Putting Indigenous athletes on the podium
Waneek Horn-Miller has played water polo at the highest level for Team Canada and has continued to be an active voice in the sporting world – she wants to bring together more Indigenous leaders in sports at the Indigenous Sports Summit. Courtesy Waneek Horn-Miller
For former Olympian Waneek Horn-Miller, sports is about much more than just playing a game.
“Sport is really, really important in our communities,” said Horn-Miller, who co-captained Team Canada at the 2000 Olympic Games. “In Indigenous communities, sports is a suicide preventer, a drug addiction preventer, an incarceration preventer, a leadership builder.”
For years, Horn-Miller said she’s not seen enough attention given to Indigenous sports development, feeling that often, the big bucks in Canadian sport don’t go towards helping communities thrive.
That’s why she’s gotten involved with the Indigenous Sport Summit, an event built by Indigenous Sport Movement that seeks to bring together Indigenous people in sport to shape a 10-Year Community-Based Indigenous Sports Strategic and Action Plan.
The event will be held in a hybrid format, on Sunday, May 17, with the option to join online or in person in Whitecap, Saskatoon. With the Indigenous Physical Activity & Cultural Circle, Horn-Miller has been involved in organizing the free summit, along with the team at Indigenous Sport Movement, a group of like-minded Indigenous leaders in sport.
She said that after being involved in the federal government’s Future of Sport in Canada Commission last year, she felt it was more important than ever to carve out a future for Indigenous involvement in sport.
That commission was created to address insufficient safeguards and accountability mechanisms in sport, and she took part in roundtables to discuss a path forward.
“There were other people like me who are very involved with the Indigenous sport movement, but are not ever included in the conversation,” she said. “We said, ‘Why don’t we start putting political pressure on? Why don’t we start to ask what’s going on?’”
She began to have conversations with chiefs, sporting organizations, and the Future of Sport in Canada Commission, which published its final report at the end of March.
“The reality is that organizations that are supposed to provide services to Indigenous communities are not accountable to Indigenous people, they’re accountable to Sport Canada,” Horn-Miller said.
She recalls speaking to a member of Sport Canada about the issue years ago.
“I said, ‘We need a national Indigenous sports strategy, when is that going to happen?” she said. “They need to take a decolonial approach to this, meaning, don’t just talk to the people in the organizations, you have to really understand how we interact with our people.”
Frustrated with the lack of meaningful consultation with Indigenous people in sports programming, Horn-Miller joined forces with other Indigenous sports leaders to come up with the Indigenous Sports Summit, which she hopes will provide a space for stakeholders to create a vision for what the future of supporting communities could look like.
“If Indigenous people were getting sport delivered in a way that met our needs, if we were working with the Indigenous Physicians Association, for example, to look at all the issues we need help with, then our people would be more positive and effective political actors within our communities,” she said.
“The Canadian government needs to start listening to the communities and the people, because if they don’t, it’s a continued attack on our health and well-being, and that’s an attack on our political efficacy.”
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Registration for the Indigenous Sports Summit can be found on the social media pages of the Indigenous Physical Activity & Cultural Circle, and more information can be found by contacting [email protected].
