You're Skating on Native Land: Queering and Decolonizing Skate Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper draws from a new materialist interpretation of Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird to analyze how Queer and Indigenous skateboarders develop critical and community-responsive ways of knowing and being. This analysis is contrasted with the implications of skateboarding’s Olympic debut to theorize how non-dominant groups build self-supporting enclaves in spite of concerted efforts to regulate and exclude them from public life. Skateboarding is herein conceptualized as a critical pedagogy which enables participants to reclaim space, achieve self-defined learning goals, and challenge the authority of oppressive institutions built upon what Angelou calls “the grave of dreams.”