Abstract
Skateboarding is a practice that reimagines and repurposes the urban landscape by manipulating its designs for unintended purposes and creating new relationships with space. In this way, skateboarding may challenge the exclusionary urban logics in colonized cities. Extending this line of thought, I explore the decolonizing and indigenizing potential of skateboarding through the concepts of visual sovereignty and placemaking. I suggest skateboarding diversifies and contemporizes Indigenous arts and practices, translates indigeneity into urban contexts that traditionally preclude Indigenous peoples and cultures, builds communities between Indigenous groups and across rural and urban geographies, and imagines other ways of being, doing, and relating to space that signals more Indigenous futures.
Keywords
“You’re skating on Native land” reads the skateboard graphic designed by Apache artist Douglas Miles, founder of Apache Skateboards (Miles, 2022). The statement reminds observers [those who see it] of the politics of space and recreation. It also indicates a decolonizing and indigenizing potential in skateboarding. Indigenous groups like Apache Skateboards in the United States, Colonialism Skateboards in Canada, Songline Skateboarding in Australia, Māori Girls Skate Collective in Aotearoa New Zealand, ImillaSkate in Bolivia, and SkatePal in Palestine, among others, are using skateboarding as an act of resistance against—and transformation of—settler colonial conditions. That is, Indigenous skateboarding is not just a resistance or deconstruction, but an empowerment, creation, and revitalization. It is a means to build and strengthen Indigenous communities, a contemporary expression of traditional values and artforms, and a method of reclaiming space and rewriting settler colonial narratives of indigeneity. In this paper, I approach skateboarding as a mediated practice that may be considered a public performance, visual culture, and form of urban communication that can work toward decolonizing media futures. I seek to call attention to the decolonizing and indigenizing potentials of skateboarding expressed through forms of symbolic sovereignty, and the ways in which it is being used to negotiate Indigenous identities, challenge popular settler colonial imaginaries about indigeneity, and transform spatial relations in Indigenous lands occupied by settler colonial systems.
I am cautious to overstate the radical and subversive qualities of skateboarding—a practice, culture, and industry still affected by, and participating in, inequalities of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and so on. As Fisher (2017) indicates, skateboarders and skateboarding scholarship “in general fails to acknowledge or interrogate the relationship of skateboarding to sovereignty in the United States” and elsewhere (p. 30). In fact, due to the dominance of heterosexual, cisgender, white men from high income nations, the very skateboarding practices that I will explore as decolonizing and indigenizing, could just as well be read as an entitlement to, and domination over, space, especially when performed by the stereotypical skateboarder. Thus, I focus on how these potentials are being deployed by Indigenous people in skateboarding to contest settler colonialism, and to inform and transform how settlers (including myself) understand, relate to, and participate in settler colonialism.
The settler-colonial imaginary positions indigeneity as incompatible with modern life, industrialization, and urbanism. Despite the fact that Indigenous people in Aotearoa New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and Australia reside in urban environments more often than remote areas (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2024; Ryks et al., 2016; Statistics Canada, 2017; Urban Indian Health Commission, 2007), indigeneity is often perceived or experienced as less authentic in urban contexts (Lawrence, 2004). Indigenous urban migration has also led to concerns about homogenizing diverse Indigenous populations, separating Indigenous peoples from tribal communities and ancestral lands tied to cultural identities, uncertainties about land rights, and differences in health, social, and economic outcomes and support (Meredith, 2015; Peters & Andersen, 2013; Ryks et al., 2016; Weaver, 2012). In response to these concerns, research has explored urban indigeneity as a unique experience and expression of Indigenous identities, and proposes Indigenous urbanism as “a heuristic for understanding the ways in which Indigenous peoples make urban space while also challenging colonial understandings of Indigeneity and urbanism” (Dorries, 2023, p. 111).
In a study of Anishinabek people living in urban areas of Canada, Wilson and Peters (2005) identified three strategies through which their respondents navigated Indigenous urbanism. First, they created safe places to express their physical and spiritual relationship to the land. Second, they preserved communication, relationships, and travel between and across reserve-urban boundaries. Third, they participated in “pan-Indigenous” communities that unite diverse Indigenous groups based on shared values, beliefs, and practices. I suggest that skateboarding can help facilitate each of these interventions through visual sovereignty and placemaking. As a result, new ways of practicing one's culture, forging identity, and building community are produced, which together remap the social, geographical, and temporal boundaries imposed upon indigeneity.
