DECOLONIZING YOUR NEWSFEED
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Native Hawaiian Carissa Moore on Tuesday at Tsurigasaki Beach, Ichinomiya,
Japan celebrating her gold medal victory in the Olympic's first-ever surfing competition. (The Associated Press)
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From hotel lobbies, to fitness centers, and glimpses of my Twitter and Instagram feeds, I've managed to take-in the headlines of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games like nibbling on
small snacks out on the open road.
I was somewhere in Canada when last week's opening ceremony in Tokyo kicked off - right in the midst of an altogether different Olympic tradition: the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics happening where
I've just arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska.
I admit, I've been remiss in prioritizing any of these events into my summer schedule. For instance, by the time I arrived in Fairbanks, the WEIO had just wrapped up.
But I've valued the headlines capturing the Indigenous narrative, specifically over Native Hawaiian Carissa Moore's
Olympic gold medal win in surfing this week. The sport is as Indigenous (and politically contentious) as the island of Hawaii, itself.
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Duke Kahanamoku, center, stands with his all-star surfing team. (Bob Johnson, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner)
| It's the first time ever that the Olympics has featured surfing in its roster of sports despite the early 2oth-century
lobbying of one man: Native Hawaiian, Duke Kahanamoku. The five-time Olympic medalist in swimming is more widely known as the "father of modern surfing." In the lead up to the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm he tried but was unable to convince the International Olympic Committee to include surfing in the competition.
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Today, there is no mistaking the $10 billion industry of surfing - a 1000-year-old Indigenous practice - as being completely colonized by mostly outsiders who stand to benefit most from the sport.
It's why Carissa Moore's win on Tuesday was so symbolic, if not spiritual. (I mean, did you hear about the rainbow that penetrated the stormy skies the day she won?) It
was as if Duke was right there to mark history - a return of surfing to the women who once dominated it: Native Hawaiian women.
Indigenously, the Tokyo Games are equally sentimental for Indian Country. It was there in 1964 when Lakota runner, Billy Mills, set an Olympic world record when he won the 10,000 meter run. He was considered an underdog, but the way
Mills tells it, he had "wings of an eagle" soaring him to victory that day.
There are more Olympic goodies to explore in this newsletter, including how Canada's women's rugby team took a subtle but solid stand for Indigenous survivors of residential schools this week; be sure to click on the end quote of this newsletter to read more. Next week, I'll be
taking a deeper dive into Indigenous representations across the Olympic Games. Then, I'm taking the rest of August off to reset in my temporary home in the far north.
The days are long here on top of the world...
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Exact number of disciplines featured out of 33 sports in the 2020 Olympic Games: 46
Total years surfing has been an Olympic competition prior to 2021: 0
Number of gold medals won by Native Hawaiian swimmer, Duke Kahanamoku: 3
Exact age gold medalist Carissa Moore (Native Hawaiian) began surfing: 3
Number of Native Hawaiian's competing in the Olympics, including Moore:3
Number of Maori Olympians out of New Zealand's 211 competing athletes: 33
Total Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contenders from Australia: 16
Exact meters of Mohawk Olympian Jillian Weir's best hammer throw: 72.5
Total winning score of Hmong-American gymnast Sunisa Lee in all-around finals: 57.43
Number of Indigenous languages the CBC broadcast the Olympic's opening ceremony: 8
Exact world record set in 1964 by Billy Mills (Lakota) in the 10K meter race: 28:24.4
Total gold medals Sac and Fox athlete Jim Thorpe won in the 1912 Stockholm Games: 2
Total years Tökahovi Lewis Tewanima (Hopi) held the 10K record from Stockholm: 52
Total years Thorpe and Tewanima each attended Carlisle Indian School, 1904-1912: 5
Estimated miles Thorpe ran back to Carlisle from an abusive "Outing": 18
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When Sac and Fox athlete Jim Thorpe crossed the finish line of the pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic games, he not only became the first Native American to win a gold medal for the U.S. - he brought home two gold medals. His other win was for the decathlon, a week later. His victories were so riveting that King Gustav V of
Sweden called Thorpe the "World's Greatest Athlete." But it was glory that was short-lived.
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Six months later, Thorpe was stripped of his medals by the International Olympic Committee after it was revealed he had previously been paid as a professional baseball player, thus violating, then as now, an arcane set of rules. His name was removed from the official Olympic record.
In 1983, thirty years after Thorpe died, his medals were returned. But his good name was never officially restored. To this day, he is listed, erroneously, as a "co-champion" in his winning events.
To call Jim Thorpe a co-champion isn't just inaccurate, it's racist.
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Join as many as 70,000 people who have joined an Indigenous-led effort calling on the IOC to restore the record of Jim Thorpe as the sole champion in the pentathlon and decathlon events at the 1912 Olympic Games.
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“It's so important to hear the stories and voices you profile. I love reading it every week."
Dorian, Northern Philippines
Thanks, Dorian for the awesome note from so far away. Just as the Olympics touch many corners of the world, so too does this newsletter.
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Correction: The last edition of Indigenously about protecting sacred landscapes across Indian Country misrepresented a place name connected to the Badger Two Medicine holy site. It is Glacier National Park, not Monument.
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