Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation

Michael Powell

nov 2019 · Penguin Random House Audio · Loeb: Darrell Dennis

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The inspiration for the upcoming Netflix film Rez Ball—produced by Lebron James

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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Michael Powell has been a writer at the New York Times since 2007, and a “Sports of The Times” columnist since 2014. Before joining the Times, he worked for the Washington Post from 1996 to 2006, where he covered the 2000 presidential campaign and later served as New York bureau chief. He has been part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize and the Polk Award. Powell began his career in 1984 at the Burlington Free Press, going on to positions with the Bergen Record, New York Newsday, and the New York Observer. He studied American and African history at SUNY Purchase College, worked as a tenant organizer in East Flatbush, and received his master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1984. Powell and his wife have two sons. They live in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.