Visual sovereignty
Storytelling is a significant practice in Indigenous knowledge, culture, resistance, and scholarship (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021; Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem et al., 2022). Indigenous storytelling is especially important given the limited and harmful ways mainstream settler colonial media habitually depicts (or ignores) Indigenous peoples. To combat this, scholars and creators employ visual sovereignty to discuss how Indigenous peoples represent themselves, their perspectives, and their experiences through film, photography, print media, and other mediums (Dowell, 2013; Raheja, 2010; Rickard, 1995). Skateboarding itself is not only a highly visual act and performance, but it also has ties to other mediums that support do-it-yourself (DIY) production and self-representational storytelling, such as punk, hip hop, urban art, photography, and filmmaking.
Indigenous skateboarders often engage in visual sovereignty and storytelling through board graphics, art exhibits, street art, skate videos, and zines. Works by Hearne (2014), Fisher (2017), and Badoni (2009) examine skateboard graphics and videos as expressions of visual sovereignty. Badoni (2009) articulates how skateboard graphics contemporize and diversify popular understandings of Native American art that do not limit it to historical traditions of weaving, pottery, beading, and so on, but account for how Native American art and artists continue to evolve over time. She suggests that skateboards are a reinvention of oral traditions that serve as a new “way of communicating myths, legends, history, and prayers” (pp. 15–16). Hearne (2014) also likens skateboarding to a contemporary expression of traditional practices that challenges settler colonial narratives of indigeneity as historical and primitive, explaining that “Indigenous skateboarders, contemporary by their very definition as pavement-riders, counter the nineteenth-century “vanishing” Indians imagined in the Western (where they are confined to horses) and elevate Indigenous presence in the here and now of shared infrastructure” (p. 52). Fisher extends this line of thinking by arguing that skateboard graphics not only “express Native American visual sovereignty” but also “challenge the legitimacy of settler colonialism, and tie questions of sovereignty to the land itself” (Fisher, 2017, p. 49).
Fisher's point is demonstrated by Shortreed (2022), who reflects on how the Boarder X: Skate, Surf, Snow art exhibit transformed his understanding of and relationship with skateboarding spaces by compelling him to recognize himself as a settler inhabiting and using colonized Indigenous lands. The Boarder X: Skate, Surf, Snow art exhibit traveled through Canada presenting “narratives and observations of traditions, movement, balance, and entanglements of space, place, and belonging” through contemporary reinventions of traditional histories and creative practices that offer an “an affirmation of cultural resilience and an acknowledgement of ongoing respect and reverence for the land” (Boarder X: Skate, Snow, Surf, 2021). One particularly salient example of visual sovereignty through skateboarding from Boarder X is collaboration between Micheal Langan of Colonialism Skateboards and artist Kent Monkman. They present a series of board graphics that, when hung together, depict the impact of residential schools on Indigenous families. There are two versions of this board series. The first hangs pristine and untouched. In the next, the boards have been completed with trucks (axels) and wheels and have been ridden (Noel, 2021). The traumas depicted in the graphics are scraped away through use. The rider has acted back on the trauma. Whether it is a symbolic purging, cathartic retaliation, or the resilient ability to have fun in spite of intergenerational suffering, they get to reclaim control of their story.
Colonialism Skateboards is a company and team of First Nations people dedicated to (re)education by “combining skateboard art with a history lesson on Indigenous culture and colonialism in Canada” (Colonialism Skateboards, n.d.). Each board graphic depicts an important figure, event, issue, and/or symbol related to various First Nations cultures and includes a detailed description of its meaning and significance. Likewise, Hañwakañ Blaikie Whitecloud created the True to the Land YouTube series to “examine life on a reserve through the lens of skateboarding” (APTNtv, 2018). The series travels to skateparks in Indigenous territories in Canada to profile local skateboarders, provide a history of Indigenous and colonial involvement in the area, highlight flourishing communities, and bring attention to critical environmental, economic, and sociocultural issues (APTNtv, 2018). Other brands such as Wounded Knee Skateboards, 4 Wheel War Pony, Apache Skateboards, Songline Skateboarding, and ImillaSkate similarly practice visual sovereignty through board graphics and videos.
