‘Rez Ball’ is no easy feat, but Indigenous communities win in the end

The latest Indigenous Netflix film shows the challenges of Native life through the culture of rez ball.

It’s a wonder that it’s taken this long for an Indigenous basketball movie to come to fruition, aside from the obvious funding issues, because the idea was ripe for the picking. Basketball is as deeply ingrained in Indigenous culture as football is to the South. Those familiar with Indigeneity will understand the meaning of Rez Ball and its close affiliation with Indigenous cultures in the United States. When I was a younger man, playing basketball for my high school team in a Comanche community in Walters, Oklahoma, our coach scoffed at the way Comanche hoopers played. He dismissed the way we played as “Indian Ball.” To him, it was a disparaging term for a disorganized, faster-paced style of basketball that lacked discipline, while I simply consider it a more fun way to play the game.

Smaller communities take immense pride in their local sports teams, and this is especially true on the rez. These teams, for better or worse, represent their communities. I always look to the 1986 film Hoosiers as the template for the exemplary small-town basketball movie. It successfully mines all the important sports tropes: small-town pride, an unorthodox, underdog team of misfits, a troubled coach overcoming enormous obstacles to achieve a goal, and ancillary characters and situations that contribute to telling the story of how a team comes to access its own special power to become champions, using a power that the players had within them the whole time. Rez Ball is that kind of story.

Two of our finest Indigenous filmmakers have teamed up with Netflix to create a basketball story that shows the pride of Indigenous teams in our own small communities. Sydney Freeland (Navajo) and Sterlin Harjo (Seminole) tell the story of a Navajo Nation high school basketball team, the Chuska Warriors, and its arduous journey to make it to the New Mexico state championship. Jessica Matten (Red River Cree Metis) plays Heather Hobbs, a coach struggling to stay focused on her team while maintaining a long-distance relationship with her partner even as both the team and the relationship are unraveling. Kauchani Bratt (Quechua/Coahuiltecan Nation) plays Jimmy Holiday, a rising star who has to quickly step into the role of team captain after tragedy befalls the team. He lacks a good support system; his mother, Gloria, played by Julia Jones, was a baller in her youth who fizzled out in college. Her dreams were left unfulfilled, and she refuses to attend her son’s games and struggles with alcoholism. There is a lot of tragedy in Rez Ball, just as there is in real-life Indigenous communities. The movie delves into alcoholism and suicide and the deaths caused by both. Given these subjects, Rez Ball may not sound like a family-friendly movie, but it is. It carefully navigates these and other challenging issues that Indian Country deals with today, and, in the end, it is an inspirational story. Perhaps this is the hallmark of Indigenous filmmakers: They can tread this terrain and still create stories that see the community succeed. They refuse to simply wallow in trauma porn.

It can be challenging to create realistic-looking basketball sequences. The actors may not know the mechanics of shooting, dribbling and passing correctly, skills that take years to perfect. But somehow Rez Ball’s creative team has managed to find actors who can actually play, or else found decent players and trained them to act. Whatever the case, they are believable on the hardwood. The basketball scenes in the small-town gyms look real; the players move gracefully thanks to the slick editing of Jessica Baclesse. The scenes slow down, then speed up to show us the skill of the players, accompanied by a modern hip-hop soundtrack — provided by Indigenous musicians Halluci Nation and Travis Thompson — that contributes to the youthful tone of the movie. When the players aren’t yelling at each other, fighting through their own obstacles on the journey to building team chemistry, they look like they are having a blast on the court.

Perhaps this is the hallmark of Indigenous filmmakers: They can tread this terrain and still create stories that see the community succeed. They refuse to simply wallow in trauma porn.

Sports movies traditionally have one memorable scene involving an unorthodox teachable moment, a way to train a person to do something they don’t yet understand. In The Karate Kid, for example, when Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel LaRusso to “paint the fence,” he is actually teaching him karate moves that will serve him well down the line. There is a great scene in Rez Ball that echoes this. Coach Hobbs decides to take her team on a surprise trip to her grandmother’s homestead, where she puts them to work herding sheep. It’s a team-building exercise meant to help her players find the chemistry they need; as a coach and former player herself, Hobbs understands that chemistry cannot be forced, only discovered. It’s a highly enjoyable scene that references Diné culture and language as the team members are forced to use teamwork, creativity and ingenuity to fulfill their mission. Together they learn the skills that a successful team basketball requires. The boys begin to integrate their culture into their basketball lives and realize they have way more in common than they realized. They learn that if they want to win, they will have to work together as one.

Since it’s an Indigenous movie, there are, inevitably, comedic moments. Navajo comedian Ernie Tsosie provides some of them in his role as assistant coach Benny Begay. His one-liners are sharp; the largely Navajo audience I watched the film with at a special Netflix advanced screening in Albuquerque laughed enthusiastically at his jokes, many of which were in Diné. His character is not introduced until near the beginning of the second act, however, and I felt he was underused. I wished that we saw more of him, because the character is charming and brings an added element of Diné humor. More successful is the use of Cody Lighting (Cree) and Dallas Goldtooth (Dakota/Dine), who play local radio sports announcers for radio station KTNN, a real-life all-Navajo radio station. Their comedic sports commentary helps move the film along as they narrate what is happening on the court. On the opposite end of the comedic spectrum, Jimmy Holiday’s mother comes across as relentlessly gloomy upon introduction and remains a bit of a buzzkill throughout. By the end of the film, we realize why Gloria is this way and why she doesn’t support her son’s dreams, but by then her character has become almost too unlikable to be redeemed.

I wouldn’t put Rez Ball in the same category as Hoosiers. It wouldn’t be fair, and it probably doesn’t aspire to be; Rez Ball doesn’t have access to Gene Hackman in his prime, or to Dennis Hopper. What it is, though, is a breakthrough in the genre: an Indigenous family-friendly basketball picture, written and directed by Indigenous people. This is no easy feat. Plus, Rez Ball aspires to a different goal than Hoosiers, telling the story of a contemporary Indigenous basketball team from a contemporary Indigenous perspective.  It has a more modern, flashier and altogether much larger underdog tale to tell, not simply the story of a small-town team taking on big-city rivals. It’s a tale of Indigenous people overcoming our trauma, our lack of support systems, our doubts and fears, and deciding to take a chance on achieving excellence — choosing to believe that Indians ultimately canwin in the end.

Editor’s Note: Rez Ball is showing in select theaters and will stream worldwide on Netflix on Sept. 27.