Skiing Racialized Geographies

“Skiing Racialized Geographies” examines how Black and Indigenous peoples are excluded in snow sports and how this lack of diversity can be addressed. Snow sports is a CAD $56.4 billion dollar industry, and the snow sports industry acknowledges that the lack of diversity contributes to industry stagnation. This is in spite of decades long efforts from both Black and Indigenous organizations working to foster participation. The snow sports industry has subsequently employed both the leisure theory marginality and ethnicity theses to explain the lack of racialized participation. The marginality thesis argues that racialized participation in leisure activities is statistically lower because of the inaccessible cost of participation and the unavailability of suitable facilities. The ethnicity thesis argues that racialized peoples have fundamentally different interests in terms of sport, leisure, and tourism, to explain lack of diversified participation in specific activities. Guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Indigenous Theory (CIT), this thesis first explores how colour-evasive and power-evasive logics, which ignore the underlying history and social construction of space, result in the lack of diversity in snow sports. This thesis explores the initial construction of outdoor recreational spaces, where snow sports take place, as spaces reserved for whiteness by starting with the history of the preservationist movement prior to 1930 and legislation enacted to create the first North American national parks. I then interrogate the history and social construction of outdoor recreational spaces through the lens of CIT to examine how the power-evasive colonial logics maintain imbalanced societal power relationships to justify settler occupation of space. Finally, I employ CRT to expose the colour-evasive neutral standard of whiteness and ontological individualism that falsely asserts that outdoor space is available to everyone equally while absolving dominant society of the responsibility of racialized inequity. Second, guided by the ethic of Indigenous storywork, this thesis examines how outdoor recreational spaces might be reconstructed in ways meaningful to racialized individuals to precipitate their participation in snow sports. This examination was undertaken as a qualitative research creation project using an original podcast to gather and share insights from 12 experts in the snow sports community, racialized as non-white, from Canada and the US. I analyzed the podcast transcripts using a thematic analysis which revealed six emergent themes: community engagement, education, leadership, and secret handshakes, barrier reductions, representation, Indigenous relationship with land, and common grounds. My findings show that the marginality and ethnicity theses insufficiently explain the lack of diversity in snow sports. Instead, the podcast data indicates that the exclusionary culture of the snow sports industry is responsible for the lack of diversity in participation. My research can be used by communities and industry because it points to appropriate solutions to consider when working to increase participation in snow sports in racialized communities. Finally, this study contributes to scholarly debates on resisting damage-centred research, critical geography, meaningful community engagement and representation, and research creation and podcasting as methodology.

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