Space, Environment, and Appropriation: Sport and Settler Colonialism in Mi'kma'ki

The displacement of Indigenous populations by settler societies forming within the British Empire was a global development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one in which settler sport took a significant role. Settler colonialism must be understood as a spatial and environmental phenomenon as well as a social and political one. This essay focuses on one geographical area: Mi'kma'ki, the homeland of the Mi'kmaq, corresponding to a substantial proportion of what is known in non-Indigenous terms as Canada's Maritime region. It reflects on the direct and indirect appropriation of unceded Indigenous space for sporting purposes, along with the implications for Indigenous sport and the nature of Indigenous response to settler encroachment. Sport as an important element of social and cultural history has strong explanatory power in showing how settler colonialism and Indigenous persistence became entangled.