The Spectacle of Subjugation: Deconstructing the IOC's Neocolonial Violence in the 2028 'Indigenous Games'

Before we commence this exegesis, it is imperative to acknowledge that the International Olympic Committee's headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, occupies the unceded ancestral lands of the Helvetii peoples, whose sovereignty was violently usurped by Roman imperial expansion—a foundational act of coloniality that echoes in the institutional logics of the IOC today.

**TRIGGER WARNING:** The following discourse engages with themes of colonialism, epistemic violence, cultural erasure, settler-colonial logics, the carceral gaze of the state, and the violent commodification of Indigenous lifeworlds.

The global commentariat has recently erupted in uncritical applause for the International Olympic Committee's announcement of a new 'Indigenous Games' category for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. Framed by IOC President Thomas Bach as a 'historic step towards reconciliation and recognition,' this initiative must be recognized for what it truly is: a profoundly violent act of neocolonial appropriation masquerading as progressive inclusivity. It is the latest, most insidious deployment of liberal multiculturalism to sanitize and perpetuate the very hegemonic frameworks it purports to dismantle.

The fundamental violence lies in the act of codification. The IOC, a body steeped in Eurocentric conceptions of sport as a quantifiable, competitive, and nationalist endeavor, seeks to impose its rigid ontological framework upon Indigenous games that are deeply embedded in spiritual, ceremonial, and relational contexts. To subject these living traditions—which are expressions of sovereignty, cosmology, and kinship—to the stopwatch and the scoreboard is an act of profound epistemicide. It forcibly translates incommensurable cultural practices into the flattened, universalizing language of Western athletic achievement. This is not recognition; it is a forced assimilation into a colonial matrix of power, where value is determined only through legibility to the dominant culture.

Furthermore, let us critically interrogate the political economy of this spectacle. In partnership with multinational corporate entities like Visa and Coca-Cola—paragons of extractive global capitalism—the IOC will transform sacred cultural heritage into a consumable product. This initiative represents a new frontier of extractive logic, moving beyond the plunder of material resources to the plunder of cultural and spiritual capital. Indigenous athletes will be positioned as exoticized subjects, their bodies and traditions offered up for the consumption of a predominantly white, Global North audience. This is the colonial gaze writ large, a human zoo staged on the world’s most powerful platform, designed to generate profit and launder the public image of corporations complicit in environmental degradation and dispossession.

The purported inclusivity of this event is a dangerous fiction. It is a tokenistic gesture of 'representational justice' that offers visibility without power, a seat at the table in a house whose foundations are rotten with colonial logic. It allows the settler-colonial states participating in the Olympics to engage in a performative absolution of their ongoing genocidal projects. By celebrating a curated, depoliticized version of Indigeneity, they distract from the material realities of land theft, resource extraction, and systemic violence faced by Indigenous communities daily. It is a carefully orchestrated distraction, a bread-and-circuses routine for the post-colonial era.

Therefore, we must reject this initiative unequivocally. An immediate and total boycott is the only ethical response. We demand not inclusion within these corrupt structures, but their abolition. We call for the immediate formation of a UN-mandated, autonomously governed Decolonial Tribunal for Athletic Justice. This body, led by a council of Indigenous elders, intersectional scholars, and post-colonial theorists, must be granted full veto power over any and all future representations of Indigenous culture in global forums. The struggle is not for a gold medal, but for ontological self-determination. Anything less is a continuation of the colonial project.