S1: Welcome in San Diego , it's Jade Hindman. On today's show , a new book explores how indigenous communities use basketball and skateboarding for cultural expression. This is KPBS Midday Edition. Connecting our communities through conversation. Basketball and skateboarding are powerful tools for building community across cultures , but for indigenous communities , these sports provide a unique avenue for cultural expression and mentorship. My next guest has a new book all about that. His name is David Camper. He's a professor of American Indian Studies and associate director of the center for skateboarding , action , Sports and Social Change at San Diego State University. His new book is called Rez Ballers and Skate Elders Joyful futures in Indian country. Professor , welcome to Midday Edition.
S2: Thank you so much for having me , Jade.
S1: So glad to have you here.
S2: And I've been a professor for American Indian Studies for , for 20 plus years and doing research in Indian Country for just as long. And my first book was about something completely different. It was about a tribal labor relations and unions and tribal communities. And when I spent a lot of time , particularly at the Navajo Nation , talking with folks for this book , a lot of the casual conversations ended up going towards sports and basketball , and my eyes were completely open about how huge , particularly high school age basketball was at Navajo. And I began to learn at many other communities as well. Um , and then the skateboard part was a bit by accident. One of my , two of my students in a class that I , uh , taught on , um , American Indians through film and television. I let the students make their own film , and they made a film about a pool on the polar reservation that was , um , a little kind of underground spot where a lot of both native skaters and some of the most famous skaters in San Diego would skate. And it also opened up a whole new world. And , um , this is , you know , kind of what you call the post tenure book , where you get to have a little bit more fun with the book. And , um , and so that's kind of what drew me to it.
S1: Well , so tell me , how far back do we see basketball or rez ball and skating show up in tribal culture ? Yeah.
S2: I mean , um , this is one of the kind of points of my book is that , you know , we often think of these sports as connecting with different communities , right ? Basketball , particularly with African-American communities and skateboarding. You know , I think now we recognize it's global reach , but it's often thought of as a Southern California kind of white suburban kid thing. But native people have been participating in both of these activities since the beginning. Basketball starts essentially what James Naismith in 1891. He's looking for a sport to do indoors and something , you know , at this time period. Um , in the kind of history of sports , sports are thought of as this kind of development of a modern human being and physical , you know , physical fitness is is thought of as key. And this is also the time when American Indians are being forced to go to boarding schools. And these boarding schools are used as spaces to try to make native people modern and civilized. And sport is a key part of that. So native folks have been playing basketball from the like really very beginning the 1890s. Um , and then , you know , the skateboarding that we have today. Um , uh , I would argue comes out of the 1970s mostly kind of what we now know as the Dogtown crew , but it comes out of Venice Beach and it's the kind of , uh , more aggressive style , less like a hobby. And , um , there's evidence of native people like skating and picking this up in the late 70s and early 80s. You know , so , so there really , um , have been kind of participating from the beginning. Wow.
S1: Wow.
S2: So in this context , I'm doing it with basketball and skateboarding. And one of the the things that American Indian scholars have talked a lot about in the last 10 to 15 years is really the importance of thinking of reservation spaces as not just damage based or not just places of desolation , but also really key moments of hope and joy. And that's , I think , what basketball and skateboarding provide. They have these venues , you know , for hope and joy.
S1: Any voices or stories you'd like to highlight ? Yeah.
