{"id":107681,"date":"2026-02-13T13:39:32","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T18:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=107681"},"modified":"2026-02-13T17:17:45","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T22:17:45","slug":"opinion-taylor-mckee-janelle-joseph-and-lucas-rotondo-discuss-complexities-of-national-unity-at-the-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2026\/02\/opinion-taylor-mckee-janelle-joseph-and-lucas-rotondo-discuss-complexities-of-national-unity-at-the-olympics\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Taylor McKee, Janelle Joseph and Lucas Rotondo discuss complexities of national unity at the Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece written by Taylor McKee, Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Brock University; Janelle Joseph, Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Sport Management at Brock University; and Lucas Rotondo, Applied Health Sciences master’s student at Brock University, <\/em>originally appeared in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

As the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina unfold, the world is once again turning its gaze to the podium. But for most nations, the importance of the Olympics extends well beyond medals.<\/p>\n

The Games are a place where nations tell stories about themselves: who belongs, who represents them and how secure that nation feels in the world. National sporting events offer a way to make abstract ideas like sovereignty and belonging visible.<\/p>\n

As humanities scholar Homi K. Bhabha\u00a0argues in his book on nationhood, nations are not fixed entities, but are continually retold, like stories. The Olympics provide one of the most visible stages for nations to shape narratives about themselves.<\/p>\n

At a time when Canada and other countries are\u00a0feeling pressure about their sovereignty, the Olympic Games are taking on heightened symbolic meaning.<\/p>\n

But Indigenous athletes, in particular, reveal the limits of using sport to perform national unity, and show how multiple sovereignties continue to exist within \u201cTeam Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forging a nation through sport<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the earliest Canadian sports stories ever told was explicitly about forging something new under the weight of empire. In 1867, days after Confederation,\u00a0a working-class crew from Saint John, New Brunswick, competed in rowing at the Paris Exhibition, a world\u2019s fair held in France.<\/p>\n

The \u201cParis Crew\u201d quickly became a national symbol, not just because they won, but because the victory felt like a young country holding its own against an older imperial world. It became a story of Canadians carving out space on an international stage that was not designed with them in mind.<\/p>\n

Over time, what it meant to see Canada represented in sport started to change. By the early 2000s, a\u00a0familiar insecurity\u00a0lingered.<\/p>\n

This sentiment did not survive Canada\u2019s exceptional performance at Vancouver 2010\u00a0when the country won a historic 14 gold medals.<\/p>\n

In the lead-up to those Olympics,\u00a0the federal government invested heavily in a high-performance system\u00a0built to deliver medals. Even the name of the initiative \u2014 Own the Podium \u2014 put it plainly. Excellence was no longer a wish for Canada, but the standard, and the resources followed.<\/p>\n

When sovereignty feels unsettled again<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today, the ground feels\u00a0less stable again. Canada\u2019s relationship with its closest ally, the United States,\u00a0is under intense strain\u00a0due to ongoing tariff disputes and repeated threats to Canadian sovereignty from the American president.<\/p>\n

Canadians are testing their mettle by discerning whether they have the skills and endurance to publicly defend and perform sovereignty on the national stage.<\/p>\n

Sport is an ideal forum for this because it\u2019s already built as a competition among national units, even when\u00a0lived reality is far more regional and local.<\/p>\n

This renewed attention to sovereignty can feel like a throwback to the Paris Crew moment, when defeating bigger powers looked like a form of self-determination.<\/p>\n

Dual narratives<\/strong><\/p>\n

The effort to balance the complexities of national pride and sovereignty under a colonial shadow takes on even more complexity through the participation of Indigenous athletes.<\/p>\n

Following Alwyn Morris and Hugh Fisher\u2019s 1000-metre sprint kayak gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics, Morris gave an\u00a0eagle feather salute\u00a0to his grandfather. This moment is widely remembered as a positive example of Indigenous resurgence through sport,\u00a0and a reclaiming of cultural space.<\/p>\n

At the same time, as\u00a0Morris himself has explained, the gesture was a reminder that Indigenous identity does not dissolve into \u201cTeam Canada,\u201d even during moments many Canadians want to read as uncomplicated unity.<\/p>\n

That is why Morris\u2019s salute still matters. It shows how representation can hold two truths at once. Morris was awarded gold while wearing red and white, but he claimed his win as one for\u00a0\u201cthe other part of who [he] is,\u201d\u00a0showing how\u00a0Indigenous sport stories cannot be reduced to a single national storyline.<\/p>\n

Indigenous resistance through sport<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps the\u00a0longest-running example of Indigenous resistance through sport\u00a0is the Haudenosaunee Nationals lacrosse team, which competes internationally\u00a0as a sovereign nation.<\/p>\n

Contemporary lacrosse\u00a0reflects a version of the sport that is much different\u00a0than what Haudenosaunee People have traditionally revered as a \u201cmedicine game.\u201d In the late 1800s, when \u201cThe Creator\u2019s Game\u201d was colonized and\u00a0rebranded as \u201cCanada\u2019s National Game,\u201d\u00a0Indigenous peoples were barred from competition.<\/p>\n

Today, the Haudenosaunee Nationals are the only sports organization in the world to compete in international competitions while\u00a0representing an Indigenous confederacy as a sovereign nation.<\/p>\n

Representing the Haudenosaunee, the Nationals embody Indigenous reclamation and resurgence. With lacrosse returning to the 2028 Summer Olympics, the Haudenosaunee\u2019s claim for sovereignty\u00a0is once again on the line.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s national story<\/strong><\/p>\n

For most Canadians, international sport is the easiest place to feel the nation in real time. A flag goes up. An anthem plays. A medal table is refreshed. In a few minutes of speed, grace and accuracy, complicated questions about history, economy and belonging collapse into a simple narrative.<\/p>\n

Through these articulations of Indigenous sovereignty, representation and resurgence, Indigenous athletes have reminded \u201cTeam Canada\u201d why this narrative isn\u2019t as simple as it feels. For Indigenous Canadian athletes, participation is about\u00a0representing the communities that came together to believe in them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about celebrating family strength,\u00a0healing inter-generational trauma and leading a new path. It\u2019s about resisting threats to sovereignty and\u00a0reclaiming what was taken away.<\/p>\n

That is exactly why sport becomes so charged when Canadians feel our sovereignty is under pressure, whether that pressure is literal, symbolic or both. In sport, athletes are asked to do more than win medals \u2014 they are asked to stand in for Canada itself and to reassure audiences that the country is coherent, respected and capable of protecting what is considered ours.<\/p>\n

\"ThePhoto credit: Marmolada48, CC BY 4.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taylor McKee, Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Brock University; Janelle Joseph, Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Sport Management at Brock University; and Lucas Rotondo, Applied Health Sciences master’s student at Brock University, wrote a piece published in The Conversation about the limits of using sport to perform national unity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107691,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107681"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107681"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107699,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107681\/revisions\/107699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}