Canyon Dreams

Now in paperback, the moving story of a Navajo high school basketball team, its members struggling with the everyday challenges of high school, adolescence, and family, but also the greater, unique obstacles facing Native Americans living on reservations.

Deep in the heart of Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the 17-1/2-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is the passion. It's a sport for winters where it can get dark fast; when there is not much else to do, the students and their parents say, but work and drink. The town has 4,500 residents but the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive from thirty, fifty, even eighty miles away to see highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to the players and the 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 difficult realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion into the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides to and from games about dreams for leaving home or the fear of never being able to.