S2: Um , many , you know. Um , when I , when I think about , um , what I was just saying about , you know , the book , the subtitle , the title of the book includes what I call skate elders , which is a sort of imperfect term that I've come up with that , um , thankfully , um , these skaters who I've identified them this way are happy with it and are okay with it , but it's taking the idea of mentorship , intergenerational mentorship , that is that is key to any community , but particularly in indigenous communities. And it it tends to happen in a way where you have somebody other than your immediate parent kind of guide you through a skill a little bit. Then you go spend time on yourself and work on this skill , and then you come back and illustrate , you know , what you've learned and making yourself a part of the community. So , um , there's one particular skater I work with , a guy named Dustin Craig , who's half Navajo and half sang , uh , a White Mountain Apache. And , um , Dustin , and kind of like had this amazing realization when he was sort of skating and had these younger guys skating that he said , you know , he's Apache and Apache have this notion of what they call raiding culture , which is essentially like , you would go out on a party and steal stuff from people. Um , and , um , the , the raiding culture generally happened. Um , you were training for this as , like a 13 year old boy. And he observed that , like , the skills you needed to raid would be having , like , agile body quick , um , uh , really sort of wiring. And he's like , wait , that's what makes a good skater too. And these Raiders would , would kind of go off and and learn sets of skills and come back and then be able to participate in , in what he calls a war party. His , his skateboard company is called Four Wheel War Pony. Um , which is this idea of oftentimes you were raiding for horses and stealing horses. So he has , like , fully incorporated this notion in , um , you know , using skateboarding as an avenue to mentor , skill set to mentor. Discipline , self-reliance. In the same way , 100 , 200 years ago , these Apache youth would. Um , and so then he uses the art of the deck to kind of teach these kinds of things to a sort of younger generation coming up. Uh , there's another amazing , um , skater named Todd Harter who , uh , would put native history on decks. He had this deck , for example , that was a collage of images and graffiti from the , um , the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz , sort of the height of the Red power movement and native civil rights activism. And he'd show up at powwows , like , with this deck , and he'd have kids come up and say , oh , that's really cool , you know , what is that ? And he's like , do you know about Alcatraz ? They said no. He goes. Go learn something about it and come back. I'll give it to you free. And he would get kids to , like , engage in their own , you know , native history , um , you know , and get excited about it. And then he'd give them the deck. So it's , you know , it's it's using things that youth are already interested in and , you know , combining it to , to foster culture. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. Well , what was your approach to to highlighting joy and community that's , uh , ever present in tribal communities ? Yeah.
S2: Um , you know , I think , uh , one of the things about , uh , the way basketball is , um , played and expressed in Indian country in particular is one it's just meant to be played at a really fast pace. So native people call it rest ball. I think you can make a good argument. It's not terribly different than the way basketball is played other places , but what matters is that they see it as their own thing , and rez ball is often played for the Of the community. You know , I think there's a common narrative , whether it's true or not , that basketball is used as a a ticket out of a community. Um , you know , I think that's a prominent narrative in African American communities. I'm not actually convinced that's totally true. But nonetheless , this kind of ticket out narrative is not found really very much at all in native communities like you are playing for the community. You are playing to kind of like be with people and celebrate people. Um , I argue that basketball is sort of a new version of powwows , you know , and , and powwows are a 20th century intertribal event that that celebrates culture and brings people together and enjoy. And people travel to all different powwows. Well , there are these basketball tournaments that are all over different reservations , and people go and play. And , you know , one week you may play with another team , another week you might grab another guy on. And I've had people tell me about , you know , these tournaments are also opportunities for people in the stands that to get together and and hang out and see relatives they might not have seen in a while. Um , I have a chapter where I use the phrase anti funeral. I call basketball an anti funeral because a couple of people have mentioned to me that , you know , sometimes it's only funerals where we see all these family members and um , you know , if it weren't for basketball , that might be the only time. Um , so to me it's just like really beautiful , um , kind of contrast. Mhm. Um , the the last thing I'll add about that too is that a lot of , um , native , uh , lit native authors , um , incorporate basketball into their fiction and poetry and really use it as this contrast or as this kind of one in the same piece of , of despair and joy at the same time. You have these beautiful poems and stories about these people that kind of just want to play basketball , but are also kind of just surviving in basketball , kind of like represents a little bit of that hope , you know. Um , in this complicated , you know , context brought by settler colonialism. Mhm.
S1: Mhm. Well , I also want to want to talk about your work with the center for skateboarding , action Sports and Social Change. Any projects that you're looking forward to.
