E3W Literature | University of Texas

LeAnne Howe
Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story
Aunt Lute Books, 2007
221 pages
$11.95

Reviewed by Bryan Russell

Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, a novel by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), tells the story of the Miko Kings, an all-Indian baseball team from Ada, Oklahoma, who are playing for the Twin Territories’ pennant against the United States’ Seventh Cavalry team. The Miko Kings is a collection of Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and mixed-blood players who are competing against various Anglo baseball teams during the 1907 season, the year of Oklahoma statehood. The Miko Kings’ story is communicated to Lena, a present-day Choctaw narrator, by Ezol Day, a Choctaw postal clerk from the early 1900s whose mastery of quantum physics allows her to travel through time.

The novel opens with Lena moving back to her home in Ada after having spent several years in the Middle East. As she is renovating her home, she finds a packet of papers in the wall that tell the story of Choctaws in that area during the time of early Oklahoma statehood. Ezol appears before Lena and guides her as Lena pieces together the story of the Miko Kings’ pivotal championship game against the Seventh Cavalry and the events surrounding the formation of Oklahoma. In addition to the details of the final game, Ezol describes the speculation that the Miko Kings’ star pitcher Hope Little Leader might have thrown the game. Ezol also helps Lena discover the story of the love relationship between Hope Little Leader and black social activist Justina Maurepas, which developed while the two were children in a Virginia boarding school. Additionally, Ezol describes her own traumatic experiences in boarding school through excerpts of her journal, the language and images of which also reveal that she is autistic.

Perhaps what is most telling about the novel is its portrayal of baseball, the “all-American” pastime, alongside issues of land allotment and Native identity. Howe delves into the indigenous history of the sport, known as stickball in Native communities, and asserts that the game initially served to train Native warriors and to develop intertribal diplomacy long before Americans appropriated it as a symbol of nationalism and began to regulate it. Along with the imposition of rules, a Native warrior tradition was relegated to a mere game, undermining the ritual element and essentially disarming its players on the individual level. Howe’s handling of baseball in the novel also connects the regulation of the game allegorically with the regulation of government land allotment that led to the decay of family structure and communal living in tribal nations.

Miko Kings demonstrates how Americans who played against Native teams created a new set of rules just before their games, which caused the Native players to lament on how they were expected to be victorious against the Americans when the rules were constantly changing at their opponents’ whims. By regulating baseball and appropriating it as America’s pastime, Howe shows that the American colonizer was able to rob natives of a vital training tool and ensure victory over a group whose warrior tradition was reduced to a sport.
The regulation of baseball in Howe’s novel undermines the Native warrior, but it also functions alongside the “regulation” of land and the “rules” that defined it during the period of land allotment and Oklahoma statehood. Land in Native territories was never parceled out to individual owners or regulated until the United States government did so with a series of land acts. In Miko Kings, while Americans are developing rules to divide a baseball game into innings, the US government is drafting acts to divide Native land into allotments. This division of land into privately owned plots caused the deterioration of the kinship and communal-living systems that Natives, such as the Choctaws and Cherokees in Howe’s novel, had relied on for generations, forcing them to rely instead on the American government for economic sustenance.

While Miko Kings crafts a moving narrative of community and identity through baseball, the novel’s true strength is its undaunted depiction of the breakdown of tribal communities as a result of American expansionist policies cleverly revealed through Howe’s description of Anglo appropriation of baseball in Indian Territory. Miko Kings is a successful contribution to Native letters in its demonstration of how these regulations and arbitrary changes in the rules within the spheres of baseball and land allotment led to the breakdown of Natives on both individual and communal levels, one by removing the weapons from their hands and the other by removing the land from under their feet.