‘Settler Colonial Sport Venues’ explores the settler histories of sporting places, and the role settler athletic venues have played in colonization and carcerality. It aims to challenge the idea that building sports facilities is always positive, showing instead how these places have often contributed to the ongoing dispossession and erasure of Indigenous peoples. For this blog, we focus on Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium. In 1971 the city was awarded the 1978 Commonwealth Games. The 56,000-seat stadium cost $21 million and was funded by 3 levels of government. This historical analysis provides a set of considerations for how new legacy facilities should be developed in the future. 

This project used historical material found in the City of Edmonton Archives and online collections from Library Archives Canada and the Provincial Archives of Alberta. These collections provided a layered historical record of dynamic stories through which we traced the history of Commonwealth Stadium’s location to analyze how power relations have shaped its development. 

Key findings on the Commonwealth Stadium 

Our analysis of Commonwealth Stadium begins in early 1970s Edmonton. Civic boosters and business elites were finally successful in mobilizing the idea that a new football field would alleviate ‘urban blight’ in neighbouring working-class communities. This was one of the arguments used to secure city funding for the stadium.  

The first of our key findings was to trace how those blue-collar, racially diverse communities in the vicinity of the stadium were deemed expendable by the late 1960s. To understand this mid-20thcentury development, the onset of colonial settlement in the 1870s must be considered. Treaty 6 was signed under conditions of manufactured famine and disease for Cree nations in 1876. This treaty functioned as a form of land theft as the settler idea of private property was imposed in the Edmonton area. Colonial settlement was made possible through successive waves of resource extraction. The stadium site was privately mined for coal from the 1880s until 1901 and a federal penitentiary operated on the site between 1906 and 1920, profiting from forced prison labour. 

This discovery illustrates a second key finding in this research. Carcerality, or the logics of control, surveillance, and criminalization, is a key to the workings of settler colonialism. Incarcerating Indigenous nations on reserves in the late 1800s was a precursor to the federally administered carceral presence on the prairies in the early 1900s. One century later, Commonwealth Stadium has been used since 2020 in the winter months to shelter houseless folks in over-securitized, warehouse-like conditions. The houseless population in Edmonton is significantly and disproportionately Indigenous. Since the Great Depression, the stadium site has been used for professional sport. In 1930, the former prison site was leased to the city to provide recreational sports fields. Clarke Stadium was built in 1938, as professional men’s football was established in Edmonton.  

A third key finding is how ‘participation’ discourses have been mobilized to secure government support for professional sport stadium construction. In the 1930s, profit-seeking civic boosters relied upon classist and eugenicist playground movement rhetoric, touting the moral goods realized by the provision of public recreation to secure almost free land tenure. In the 1970s, the Commonwealth Games Foundation suggested the Games’ facilities should be turned over for affordable public use after the Games. Despite the promotion strategy of ‘participation’ there was little indication that Commonwealth Stadium was ever developed for significant recreational activities. Rather, the main tenant of this facility was always intended to be the CFL’s Edmonton Eskimos (now Edmonton Elks). 

In the post-war years of the mid-twentieth century, white middle-class residents left central Edmonton for a growing suburbia. Racially diverse, working-class communities remained affordable places to live in the central core of the city. They also became targets for city planners, as civic boosters mobilized urban renewal discourses in the lead up to the stadium decision.  

A fourth and final key finding from this project was the central role sport stadia policy debate had in this process of removal and dispossession. From the late 1950s through the 1970s, advocates of stadium development (primarily professional men’s sport representatives) sought to portray these neighbourhoods and their residents as dysfunctional and dangerous. This rhetoric contributed to convincing Edmontonians to fund the building of Commonwealth Stadium. Hundreds of public housing units were destroyed, and community leagues were lost in 6 central neighbourhoods. The ‘urban blight’ that stadium development was meant to improve, was merely exacerbated while the professional Edmonton CFL franchise was able to move into their new state of the art facility.

A strength of this project is its insistence that sport research take seriously its role (both historically and currently) in the (ongoing) dispossession upon which the nation of Canada was founded and continues to function. It demonstrates the importance of historicizing sport infrastructure developments as settler colonial projects. 

One of the limitations of this kind of structural critique is that it is difficult to operationalize these types of insights in policy situations, especially under governmental demands for short term evaluation goals. 

Next steps 

Popular histories of sport in Edmonton have told a celebratory story. With this counternarrative, we have shed light on some of the violent processes of settler colonization and its related carceral tactics in this story of the Commonwealth Stadium site. The CFL’s Edmonton Elks have been lauded for the reconciliatory act of changing their formerly racist team name. However, what this analysis teaches us is that to significantly unsettle sport infrastructure development requires next steps that involve critical historicizing and structural analysis to go beyond mere surface changes. Understanding what is at stake for new sport facilities needs interrogation that seriously considers structures of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. 

Funding acknowledgement 

This blog draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Sport Canada as part of the Sport Participation Research Initiative.  

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About the Author(s)

Judy Davidson is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta.  

Matt Ormandy is a Research Coordinator in the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. 

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The information presented in SIRC blogs and SIRCuit articles is accurate and reliable as of the date of publication. Developments that occur after the date of publication may impact the current accuracy of the information presented in a previously published blog or article.