Forsyth book receiving kudos for her take on Indigenous sports awards program

By Sam Laskaris

It was 20 years ago that Janice Forsyth volunteered to help out with a project proposed by the Aboriginal Sport Circle (ASC).

And now, two decades later, Forsyth has taken the research she gathered then and combined it with countless hours of writing and rewriting in recent years. The end result is the recently released Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination In Canadian Sport, a book which is earning rave reviews.

Praise is being thrust on Forsyth for the creativity and manner her book is presented. Besides having a critical eye on the past, she also provides her visions of what an Indigenous awards program can do in the future, especially when it comes to reconciliation and decolonization.

Forsyth, a member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba, was working as an interim project manager for the governing body of Indigenous sports in Canada at the turn of the century.

A few years before that, the ASC started presenting the Tom Longboat Awards, recognizing Indigenous athletic excellence. However, the ASC was looking to get a complete list of the regional and national award winners.

Before the ASC took over the responsibility, various other groups had been in charge of handing out the Tom Longboat Awards, first presented in 1951.

Forsyth stepped up to collect data on the award winners figuring she would utilize that information as part of her dissertation. She had also just begun working towards her PhD from Western University, based in London, Ont.

Forsyth went through the painstaking efforts of tracking down information on previous winners in order to present a list to the ASC.

While doing her research, Forsyth garnered copious amounts of information. By delivering chunks of these details into her book, she is able to generate an insightful commentary on the awards and their purpose, a motivation not evident for some.

Forsyth, who is now the Director of Indigenous Studies at Western University’s Faculty of Social Science, is being heralded for going far beyond what might have been expected from a historical look of awards presented to deserving Indigenous athletes.

Forsyth’s book begins by recapping the life of Longboat, an Onondaga runner from Six Nations, who was one of the world’s top long-distance runners in the early 20th century and the winner of the 1907 Boston Marathon.

Forsyth, who also a Western University associate professor in the Department of Sociology, also goes into great detail about how the Tom Longboat Awards were created.

And she writes how over the years these awards, which were supposedly in place to recognize Indigenous athletes who were excelling in various sports, were not actually serving this purpose at all.

Instead, the awards were being handed out at times to further the political agendas of the presenters themselves.

As for the future, Forsyth believes there is hope for good – especially if previous recipients of Tom Longboat Awards are given a proper voice.

“Their experiences are a foundational part of the history of Indigenous sport in Canada, as well as Indigenous history more broadly, touching on matters that are sport-specific but are also tied to issues that extend well beyond the playing fields and ice rinks,” Forsyth wrote. “Understood in this larger context, their stories – not filtered through mundane sporting narratives – will help us all to reflect on our own lives, as well as the state of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada.”