Allan Downey

McMaster University, History, Faculty Member

Columbia University, Anthropology, Former Fulbright Fellow

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Allan Downey is Dakelh, Nak'azdli Whut'en, and a Canada Research Chair in the Department of History and Indigenous Studies Department at McMaster University. A former Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University, he previously served as the Chair of the Indigenous Studies Program and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University from 2015-2018. Author of The Creator’s Game (UBC Press, 2018), his current research focuses on the history of Indigenous ironworkers in New York City as a lens to view Indigenous self-determination and nationhood. Beyond teaching, Allan splits his time volunteering for Indigenous communities and youth organizations throughout the year. For more visit: https://allandowney.wordpress.com

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Papers by Allan Downey

To Know the Indigenous Other: A Century of Indians in Canadian History

Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2023

Celebrating its centenary in 2022, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA) has ... more Celebrating its centenary in 2022, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA) has been home to scores of articles on Indigenous history within the colonial borders of Canada. Offering a historiography of the past one-hundred years of scholarship appearing in the journal focused on Indigenous topics, this article argues that the JCHA offers a unique case study of the history of the field. While the journal has offered a dearth of scholarship on people of colour, leading to the erasure of Black Canadians as prominent actors in Canada's past, the zealous study of "Indians" within the journal's pages is salient. However, much like the larger field of Canadian history, the journal has a fraught and contentious past with Indigenous Peoples, stories, and methods. Unlike the erasure of Black Canadians, the fervent focus on "Indians" in Canadian history has had the significant effect of Canadians coming to "know" the Indians who were produced within the power structures of Canadian imperialism, settler colonialism, and the academy as they sought to identify, classify, and organize the Other. More recently however, there has been a slow trickle of articles produced by historians of Indigenous history that is contributing to an intellectual sovereignty that situates Indigenous history as an independent and unique course of study not tied exclusively or directly to the nation-states of the United States and Canada.

format_quoteHistorical portrayals in the JCHA have often framed Indigenous Peoples as savage or peripheral, contributing to their marginalization.format_quote

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Indigenous Brooklyn: Ironworking, Little Caughnawaga, and Kanien’kehá:ka Nationhood in the Twentieth Century

American Quarterly , 2023

On May 10, 2013, eighteen hundred feet above the city streets of Manhattan, workers erected the c... more On May 10, 2013, eighteen hundred feet above the city streets of Manhattan, workers erected the crowning spire of One World Trade Center, marking the completion of the first of six towers that would replace the buildings destroyed on September 11, 2001. Atop that tower stood one of the latest generation of Haudenosaunee ironworkers to follow in the footsteps of
Indigenous families who, for the last 140 years, have helped create some of North America’s most iconic landmarks. Beginning in the 1880s, ironworking quickly became a principal source of employment for Haudenosaunee men who traveled to jobs throughout Canada and the northeastern United States. By the 1920s, Haudenosaunee families from Ahkwesáhsne and Kahnawà:ke began relocating to Brooklyn, where they opened a string of boardinghouses and established a new community: “Little Caughnawaga.” Together, ironworking and “Little Caughnawaga” became a nexus between Kanien’kehá:ka family life, nationhood, and self-determination. This is particularly significant when we consider that Indigenous peoples were conceptually and physically removed from urban spaces that were reframed as “modern” and juxtaposed to perceptions of “Indian authenticity.” Yet Kanien’kehá:ka citizens were at the center of building these sites of “modernity,” an undertaking that influenced their own rearticulations of Kanien’kehá:ka nationhood.

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Sport-for-Development and the Failure of Aboriginal Subjecthood: Re-Imagining Lacrosse as Resurgence in Indigenous Communities

by Allan Downey and Alexandra Arellano

In November 1989, the United Nations initiated a fundamental shift in international support for t... more In November 1989, the United Nations initiated a fundamental shift in international support for the rights of children by introducing the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As part of that Convention, the UN helped solidify the rights of children to engage in rest, leisure, play, and recreational activities introduced in article 31 of the resolution. As a result, the institutionalization of sport as a catalyst for social change – known as sport-for-development – and supposed ‘decolonization’ has flourished. This is particularly true in Canada where non-government organizations such as Right to Play have focused their attention on Indigenous youth. As this article will demonstrate, despite the claims that these sport-based initiatives are designed as vehicles for positive social change and decolonization, sport-for-development programmes have unwittingly embraced ‘shape-shifting’ forms of settler colonialism while continuing to reinforce existing structures. This has been masked by the ‘politics of recognition’ and the implementation of an ‘Aboriginal subjecthood’ at the expense of Indigenous identities and nationhood. And yet, there remains an opportunity for sport to play an active role in the re-empowerment of Indigenous communities and to act as a form of resurgence.

