‘I keep forgetting them’: Lacrosse, indigenous women and girls and reconciliation in Canada

Abstract

In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its list of Calls to Action (CTA) in 2015, and five Calls were directly related to reconciliation and sport. Within these five sport-related CTA, there was no specific reference to gender. Lacrosse, as an Indigenous cultural practice that has been culturally appropriated by white settlers, is a complex site to investigate how the TRC's CTA is (or are not) being implemented and the ways in which these efforts are gendered. In this paper, we examined how staff at Canadian lacrosse organizations address the CTA and Indigenous women's and girls’ participation in lacrosse. Through the use of Indigenous feminist theory, feminist methodologies informed by the tenets of Indigenous methodologies, semi-structured interviews and reflexive thematic analysis, our findings demonstrate that Indigenous women and girls are commonly overlooked, and gender is typically an afterthought within the implementation of sport-related CTA by lacrosse organizing bodies in Canada – if they are implemented at all. As a result, we argue that there is a need to make gender a central organizing principle when lacrosse organizations within Canada implement the TRC's CTA.