Due to the emplaced performance of skateboarding that consistently raises issues of land use, the visual sovereignty expressed through skateboard graphics and videos “could in fact be interpreted as a political statement and expression of land-based sovereignty” (Fisher, 2017, p. 5). Thus, I suggest skateboarding is a mode of placemaking that can connect visual, cultural, and land-based expressions of sovereignty to make place for indigeneity where it has historically been ignored, erased, restricted, and invalidated.
Placemaking
Placemaking refers to “the way in which all human beings transform the places they find themselves into the places where they live” (Schneekloth & Shibley, 1995). It consists of individual and community acts that tether people, their cultures, and values to space. In short, it is “the way we humanise space” (Hes et al., 2020, p. 2). The process of placemaking is also a political contest that stakes claim to a place and asserts the right to occupy public space and use it as desired. This is particularly important for Indigenous communities who have been displaced, and Indigenous lands which have been colonized. As Patterson (2012) explains, skateboarding “creates a sense of being here and a sense of being part of the environment the person finds themselves in” (p. 27). Yet, skateboarders “have gradually been excluded from the city” and “for Māori skateboarders this is a double dose of exclusion, as many Māori feel they have largely lost their membership of place through the process of colonisation” (Patterson, 2012, p. 27).
Contemporary colonization is guided by neoliberal capitalism (Tomiak, 2017). As a form of placemaking, skateboarding disrupts the spatial and behavioral norms built into settler colonial urban design. Skaters convert cities designed for industrial and commercial productivity into communal sites of recreation, creativity, and collaboration (Borden, 2019). For this reason, skateboarding is often discussed in terms of subverting and/or contesting space against neoliberal privatization and state control (Borden, 2001; Chiu, 2009; Geertman et al., 2016; Howell, 2001; Németh, 2006; Nolan, 2003). Much of skateboarding involves manipulating the unintended (and often unwanted or criminalized) potentials of public space. It requires interacting with the world in unconventional ways and imagining alternative possibilities. A handrail is transformed into a slide, a curb cut becomes a launch ramp, and playfulness and creativity are exposed from the seemingly mundane architectural features that surround us. Shortreed (2022) refers to this as “a skatescape: a landscape as seen through skateboarders’ eyes” (p. 60). To this point, skateboarding and urban planning scholar Giamarino suggests that “non-skaters can learn from skateboarders that public space is not a static, homogeneous commodity to be used for commercial activities” but “can and should be a space for play, sustenance, and survival that is contested and conflictual, politically active, and open and inclusive for different social groups” (Willing & Pappalardo, 2023, p. 220). I suggest Giamarino's conception of public space approaches a decolonial vision. As such, skateboarding may be considered a radical, transformative practice, but specifically one that, through opposition to neoliberal urban logics, can be oriented toward decolonization and indigenization.
For Indigenous skateboarders, the repurposing of urban landscapes constructed by, and symbolic of, settler colonial institutions “inherently questions the ways in which land can be used, and in what manner, and by whom,” and “enacts dramatic, if temporary, control over the land itself” (Fisher, 2017, pp. 59–60). This disruption and reformatting of neoliberal urban environments creates an opening for indigeneity in spaces typically coded for/associated with settlers. As Wilson and Peters (2005) point out, translating indigeneity to an urban context is “not a simple transfer of traditional practices from one place to another,” but “involves the production of new cultural forms that adapt traditional practices to the opportunities and constraints of a new environment” (p. 405). Patterson (2012), for instance, likens skateboarding to the Māori martial art mau rākau and explains how values such as whakawhanaungatanga (building relationships, connectedness) and mau te rongo (a state of peace) are cultivated and expressed through skateboarding. As these examples demonstrate, skateboarding can help make a place for indigeneity in urban contexts by adapting traditional values and practices to nontraditional contexts. In the following, I outline how skateboarding may foster more indigenized ways of inhabiting space through an emphasis on more-than-human relations that prioritize stewardship, care, and connection over ownership, dominance, and privatization.
