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  • The Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story
  • Michael Wilson (bio)
LeAnne Howe . The Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-8799-6078-7. 221 pp.

In LeAnne Howe's second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, a young female spirit named Ezol Day returns to Ada, Oklahoma, after one hundred years to talk about the early days of Indian baseball with Lena Coulter, a contemporary Choctaw journalist. Even within the long tradition of literary Indian spiritual helpers, Ezol is an unusual figure. She has the uncanny ability make high-level mental calculations and talks about the possibility of time travel with the use of her iti nishkin, or "eye tree." At twenty-one, she was reading French at the Good Land Orphanage and displayed what one administrator terms "genius symptoms" (142). At the same time, Ezol Day wishes desperately to live a normal life, to find acceptance and love. She internally rejoices, for instance, when she manages to show some level of social competence by acting similarly to those around her. And one of her fervent hopes is to one day "speak in complicated thoughts to Blip" (163), her team's player/manager whom she loves.

It is unclear whether Lena somehow calls for the return of Ezol Day or whether Ezol returns for some purpose of her own. Following [End Page 104] the guidance of an inexplicable voice telling her to return to Oklahoma, Lena begins rebuilding her Grandmother Cora's house (and her own family history), when she finds a leather mail bag hidden in the walls that contains information from and about Ezol. Soon after, Ezol appears and begins telling her the story about the pressures and politics of the Miko Kings baseball team. At first, Lena sees this as the kind of investigation that appeals to her as a researcher and journalist who worked in New York and later in the Middle East. But as she learns more about the history of Indian baseball, she also learns that the past becomes quite personal, forcing her to confront her feelings of abandonment by her mother and to confront the complex tragedies in her own family's past.

In Howe's novel, baseball is both recreation and re-creation. As Ezol says, "Choctaws and Chickasaws are renounced for their ability to rebuild. . . . We seem to manifest nature itself, as re-creators" (34). In the days of the Miko Kings baseball teams, there was perhaps never a more difficult time for the Choctaw people of Oklahoma to re-create themselves yet again: the U.S. government fragmented their communal land base into small, individually owned plots; the promise of tribal freedom in Indian Territory was soon to be completely extinguished by the creation of the state of Oklahoma; and general lawlessness pervaded the area. For the Choctaws, and particularly for the owner of the Miko Kings, Henri Day (Ezol's uncle), baseball provides the perfect vehicle for promoting tribal identity and solidarity. For one thing, baseball, according Ezol Day, was invented by Indigenous people in North America, where versions of the game appeared among many different tribes. Furthermore, the proceeds from the team went to the Four Mother's Society, an organization that worked to prevent the allotment of tribal lands. Finally, Henri Day bases the organization on the Four Women's Society: he refuses to sell shares of the team to gamblers while at the same time buying shares himself so that regular people could purchase them and have ownership in the team and in the idea, even though this approach risked the viability of the team.

Howe's novel repeatedly returns to aesthetic, creative response to the difficulties for Indians in Oklahoma in the early twentieth [End Page 105] century: fragmentation, changing cultural borders, and lawlessness. At the same time, the novel shows a well-founded skepticism about stories that try to do too much—that deny the complexity of human experience in the heady mist of the unbroken narrative. Justina Maurepas, for example, who lives among the Choctaws for one year, falls in love with the Miko Kings' star pitcher, Hope Little Leader. But years...

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