"Some days it's a good day to die, some days it's a good day to play basketball"
- Victor Joseph in Chris Eyre's "Smoke Signals"

The University of Wyoming almost never even makes it to basketball's "Sweet Sixteen," and wipes out spectacularly on those rare occasions when we do.

It may, then, seem strange to those who aren't in the know to say that Wyoming is one of the great basketball capitals of the known world. It may seem strange, but it isn't.

It's just that Wyoming's basketball gods very rarely make it to college, and when they do, they don't usually make it through college. And never, ever, do these gods manifest themselves at the University of Wyoming or any other Division I school.

That's because these gods live "on the rez," as budding filmmaker Daniel Junge shows us in his documentary "Chiefs."

Junge spent two years filming the lives of several members of the 2000 and 2001 Wyoming Indian High School boys basketball teams, on and off the court, then heroically edited down all of that footage into a taut, often moving, and definitely illuminating 90 minute film, which aired nationwide last night on PBS's "Independent Lens" program.

There's a lot to love, to be astonished by, and to be saddened by as Junge's images roll on with very little commentary from the filmmaker. These boys carry the hopes of an entire nation with them onto the basketball court, and are expected to live up to a proud legacy - 20 straight trips to the state tournament, numerous state championships, undefeated seasons - ever under the watchful eyes of their ancestors (many of whom were directly involved in establishing that legacy, those record seasons, those statistical marvels, those packed gymnasiums all over Wyoming). Every team in the state, even those from schools in Casper and Nebraska and Lander whose benches hold triple the number of players as the Chiefs because their schools hold ten times as many students as Wyoming Indian, wants a piece of them, making the Chiefs' entire season into an endless repeat of the plot of "Hoosiers."

Except those Indiana boys never had to deal with the social conditions and the occasional racism that were and are a fact of life for young men like Brian Sounding Sides, Ben and Al C'Bearing, and Tom Robinson.

Wisely, Junge does not dwell on these in the maudlin muckraking way of so many documentarians observing the tragedies of indigenous peoples. Junge also wisely does not dwell on the obviously "Indian" elements of these players' lives. A quick shot of a team session in a sweat lodge, a glimpse of a drum circle, are enough, as are quick looks around the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming - an area hard to make look picturesque, and Junge didn't try.