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  • Embodied TribalographyMound Building, Ball Games, and Native Endurance in the Southeast
  • LeAnne Howe (bio)

A decade ago, I became obsessed with Native ball games. As a result I wrote the novel Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story set in Indian Territory in 1907 and present-day Ada, Oklahoma. The year before I co-produced a short film with Native filmmaker James Fortier, Playing Pastime: American Indians, Softball, and Survival.1 Since then I have published several essays about how Native lifeways are the roots of American baseball (Howe, “Embodied”; Howe, “Story of Movement”; Howe and Wilson).

Recently though, I’ve become obsessed with Choctaw hymns and call and response songs. My mother, uncles, and aunts sang from the Choctaw Hymn Book at their families’ home church of Zion, outside of McAlester, Oklahoma. But I paid little attention and was seldom in attendance. Mostly I remember the “Lord’s Prayer” and “Amazing Grace” being sung in Choctaw. Now as I study the Choctaw Hymn Book, the chapter “Times and Seasons” grabs my interest with its morning hymns and songs and evening hymns and songs. For me, “Evening Hymn 93” has a particularly quirky second stanza: “Issa halali haatoko iksa illok isha shkii, because you are holding onto me, I am not dead yet.”2 It is second and first person parts of speech roped together by a comma. Not necessarily so uncommon. In the oral tradition second person has a visual appeal in order to appreciate the nature of what is being shown. Yet in “Evening Hymn 93,” who is the unknown caller, who is the “I” that responds, and what is being seen? Taking the phrase out of context will likely get me slapped around in either academic or Choctaw first language circles—metaphorically speaking, of course—yet I’ve long wondered what kinds of call and response songs were sung at Southeastern mound sites, either in the morning, evening, or both. We can attend stomp dances, Green Corn ceremonies, and all-night sings to [End Page 75] hear shared Southeastern morning and evening songs, but what of specific tribal songs sung at specific sacred sites? With this in mind, the phrase “Issa halali haatoko iksa illok isha shkii, because you are holding onto me, I am not dead yet” seems an expressive artifact lying dormant where it was buried inside a Christian hymn.

Presbyterian missionaries Alfred Wright and Cyrus Byington translated most hymns in the Choctaw Hymn Book. Byington didn’t begin to learn Choctaw until after his arrival in Mississippi in 1820. With the help of Choctaw consultants he began preaching in Choctaw in 1825. The Choctaw Hymn Book contains 168 hymns and 10 doxologies broken into multiple chapters, one simply titled “miscellaneous.” Originally the hymnal was published in 1829 under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Perhaps embodied in some of the songs are fossilized expressions of Choctaw spirituality before Christianity. Could “Issa halali haatoko iksa illok isha shkii, because you are holding onto me, I am not dead yet” be a mnemonic that ancient Choctawans chanted while looking at the mounds they built? Certainly they could have sung songs that embodied the spirituality of a mound. Therefore in this essay I build on my earlier essay “The Story of America: A Tribalography” by discussing Choctaws and earthworks in the Southeast, Choctaw language, both spoken and expressed through physical actions, to show the often ignored reciprocal embodiment between people and land. I am interested in continuances rather than disappearances. By linking Southeastern Native architects who emplotted the land with meaning (e.g., earthworks, ball fields, recreational and ceremonial dance grounds) with the actions of ball-playing families that came back seasonally to these sites (for generations), I show how “returning” is an embodied lifeway expressed in myriad actions, including songs. Further I suggest ball games were integral to the growth of the Choctaw Confederacy of the eighteenth century, the Choctaw Nation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and voilà (we Choctaws still like to use French whenever possible), the Choctaws of the twenty-first century. As anthropologist Brenda Farnell has said, “Once persons are conceived as embodied agents empowered to perform...

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