S2: Thank you for asking about that. So , um , yeah , we are um , you know , uh , I spent time traveling to a bunch of tribal skate parks. Um , you know , probably been to over 15 of them , and there's probably twice that many. And we have , uh , we as our center , we work in collaboration with the , um , the skate park project. And one of the goals of the skate park project that formerly Tony Hawk Foundation has been to build and help people build skate parks , um , all over. Mhm. Um , and a kind of small interesting thing is that , that , that usually the way their project worked was not that we'll build the park for you , but we'll give you the toolkit of how to lobby your local governments , how to raise money , etc. but recently , the skatepark project completely covered the cost of two skate parks and two only one in honour of Tyree Nichols , the black skater that was murdered by police and the other on the Navajo Nation reservation , which is a really cool for me to kind of see this community I've worked with forever , um , be acknowledged that way. But now there's this acknowledgement that maybe we don't need something as big as a skate park. Maybe , um , and maybe we need to , like , work on getting skaters back into kind of accept in the community. So there's this great movement in a lot of European cities and some in the global South called scalable sculptures. And the idea is you create the sculpture that can both be skated , it can be lounged on , it's art , etc. , as a way to like incorporate skaters back into communities rather than saying , you can't skate here. You can't there. So , um , I with my colleague , Doctor Naphtali Williams , we've been working on this , and we're working to try to get a scalable sculpture a little , what we call an urban mobility lab on campus to kind of look and see how this might play out. Um , uh , and then can we scale it to other places , you know , actually do it in the city ? So we're working on that. And then the , the center for Skateboarding and Action Sports and Social Change is part of a larger collaboration that we also have at San Diego State called the Surf Skate Studies Collaboration. And this collaboration hosts a conference every couple of years. And we're in October , are going to host our third conference that has people from 10 to 15 different countries come and talk about the importance of surfing and skateboarding and people's life and , you know , all different areas like , um , ecological protection , uh , inclusivity , um , etc.. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. When you say Scalable sculptures. The first thing comes to mind is pedestrians.
S2: And it really puts a lot of the onus and responsibility on skaters saying like , hey , you should be responsible citizen as well and kind of be aware of what's going on around you. I mean , skaters are really acutely aware of built environment , always have been. You know , one of the things I love so much about hanging out with the skater is like they experience the world differently. They're like , oh , that could be scalable. Could that be scalable or not ? And so this idea of like thinking like , well , we're going to do a joint project rather than having the city say to us , here's a park , you go skate over here , we're saying , let's do this in a central space. But this also means you have to be like a good community member. And and that means you have to share as well , you know ? So it does put the responsibility on skaters in a way that that I think skaters are embraced and want to to have and say like , hey , I know what I'm doing and I can avoid hitting you because I know what I'm doing. You know , and so but they need the right to prove that. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. Yeah. So it's almost it's an experiment in sociology.
S2: Absolutely , absolutely. And honestly , that's kind of why we want to start it as a lab here. Yeah. You know , to kind of figure it out and , and do research to then scale it.
S1: All right.
S2: And I think in , uh , connection to that part of the idea of seeing , you know , these , these places as desolation is coating native places as places of the past. Um , that's one of the main projects of settler colonialism , is to suggest that native people are not people of the present or the future , but people of the past only. Right ? And that eliminates hope and and sort of joy that comes with it. And , um , by talking about the way that these people are participating in , like a fully modern , um , you know , activity of skateboarding and basketball , I think I want people to get a sense that native people are people of modernity , too , and they are kind of co-creators in modernity and therefore people of the present and the future as well.
S1: I've been speaking with David Camper. He's a professor of American Indian studies and associate director of the center for skateboarding , action , Sports and Social Change at San Diego State University. His new book is called Rez Ballers and Skate Elder's Joyful futures in Indian Country. Professor camper , thank you so much.
S2: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.
S1: That's our show for today. I'm your host , Jade Hindman. Thanks for tuning in to Midday Edition. Be sure to have a great day on purpose , everyone.
