Medicine Ball follows Native college athletes, Lexus Redthunder and Leroy Fairbanks IV, as they navigate college life and basketball at the University of Minnesota Morris located on the site of a former Native boarding school. Their journey reveals how basketball became a powerful symbol of resilience, hope, and cultural pride in Native communities.

Leya Hale is a 2025 Bush Fellow and documentary filmmaker from the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Diné Nations. Based in Minnesota, she is a multiple regional Emmy award-winning producer for Twin Cities PBS, where her work elevates Indigenous lifeways and centers community-driven stories rooted in culture, history, and lived experience. She is best known for her nationally broadcast films The People’s Protectors and Bring Her Home, distributed by PBS, and The Electric Indian, distributed by American Public Television.

Her most recent documentary, Medicine Ball, will be distributed nationally in Fall 2026. A 2020 recipient of the Sundance Institute’s Merata Mita Fellowship for Indigenous Artists, Leya’s work has premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and has been featured by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Through powerful storytelling and cultural advocacy, she fosters deeper understanding and connection between Native and non-Native audiences alike.

Director Statement

As a Dakota and Diné filmmaker, my work is grounded in stories that explore the resilience, strength, and survival of Native people. Medicine Ball continues this journey by weaving together the personal lives of two Native student-athletes with the larger, often painful history of Indian boarding schools and the powerful role basketball has played in Native communities.

Basketball was introduced to Native youth in boarding schools as a tool of assimilation and control. Yet, like so many imposed systems, our people transformed it into something uniquely ours. Over generations, basketball became a symbol of hope, a space of healing, pride, and identity. For Native families, the game is more than sport; it is a lifeline, a way to carry forward culture, to build community, and to create joy amidst adversity.

This film follows Leroy Fairbanks IV (Leech Lake Ojibwe) and Lexus Redthunder (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota) as they navigate college life at the University of Minnesota Morris, a campus built on the grounds of a former Indian boarding school. Their personal journeys as athletes unfold alongside the layered history of how basketball became interwoven with Native resilience. Guiding their path is Dakota historian Syd Beane, whose own family connection to basketball provides a living bridge between past and present.

As a Native woman filmmaker, I am committed to reclaiming stories that have too often been hidden or silenced. Medicine Ball is not just about basketball, but about legacy, survival, and the ways our people continue to adapt and thrive. My hope is that audiences walk away with a deeper understanding of the boarding school era’s enduring impact, but also the hope, ceremony, and empowerment embodied in the game of basketball for Native communities today.

For me, Medicine Ball is both personal and collective, an offering to honor those who came before us and to uplift the next generation of Native athletes and storytellers.