety of American middle-class masculinity in relation to the growing commercialization of collegiate sports and the indiscriminate use of Indian identity as mascots. Indian Spectacle explores the ways in which white, middle-class Americans have consumed narratives of masculinity, race, and collegiate athletics through the lens of Indian-themed athletic identities, mascots, and music. Drawing on a cross-section of American institutions of higher education, Guiliano investigates the role of sports mascots in the big business of twentieth-century American college football in order to connect mascotry to expressions of community identity, individual belonging, stereotyped imagery, and cultural hegemony. Against a backdrop of the current level of the commercialization of collegiate sports—where the collective revenue of the fifteen highest grossing teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has well surpassed one billion dollars—Guiliano recounts the history of the creation and spread of mascots and university identities as something bound up in the spectacle of halftime performance, the growth of collegiate competition, the influence of mass media, and how athletes, coaches, band members, spectators, university alumni, faculty, and administrators, artists, writers, and members of local communities all have contributed to the dissemination of ideas of Indianness that is rarely rooted in native people’s actual lives.

The Native American Identity in Sports

The Native American Identity in Sports
Author: Frank A. Salamone
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0810887088

This collection of essays examines how sport has contributed to shaping and expressing Native American identity-from the attempt of the old Indian Schools to "Americanize" Native Americans through sport to the "Indian mascot" controversy and what it says about the broader publ...