Rather than just play on the urban landscape, skaters play with it. They recognize the agency of their nonhuman environments as more than passive objects they command. Rather, the board and the environment are treated as active participants in the creation of skateboarding alongside the human as a more-than-human assemblage (Geckle, 2021). The relationship between skater and city creates an emotional and physical resonance, or merging of self with place. The skater and space mark each other with bumps and scratches, mutually transforming one another. As the human moves with the object, they feel the textures, vibrations, and contours that serve to internalize the external environment (Bäckström, 2014; Hölsgens & Glenney, 2024). In this way, they foster a more reciprocal relationship with space that can cultivate a mentality of stewardship and collaboration, rather than ownership and dominion. To this point, there is a certain reverence skaters hold for their “skate spots” that Paul O’Connor (2020) argues can be considered spiritual or religious. Skaters make pilgrimages to these sites, protect them from destruction or appropriation by the state, and share a communal responsibility to tend to these spaces. In some cases, skateboarders created and molded these spaces themselves as DIY projects. Skateboarders claim space in increasingly regulated cityscapes through these “sacred” spots and custodial rituals. Conversely, Hearne (2014) describes the “collective practices of creating and stewarding one's own (built) environment” in the case of Apache community skateparks on reservations, as evoking “both ceremonialism…and local, land-based activity, or reterritorialization” (Hearne, 2014, pp. 54–55). In both cases, skateboarders declare a right to occupy these spaces and perform their unique relationships with them.
However, an important distinction is to be made in the way skateboarders claim space as “skateboarding is aimed at the appropriation—and not domination—of time and space” (Borden, 2001, p. 257). As the London Southbank and Tompkins Square Park examples will demonstrate, skateboarders use community advocacy and organization to protect their skate spaces from destruction, cooptation, and redevelopment by municipalities, but do so with the intention of preserving public multiuse spaces for diverse communal, creative, and marginalized activities. The organization Long Live Southbank has protected the London undercroft known as Southbank from destruction and redevelopment into a restaurant and retail district and secured the skateboarding space's long-term future as an “Asset of Community Value” (Gorton, 2014). But Long Live Southbank's motivations and successes extend beyond skateboarding. They are interested in preserving creative spaces that resist neoliberalism, demonstrating the political power of community action, and inspiring others to take control and create cities they want to live in (Powell, 2019). The Save Tompkins Square Park representatives likewise see their initiative as bigger than themselves. They feel they are preserving entry-level learning grounds for future generations of skateboarders, as well as protecting space for “marginalized activities” beyond skateboarding by resisting city “beautification” plans which they interpret as “gentrification” (Lee & Oliveira, 2019).
These examples demonstrate how skaters successfully mobilize to protect their spaces and preserve their futures. They show that skateboarding is an effective means to claim the right to space and that skateboarders are willing to adopt a role as stewards and custodians of their spaces. In this way, skateboarding could also be leveraged as a framework for claiming and protecting space to influence urban policy and planning in support of Indigenous land rights. Further, skateboarding does not just offer a means to connect to space, but also to each other. It is a common foundation from which to build pan-Indigenous communities. Songline Skateboarding, the first all-Indigenous skateboarding team in Australia, claims to unite skaters “from different tribes across this country, connected by a love of skateboarding and through the ancient Songlines of this land” (Our Story, n.d.-a). The team also hosts workshops in Indigenous communities that teach young people how to skate and incorporate traditional art and imagery. Māori Girls Skate Collective was established by Māori wāhine (women) skaters who often felt like “the only one” in their respective communities. The group now hosts huis (gatherings) to bring wāhine skaters together and encourage more to get involved (Johnsen, 2023). Since 2006, the All Nations Skate Jam has been hosted alongside the annual Gathering of Nations, the largest pan-Indigenous powwow on Turtle Island North America (Matias, 2018). These examples not only demonstrate the pan-Indigenous connectivity of skateboarding but also the growth of skateboarding beyond urban contexts.
Just as traditional Indigenous practices are being adapted to contemporary urban contexts, contemporary urban practices are being adapted to rural reservation contexts. Specifically, skateboarding, as an urban art adapted to reservations channels the energy, adaptability, and creativity of DIY skate culture into a useful appropriation for Indigenous survivance or perhaps, instead, it reveals how DIY has always been a valued Apache skill, with skating being its current manifestation (Hearne, 2014, p. 57).
