Rez Ball

My husband often says that the thing about basketball is all you have to do is get a basketball, hang a hoop on a pole and you can play. Heck, Naismith first suggested a peach basket! Many great careers have been launched with this low tech, low overhead approach to playing basketball. Lebron James’s career is one of those. Heard of him? In addition to being a future hall-of-fame player, he is one of the producers of Rez Ball, a fictional story of high school basketball on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

Kauchani Bratt (nephew of Benjamin Bratt) plays Jimmy, the promising, contemplative star guard on the Chuska High School Warriors, who along with his best friend and team leader, Nataanii (Kusem Goodwind), make the Warriors the pride of the Chuska community. Like many young and gifted athletes, both kids aspire to play ball in college. But when Nataanii experiences a personal loss, he loses the joy and excitement teen athletes typically have when competing in sports. Still, Jimmy, his teammates, and the rest of the community are gut-punched when Nataanii takes his own life.

There is a great deal of literature about the social ills on tribal lands; alcoholism, depression, and suicide are at the top of the list. The literature addresses, ad nauseam, the lack of money and resources in the communities. If this sounds cynical, it is because these problems were borne out of centuries of the dehumanization, colonization, and exploitation of Native Americans. Much of what is observed today are the remnants of what some researchers might describe as “benign neglect.”

Nataanii’s suicide in the film contextualizes the conditions of the rez. So too does Jimmy’s mother, Gloria, played by Julia Jones (Wind River, Cold Pursuit), whose primary role seems to be that of fatalist. Rather than comforting Jimmy when he loses his friend, Gloria blithely tells him that people on the rez are destined for disappointment and suicide. She then discourages him from getting his hopes up about attending college to play basketball because “The higher you go the greater the fall. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.” To be fair, Gloria is struggling to cope with disappointments she has experienced in her life. But her words of caution for her young son, rather than comfort and encouragement, ultimately leave him to deal with his anguish (and even hopes) alone, depicting how one generation’s distress can become intergenerational despair without some intervention.

Jessica Matten (Dark Winds, Frontier) plays Coach Heather Hobbs, a former WNBA player who has her own aspirations of leaving the rez and coaching a professional team. With no bites to her inquiries, she reinvests herself in the Chuska Warriors basketball team, enlisting her reluctant former coach, Benny Begay (Ernest Tsosie III), as an assistant. On Benny’s first day, he performs a traditional Indigenous ritual with the kids, while acknowledging their feelings of uncertainty resulting from Natanii’s death. He adds that they “descend from Warriors” and that “true [Warriors are] are not afraid to grieve.” This, along with Coach Hobbs’s encouragement, brings comfort to the players as she refocuses their energies on their cultural identities as fighters against their all too-familiar adversity. They dedicate the season to Nataanii and commit to win the state championship. The team then turns its attention to their top adversary, the Santa Fe Catholic Coyotes, where the boys are much bigger than they are. 

With the team having lost Nataanii’s size as well as their confidence in winning, Jimmy seeks ways to gain an advantage. He devises a way to leverage the Navajo language for their in-game communications, much like what the Navajo Code Talkers did in World War II to mask the U.S.’s war strategies. When this puts their opponents on their heels, the Warriors experience success again and believe in themselves. Will it be enough, however, to beat the Coyotes? Regardless, slowly but surely, the quiet, introspective half of the Nataanii-Jimmy duo emerges as the new leader in the locker room. We see Jimmy’s continual growth as a leader when he challenges his teammate, Bryson (Devin Sampson-Craig), for going on a bender the night before a game. Waking Bryson at his home late after the game, Jimmy admonishes him for being irresponsible. When Bryson calls him a “Nataanii-wanna-be,” the intense exchange escalates into a fist-a-cuffs. Bryson’s nonverbal cues later hint not only at his remorse for his role in the team’s poor game performance, but also his acknowledgment of Jimmy as the team’s new leader. 

The weight of intergenerational oppression is cumulative and heavy. Jimmy’s emergence as the team leader suggests that the resulting despair is something that can be overcome, but not without some intervention. With the support of the coaches, he and his teammates manage to pull their way through a painfully dark period in their young lives to see hope and experience joy once again. The underlying themes of Rez Ball may seem sappy or even weighty as indicated by the Honeybush tea designation. But the Masala Chai tag conveys the sense that the film is infused with intense game competition, meaningful family interaction, and vibrant community dynamics.

While Rez Ball necessarily contextualizes the story of the Chuska High School basketball team, it avoids dwelling on the struggles of people who live on Native American reservations. Instead, writer/director Sydney Freeland forces us to live in the lives of the kids on the team. She presents the characters as teenagers playing a game that is accessible to them and dealing with many of the same issues and quandaries of most teens (i.e. drinking, teen romance, work-extracurricular activity conflict). In doing so, Freeland humanizes Native Americans as people who love playing and watching sports as much as anyone else. Rez Ball even presents the Chuska community as one that rallies around their high school team, much like many small towns in rural areas across the country. 

Rez Ball reminds me of Friday Night Lights, the five-season television series about a high school football team that is the pride of its rural Dillon, Texas community. The show stars Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton, Taylor Kitsch, Jesse Plemons, and oh yeah, a young Michael B. Jordan! Like Rez Ball, the kids in Friday Night Lights fight with their teammates during and after games because they miss a pass, don’t hustle enough, or fail to properly prioritize because they went on a bender the night before. And like Rez Ball, the best players aspire to play college ball and ultimately go pro. I have to say that it would be nice to continue to have frequent/regular exposure to representations of Native Americans on television like this, just doing what everyone else does, being normal.