농구를 통한 나바호 인디언 문화의 부활 : 다큐시리즈 <나바호 바스켓볼 다이어리>를 중심으로

Abstract

Basketball or Nothing, an American basketball docuseries of six episodes, was released by Netflix in 2019. It shows how Wildcats, a Chinle High School basketball team on Navajo Indian Reservation, proceeds towards Arizona State Championship until it is lost in semi-final tournaments in 2017-18. It has attracted a lot of attentions from non-Native Americans as well as Native Americans for several reasons. First, it has shown the dramatic transformations of rezball (reservation basketball) into a regular basketball game through the painstaking efforts of Wildcat players guided by a legendary coach, Raul Mendoza, Tohono O’odham Indian. Second, the film has helped Navajo Indians realize the rezball teenager players possess the potential of making themselves warriors who will represent and navigate the desperate Navajo people in the 21st century, replacing such traditional heroes as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo. Third, the docuseries has provided the Navajo Indians with strong confidence in recuperating the resiliency spirit in the Long Walk of the Navajo in 1864. They believe the Indian basketball teenagers will come back to the reservation with all needed strategies to regenerate their dying communities after college educations. Fourth, the film has enabled the Navajo Indians to modernize themselves not by force but by their own willingness. They are fully ready to learn American values like independence, capitalism, and individualism so that they will gradually customize them as needed in the Navajo culture.