Book review: Playing sports on stolen land

According to the Yugambeh people, one of many Aboriginal groups in Australia, only two relationships are important in life: our relationship with the land and our relationship with other people.

For nonbinary Mununjah Yugambeh and Dutch writer Ellen van Neerven, this fundamental belief has complicated their relationship with sport, because not only are most games played on First Nations land, but many athletes bring a range of discriminatory attitudes about race, class, gender and identity to each competition.

Personal scorea collection of more than 40 essays, analyzes the many problems faced by both professional and amateur athletes while celebrating the joy that comes from teamwork. In addition, the book provides a succinct but scathing indictment of the numerous ways in which white settlers erased Native history from the dominant narrative and omitted Native contributions from official accounts.

Not surprisingly, this area extends from agriculture to medicine to sports.

As a child, van Neerven’s favorite game was football (known as soccer in the US). They played the game from the age of seven until health problems made it impossible to continue. All the while, they were acutely aware of anti-Aboriginal racism and its intersection with other forms of bigotry.

They write that they were aware of their personal vulnerability early on and that the danger was ever-present, posed by both homophobic teammates and negligent coaches.

It can be described as a double blow, as 41 percent of the female athletes told investigators that they had been sexually abused “in a sporting environment.”

Added to this was heterosexism – the fear of many female athletes of being “vilified” as lesbians – and the situation for players like van Neerven was made even worse. Gender police, They offer a heartfelt reflection on the anxieties of adolescents. “My body wasn’t like the white girls’. It was fat and dark. It wasn’t normal. I started to feel monstrous. I started shaving and waxing and trying to be more feminine, but I realized there was always something that kept me from being accepted. I wasn’t going to win that game.”

Later, as their feminist consciousness developed, they assessed the harm of exclusion and realised that it went beyond football. “As a young Murri, queer person growing up in Queensland, they wrote in Bookmarks“I felt a deep psychological shadow on my being. I saw no one representing me on television, in films or in books. I didn’t understand the strange alienation I felt as one of the few Indigenous students at my school, despite being part of such a strong culture and ancestry from South East Queensland, my ancestral home.”

Activism ultimately helped them feel less disconnected and provided a way to weave Indigenous knowledge about land stewardship, climate change, and the intersection of disrespect toward women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and the descendants of the land’s indigenous peoples into a coherent ideology.

The mixture is potent. Overall Personal score is a powerful, poetic tribute to Indigenous ancestors that weaves personal and political stories into a vivid history of exploitation and oppression. In addition, the essays offer a painful insight into racial and gender hierarchies and the way they continue to impact culture and social relations today – and not just in Australia.

There is plenty of anger and justified rage here. There is also practical advice. In HHow to play sports on indigenous landVan Neerven makes recommendations: Recognise that most parks and sports fields were originally Aboriginal camps. Make sport accessible to all, regardless of immigration, disability or economic status. Implement water conservation measures. Respect the diversity of sentient beings with whom we live. And consistently promote gender equality and global human rights.

These are good suggestions. Nevertheless, I have closed Personal score with questions about van Neerven’s Dutch heritage (on his father’s side) and wondered why some of the essays are written in the first person and others in the third person. Nevertheless, van Neerven, born in 1991, is clearly a writer to watch. His voice is incisive, provocative, wise and radical.

“This is an ugly book, born of the ugly language I grew up with,” they write in Before the game. “With this book I am trying to scratch myself out of the filth of the schoolyard… This book reflects the fact that violence does not exist as a binary violence and that we are all capable of both causing and receiving harm.”

To his honor, Personal score does not offer platitudes or easy solutions to difficult social problems. Instead, it calls out bad behavior – individual and collective – and reminds us that we can and should do better.

Personal Score: Sports, Culture, Identity
Essays by Ellen van Neerven
Two-Dollar Radio
April 2024.