Seventy-some years ago, local filmmaker Leya Hale’s grandparents met as students at the Sherman Institute in California.
The boarding school was one of many that Native kids, like Hale’s Diné grandparents, were forced to attend as part of federal assimilation programs, and the schools were notorious for abusive practices and harsh cultural suppression.
But these were not the stories Hale’s grandparents chose to tell about their education, said Hale, who’s Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota on her mother’s side and Diné on her father’s, and now works as a documentary producer for Twin Cities PBS in St. Paul. Instead of recounting the negative experiences, she said, they talked about the joy of meeting classmates from other tribal cultures and forming friendships through activities like dance and sports.
Leya Hale is a documentary producer for Twin Cities PBS in St. Paul. (Courtesy of Leya Hale)
This perspective also guides Hale’s upcoming TPT documentary “Medicine Ball,” which follows two Native basketball players at the University of Minnesota Morris, a campus that traces its own history back to a boarding school called the Morris Industrial School for Indians. In the documentary, the players — and the audience — learn about basketball’s historical and continuing importance to Native culture from Syd Beane, a local Flandreau Santee Sioux Dakota historian who grew up playing basketball in the boarding school system.
“This film is me carving out a little space for us to share those stories — resilient, hopeful stories — that came from that era,” Hale said. “It’s important to educate and bring awareness to the most awful things that occurred during that time. But it’s also for our own community’s sake to remember those good stories, because it’s those good stories that made us survive.”
Modern basketball was invented in the 1890s at a training school run by the organization then called the Young Men’s Christian Association (now the YMCA). Boarding school administrators, tasked with assimilating Native kids into white Christian American society, approved of the sport’s origins and hoped it would push kids to develop a religious sense of self-discipline.
Native students, for their part, also quickly embraced the game for its similarities to common tribal ball-and-basket sports they were familiar with.
Contrary to administrators’ hopes, basketball ultimately became a way for Native students to build camaraderie within an oppressive environment and strengthen a shared Native identity across tribal backgrounds, Beane said on an episode of the Minnesota Historical Society’s “Minnesota Unraveled” podcast.
The basketball court “was one of the places where the culture was retained,” he said. “It’s what saved them from that trauma.”
Hale’s film “Medicine Ball” is in post-production and is scheduled to premiere next year, though a specific release date has not yet been announced.
When it does premiere, though, it won’t be in the style of a traditional documentary, with talking-head interviews spliced alongside historical footage, Hale said. She wants to make the point that history can be a story, not a set of facts to memorize, so she said she tries to take a more contemporary cinematic approach.
“Even though we’re PBS, we don’t have to always produce traditional PBS films,” she said. “I really try to create films that take you on a journey. You’re feeling those ups and downs of someone’s life and you’re learning with them, and those types of stories really connect you to whatever you’re watching.”
A 6-year-old Leya Hale, front row on the right, stands with her family’s Eagle Spirit Dancers group in this family photo. Hale, now a documentary producer at Twin Cities PBS, makes films exploring various aspects of Native American history and culture. (Courtesy of Leya Hale)
Hale studied media and communications as an undergraduate in California and earned a master’s degree in American Indian Studies from the University of South Dakota, then moved to the Twin Cities for a job at the Division of Indian Work teaching an after-school program on producing TV public service announcements. In the early 2010s, she was hired as a temporary production assistant for the TPT documentary “The Past Is Alive Within Us: The US-Dakota Conflict,” and was ultimately promoted to co-producer and offered a full-time role creating original history documentaries at the station.
In contrast to a movie studio set, which might be supported by an entire production team, Hale is the primary writer, director, casting agent and business manager on her projects at TPT. It’s up to her to find ideas, secure funding and bring the story to screen.
“You have help all the way, but you’re the one leading it all,” she said. “We’re low budget here, we’re not Marvel Studios, so you have to stretch a dollar and make sure you’re telling the best story you can possibly tell with the amount of resources you’re able to obtain.”
That’s where organizations like Vision Maker Media come in. The nonprofit, which distributes grants to filmmakers like Hale who are telling stories of Native culture and history, has supported several of Hale’s films, including “Medicine Ball.”
But the funding landscape for public broadcasting has changed considerably over the past few months, making stories like “Medicine Ball” harder to tell, Hale said. Over the summer, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the nonprofit that directs federal money to public radio and television stations — was defunded and shuttered over alleged concerns of partisan bias. This not only affected programming and staffing at local stations like TPT but also other organizations like Vision Maker, which received CPB funding.
In 2025, Hale was among 22 Indigenous filmmakers who received money through Vision Maker’s annual Public Media Fund to help with research and production costs; that pool of money, the organization says, is now empty.
Even if she has to be more creative in finding those resources, as she put it, the story Hale is telling in “Medicine Ball” — of Native young people, today just as in boarding schools a hundred years ago, finding basketball a symbol of hope and connectedness — remains important, she said.
“I was always taught that our people are resilient,” she said. “That in any situation we’re in, we always find the ability to share stories that help you through those negative experiences.”
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