The Rural Towns Project Podcast
In the Rural Towns Project Podcast, Dax Jacobson combines his day job as a business professor with his love for the rural American West he grew up in. He talks to the people who are actually trying to make a living in - and to the researchers, artists, and others inspired by - the rural towns of the American West. He hopes to help himself and others understand the past, appreciate the present, and positively impact the future of rural towns and the American West.
The Rural Towns Project Podcast
Inspired by my drive from Bluff (UT) through the Navajo Reservation, I talked to Michael Powell, author of Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation (which was the inspiration for the Netflix movie Rez Ball)
In this episode, I talk to Michael Powell, currently a staff writer for The Atlantic and author of Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation (which was the inspiration for the Netflix movie Rez Ball). Michael and I talk about our brief experiences playing rez ball (he calls it a “fast flowing stream”) and Michael talks about the inspiration for the book, the reservation basketball gyms that hold more people than the population of the towns they are built in, hours long road trips with hitchhikers to games, and how basketball on the Navajo reservation is a community and generational thing where everyone knows basketball and everyone has an opinion on how it should be played. We also talk about how entrepreneurial the Navajo people are but how tribal and federal government bureaucracies, clan control of land, spirituality, history, and suspicions around change make economic development and entrepreneurship difficult on the Navajo reservation. And yet, despite the challenges, entrepreneurial activity can be found in the cracks - jewelry in the beautiful canyons and sushi in the desert! We end, as always, with the Road Trip Music Question.
Podcast music: “A Happy Day” by codemusic, http://www.jamendo.com, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/