Indigenous futurity
Skateboarding as a form of visual sovereignty and placemaking can accomplish the three interventions for fostering urban Indigenous identities and communities introduced by Wilson and Peters (2005): maintain and express connections to the land, foster urban-rural/reservation communication and relationships, and create pan-Indigenous practices and communities. It can cultivate other ways of being, doing, and relating in the world that usher in other possible realities and futures for those restricted by the present. As Romero (2020) articulates, Indigenous liberation “is not to make settler colonialism more inclusive” but rather, “working to eradicate genocidal discourses and establish new ways of being that center our respect for (and responsibilities to) one another, our environment, and our ancestors” (Romero, 2020, p. 236). The contemporary and urban expressions of indigeneity cultivated and performed through skateboarding can transform urban spaces and their engrained Indigenous and settler colonial meanings and spatial relations.
Therefore, although individual instances of symbolic sovereignty (such as a board graphic or skate session) may seem fleeting, together they constitute part of a larger, sustained effort toward Indigenous futurity. Each of these performances contributes toward the imagination and production of alternative futures beyond the strictures of settler colonialism. Hence, it is important to note that Indigenous futurity is not about assimilating to settler colonial forms of modernity and urbanism, but about how ever-evolving meanings of indigeneity, urbanism, and modernity are “co-produced” (Dorries, 2023, p. 113). By blurring the boundaries imposed on indigeneity, urbanism, and modernity “based on the obsolete cliché of American Indians struggling between ‘two worlds’,” it becomes clear that the obsolete dichotomies of traditional/contemporary, urban/reservation, Indian/white need to give way to the boundaries being set by a fresh generation… mashing things up into new images, rhythms, and ideas, out of which Indigenous identity and values are not lost but liberated from the chains of convention” (Martínez, 2013, pp. 376 & 390).
Borden (2001) asserts that skateboarding is a critique of contemporary cities, one which proposes an alternative vision of a “future, as yet unknown city,” and Indigenous skateboarders are ensuring indigeneity is a part of that future (p. 173). Indigenous skateboarders transform the conditions of possibility for Indigenous peoples by grinding away the “the ‘simulacrum of pastness’” which “denies Indigenous modernity in order to maintain the myth of a colonial ‘conquering’ of the land” (Shortreed, 2022, p. 72). Through their reclamation of space, representation, and culture, “Indigenous skateboarders reconceptualize what settlers might traditionally understand as the divide between settler and Indigenous territories” and “in so doing teach and remind settlers that these environments are also thriving Indigenous spaces” (Shortreed, 2022, pp. 72–73). As Weaver (2016) observes of her experiences as part of a Lakota family in a predominately white area, her “son's story of his riding at the skate park undermined an ability to fracture people into us and them, with Native Americans as outsiders, others, or agitators who are unlike other community members” (p. 523). In other words, skateboarding “can be a visible means to challenge stereotypes and rigid definitions of us and them,” which gives Indigenous youth “both a voice and a place” (Weaver, 2016, pp. 517 & 524). The result is a more Indigenous city and a more Indigenous future.
Limitations, tensions, and future directions
This paper presents an optimistic account of the decolonizing and indigenizing potential of skateboarding as deployed by Indigenous skateboarders. However, skateboarding is far from a perfect intervention. Despite its growing legitimacy, skateboarding remains criminalized in many places. Thus, surveillance and policing tend to increase where skaters gather (Howell, 2001). This can be particularly threatening and exclusionary for marginalized groups. Further, many skaters (in the Global North/West) come from suburban middle-class backgrounds and may not live in the immediate vicinity of the urban areas where they skate, or conversely, are able to skate in sanctioned suburban skateparks (Chivers Yochim, 2010). Thus, they can avoid the policing of urban street skateboarding. Or, their temporary presence skateboarding in inner-city neighborhoods may draw increased surveillance and security measures to the area, making them less safe for local residents, while the skaters can leave for home in the surrounding suburbs.
