Epilogue: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Predicaments

Abstract

Sport in the Pacific, as the contributions to this special issue have clearly illustrated, cannot be understood without a thorough understanding of imperialism and its lasting impacts. This has proven especially true for indigenous peoples. Colonial agents, ranging from administrators to missionaries—routinely misunderstood indigenous sporting practices and regularly worked to end them. At the same time, European athletic pursuits were seized upon as a means to social indigenous peoples, offering the discipline and enculturation necessary to civilize cultures deemed savage. Ironically perhaps, sport reinforced prevailing images and interpretations, precisely because its corporeality demonstrated its proponents believed the truism of their race-based distinctions. As such, sport became crucial to the establishment of social boundaries and racial hierarchies, encouraging the exclusion of brown bodies from white spaces and from emerging white settler states. Even as they sought to marginalize indigenous peoples, settlers made a habit of taking and remaking their practices (such as surfing and haka) for power, pleasure, and profit no less than for the claims on place and to identity it offered them. Importantly, in the wake of the Second World War and quickened by freedom struggles locally and globally, a decolonial moment opened and with it the possibilities of sport changed radically. Rather than civilize indigenous peoples (whatever that might mean), sport opened significant sites to challenge the prevailing imperial order and its racial logics and to formulate novel identities that empowered previously marginalized communities. Across Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and the United States, sport played a key role in causing this break and in the manner that native and settler communities would work to come to terms with it. While multiculturalism came to prevail in distinct forms in each of these settler states, racism directed at indigenous people did not go away so much as it was recoded, moved back stage, or redirected: the struggles of P akeh a in New Zealand/Aotearoa to come to terms with M aori in rugby, the racism that persists in recruiting Aboriginal Australian footballers in Australia, and the exploitation of Polynesian bodies and