Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

Ezol smoothes the hem of her dress. "Documents lie," she says casually.

—Miko Kings 28

Contemporary American Indian texts engage with the materials of colonial US archives to highlight their complicity in the genocide and oppression of Indigenous peoples. Archival practices of documentation, including missionary records, the mapping of land, and the collecting or theft of artifacts and stories, are revealed as tools of settler colonialism mobilized to justify genocidal state practices. Yet these colonial archival materials may also serve as entry points to tribally specific histories. Since American Indians are both silenced and hypervisible within the colonial archive, working with the colonial archive's misrepresentations is an important part of destabilizing that archive. Well-read authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance, including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), confront the limitations of the colonial archive and emphasize Indigenous modes of accessing, organizing, and preserving histories in their fictional texts. Contemporary American Indian novels continue to chart the violences of US colonial archives and offer a way out of a narrow historical lens. These novels open up historical possibilities and deepen historical understanding in part by repurposing colonial archival documents within Indigenous narratives and epistemologies.

I focus on LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007) in this article because the text explicitly theorizes and models the construction of a decolonial archive using real and fictionalized documents. Placing work of the interdisciplinary "archival turn" in conversation with the tribally specific, I call collections of document, story, object, and ephemera "archives" throughout this article in order to legitimize them as sources of historical knowledge and sites of knowledge production. Such collections are uniquely powerful because they occur outside of institutions; as feminist and queer archivists have demonstrated, calling personal collections and ephemera "archives" "remains a powerful authorizing act" (Eichhorn 15). Decolonial archives are mediums for preserving and accessing history that privilege Indigenous epistemologies and deauthorize the written document as the definitive record of what has past.

The devaluation of American Indian forms of archiving was integral to the colonial project; as Diana Taylor has explained, "[P]art of the colonizing project throughout the Americas consisted in discrediting autochthonous ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding" (34). Therefore, to decolonize the archive requires both revealing the destructive nature of the colonial archive that continues to be employed to justify state violence (such as land and resource acquisition and a militarized US-Mexico border) and privileging Indigenous modes of preserving and accessing historical knowledge. Decolonial archives both enact Indigenous epistemologies and dismantle a narrow colonial historical lens characterized by Manifest Destiny and the erasure of Indigenous cultures and political systems. Formed outside of institutions, they redefine archival possibilities. The intentional inclusion of Indigenous narratives and epistemologies within institutions can also produce decolonial archives.¹ My focus here is how literature creates decolonial archives by positioning the US colonial record within an Indigenous frame.

Revealing the constructed nature of colonial historical narratives, American Indian contemporary texts tell tribally specific histories with the help of materials from the colonial archive. Both decentering and repurposing the materials of the colonial archive is a decolonizing archival practice, an act of what I call "archival sovereignty." Archival sovereignty is achieved in literature that takes control of both Indigenous histories and the colonial historical record. In addition to providing an alternative Indigenous archive, these texts decolonize the archive by intimately engaging with the colonial record. I choose the term "sovereignty" because of the work it does in marking the complex politics of tribal struggles for self-determination within the context of US colonialism. Sovereignty points both to a history of tribal autonomy longer than the colonial gaze and to the necessity of working across borders, including with European American structures of power.² I follow Jace Weaver's (Cherokee) formulation of sovereignty as both useful within colonial power structures and independent of their powers of bestowal. The archives I describe in this article are at once autonomous and in negotiation with the colonial archive. My use...