Pouring Asphalt on Ancestral and Unceded Land: Indigenous Experiences at the Steve Smith Bike Park Pump Tracks

Pump tracks are among the fastest-growing recreation infrastructure in North America. Within the leisure community, pump tracks are increasingly framed as inclusive public spaces for all ages, skill levels, and all wheeled equipment. However, inclusion in urban leisure spaces in what is now known as Canada must be understood within the context of the country’s colonial history, which has typically erased Indigenous Peoples. In this paper, the authors (leisure researchers and Indigenous community members) explore Indigenous Peoples’ relationship(s) to the pump tracks at the Steve Smith Bike Park located on Snuneymuxw First Nation ancestral and unceded lands, in what is now Nanaimo, British Columbia. Using settler colonial theory, community-based participatory research, go-along and semi-structured interviews, and reflexive thematic analysis, we produced two themes: (1) enduring colonial legacies at the pump tracks; (2) the pump tracks as a space for resistance and cultural resurgence. Together, these themes illustrate how the pump tracks function as complex urban leisure spaces that both (re)produce settler colonial exclusions and enable Indigenous presence, resistance, and resurgence.