Available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/mqitUWExQS8QyAhBwpwQ/full

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Claiming 'Our Game': Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Lacrosse and the Performance of Indigenous Nationhood in the Early Twentieth Century

Peter Gossage and Robert Rutherdale, ed., Making Men, Making History: Canadian Masculinities across Time and Place (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018).

Introduced to the Haudenosaunee version of the game by the Kanien’kehá:ka, middle-class British i... more Introduced to the Haudenosaunee version of the game by the Kanien’kehá:ka, middle-class British immigrants and anglophone Montrealers formed the Montreal Lacrosse Club in 1856 and set out to appropriate and control the image that lacrosse conveyed to Canadians. They did this by monopolizing it through a series of non-Indigenous organizations, a uniform code of rules, and new lacrosse histories. The appropriation of lacrosse as a marker of national identity by non-Indigenous Canadians and its subsequent use in residential schools as a tool to coercively assimilate Indigenous boys demonstrate how, throughout the history of Canadian settler-colonialism, a substantial method of instilling the performance of gender – the production, repetition, and “standardization” of gender identities – occurred through sport and recreation. Colonial agents attempted to re-engineer and replace Indigenous gender identities and lacrosse games became both a site and an articulation of these gendered acts, blanketed in a discourse of Canadian nationalism. One of the many Indigenous nations to experience this process was the Coast Salish Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Nation. Although the introduction of this performance of masculinity in the form of lacrosse was imbued with a message intended to facilitate conformity within the new gendered Canadian nationalism, the message of that performance was “interrupted” by the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh’s own interpretation of the game based on their understanding of their nationhood and identities. Introduced to the game by non-Indigenous organizers at residential schools and in the metropolis of Vancouver during the turn of the twentieth century, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh quickly embraced lacrosse not in the pursuit of Canadian nationalism, as was the intention of the dominant society, but as an Indigenous game and as citizens of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation. The chapter can be found in Making Men, Making History https://bit.ly/2qxeOue.

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Mobilizing Indigenous Self-Determination in Unexpected Places

This short article examines how the Haudenosaunee mobilized their self-determination and sovereig... more

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Remembering One of Kahnawake's Greatest Lacrosse Rivalries

A special to the Iorì:wase newspaper in Kahnawake. This article examines Kahnawake's contributio... more

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Engendering Nationality: Haudenosaunee Tradition, Sport, and the Lines of Gender

The Native game of lacrosse has undergone a considerable amount of change since it was appropriat... more The Native game of lacrosse has undergone a considerable amount of change since it was appropriated from Aboriginal peoples beginning in the 1840s. Through this reformulation, non-Native Canadians attempted to establish a national identity through the sport and barred Aboriginal athletes from championship competitions. And yet, lacrosse remained a significant element of Aboriginal culture, spirituality, and the Native originators continued to play the game beyond the non-Native championship classifications. Despite their absence from championship play the Aboriginal roots of lacrosse were zealously celebrated as a form of North American antiquity by non-Aboriginals and through this persistence Natives developed their own identity as players of the sport. Ousted from international competition for more than a century, this article examines the formation of the Iroquois Nationals (lacrosse team representing the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in international competition) between 1983-1990 and their struggle to re-enter international competition as a sovereign nation. It will demonstrate how the Iroquois Nationals were a symbolic element of a larger resurgence of Haudenosaunee “traditionalism” and how the team was a catalyst for unmasking intercommunity conflicts between that traditionalism—engrained within the Haudenosaunee’s “traditional” Longhouse religion, culture, and gender constructions— and new political adaptations.

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Raven Plays Ball: Situating 'Indian Sports Days' Within Indigenous and Colonial Spaces in Twentieth-Century Coastal British Columbia

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Canadian colonial agents (residential school administr... more Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Canadian colonial agents (residential school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and government officials) introduced a number of Western-style sporting activities among Indigenous peoples through athletic clubs, church gatherings, and school physical fitness programs. In keeping with a Victorian conception of leisure, these elites understood sports in moral terms, believing that they would support ‘‘civilizing projects’’ intended to remake Indigenous socio-cultural spaces into colonial ones. Indigenous communities, however, used these same sports organizations to challenge, resist, and even displace colonial agendas. Inspired by J.R. Miller’s treatment of Indigenous–non-Indigenous relations as a nuanced, multidirectional, often contradictory encounter, we argue that ‘‘Indian Sports Days’’ in coastal British Columbia from the 1910s–1940s were complex social spaces, reflective of both Indigenous and colonial perspectives.

Article: http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cjh.ach.50.3.003