The moving story of a Navajo high school basketball team, its members struggling with the everyday challenges of high school, adolescence, and family, and the great and unique obstacles facing Native Americans living on reservations. Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans. Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.
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Darrell Dennis is a native Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter and radio personality from the Secwepemc Nation in the interior of British Columbia. In addition to acting and comedy, Darrell is a writer whose works have been published by Playwrights Canada Press and Douglas & McIntyre Publishing. His short stories have been published in periodicals across Canada and the U.S. His first play, Trickster of Third Avenue East, was produced by Native Earth Performing Arts, which twice named Darrell their “Writer-in- Residence.” His semi-autobiographical one-man play, Tales of an Urban Indian, in which he explored themes of growing up as an indigenous First Nations Native American, was nominated for two Dora Awards and has been produced for multiple tours across Canada and the United States