Yet, former professional skateboarder and current urban studies scholar, Ocean Howell, explains that “if skateboarders are swept out of some places, they are used as a broom in other places” (Schwinghammer, 2020). Some municipalities have recognized the commercial power of skateboarding. They employ the “cool factor” of skateboarding to attract lucrative young professionals of the “creative class” to their cities (Howell, 2005). As such, sanctioned skate spots may contribute to the gentrification of urban areas. Some have even been introduced as tools to disperse and displace people experiencing homelessness. Likewise, skaters (as well as surfers and snowboarders) from privileged backgrounds often travel to developing and low-income areas around the world to chase their thrills. Their extended presence can change the culture, economy, and accessibility of these places for locals and become a colonization of recreation (Ponting et al., 2005). This tension of decolonizing versus colonizing potential presents a need for continued examination.
As Howell (2005) highlights the ways in which skateboarding has been deployed as a tool of gentrification, Tomiak (2017) similarly critiques how new urban reserves in Canada are being coopted into a discourse of economic development as part of the “neoliberalization of settler colonialism” (p. 930). However, she also illustrates how First Nations are using these spaces to “generate economic self-sufficiency, exercise self-determination, and subvert settler state boundaries,” ultimately presenting new urban reserves as contradictory spaces (Tomiak, 2017, p. 930). So too, are skateboarding spaces and practices contradictory (Glenney & O’Connor, 2019; Vivoni, 2009). Skateboarding is at once a restricted antisocial behavior that appropriates space and subverts dominant urban logics, as well as a prosocial, healthy, creative activity that occurs in sanctioned skateparks. Chiu and Giamarino (2019) find that skateboarding activist groups (such as those involved with the Tompkins Square Park and London Southbank examples) “combine their tactical interventions with neoliberal ideals to temporarily or permanently claim their right to neoliberal, revanchist city space” (p. 466). They propose that temporarily adopting neoliberal actions and discourses gives strategic agency to “excluded groups” of “non-elites” to “preserve, secure, and reclaim their right to city space” (Chiu & Giamarino, 2019, pp. 486 & 488). This tension between resistance and cooptation has prompted Lawton (2020) to pose the question “what if skaters can exercise sufficient agency to mitigate the social harm of regeneration policies by being critical and radical, rather than malleable, ‘good partners’ to the city?” (p. 34). Perhaps skateboarders, like First Nations peoples and new urban reserves, can work within neoliberal settler colonial systems to subvert and transform them.
Glenney and O’Connor (2023), however, caution against the “continued incorporation of skateboarding into…prosocial paradigms” and instead emphasize the disruptive “arrhythmia” of skateboarding as an asset to resist “uniform ordering and containment” (pp. 172 & 173). They suggest that it is skateboarding's discordance that allows it to cope, and even thrive, in natural disaster situations (arguably, settler colonialism can be conceived of as a social disaster situation). Discordance instills in skateboarding a “latent political orientation” with which to critique “the linear imaginings of urban space resolved purely for the accumulation of capital” that guides neoliberal settler colonialism (Glenney & O’Connor, 2023, p. 181). Thus, while some see sanctioned skate spaces and adoption of prosocial paradigms “as a strategy to control space and bodies in these spaces,” others embrace such approaches as effective strategies to acquire space and positive identity and well-being outcomes for Indigenous youth facing “disproportionately high rates of diabetes, poverty, and violence” (Weaver, 2016, p. 516). These tensions and contradictions indicate differences in priorities and philosophies among skateboarders and skateboarding advocates that are potentially reflective of or informed by differing experiences of marginalization. However, they are also demonstrative of the multiple available strategies of resistance customizable to location, community, or individual as discrete but concomitant and compounding efforts to decolonize and indigenize urban spaces and futures.
Conclusion
Obviously, skateboarding is not enough to undo or correct settler colonialism, oppression, and genocide. But opposing a centuries-long system of power can feel like an impossible task. Skateboarding is an accessible, approachable, and pleasurable practice that can be adopted at the individual/local level to imagine, create, and live out other possible realities. Importantly, while resistance and transformation are work, skateboarding “demonstrates that this work can be fun” (Romero, 2020, p. 236). Skateboarding tells a story of indigeneity and resilience that centers joy, creativity, and community beyond suffering. Though Indigenous peoples have suffered, they have also survived, and are capable of thriving, and skateboarding is just one way that Indigenous people have chosen to thrive.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Correction (February 2025):
Since the original online publication, the “Placemaking” section has been updated with details about Nicky Hayes.