Copyright by Emily Ann Lederman 2012

The report committee for Emily Ann Lederman

certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:

Moving in Choctaw Time: Baseball and the Archive in LeAnne Howe’s

Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

APPROVED BY

SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor: ______

James H. Cox

______

Ann Cvetkovich

Moving in Choctaw Time: Baseball and the Archive in LeAnne Howe’s

Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

Emily Ann Lederman, B.A.

Report

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin

May 2012

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express her gratitude to her faculty readers, James H. Cox and Ann Cvetkovich, for their guidance and encouragement. She also thanks Colleen Eils for her excellent questions.

Moving in Choctaw Time: Baseball and the Archive in LeAnne

Howe’s Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

Emily Ann Lederman, M.A.

The University of Texas at Austin 2012

SUPERVISOR: James H. Cox

LeAnne Howe’s second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), brings together story, theory, performance, and document to create an archive that positions American Indians in the center and foundation of American culture, shifting the meaning of the “All-American Pastime” and reclaiming baseball’s American Indian history and pre-colonial existence. While a student at boarding school, Choctaw time theorist Ezol Day draws a picture of a tree with an eye at its base and six others floating around its seven branches, gazing in multiple directions. She refers to this tree as a part of herself that allows her to see patterns and develop theories of relativity based on Choctaw temporality. I read this image as indicating a particular depth of sight, representative of looking around, beyond, and through colonial archives and histories to form a Choctaw archive, an act that I argue is part of the project of Howe’s text. In this paper, I use the

eye tree as a theoretical lens to examine how Choctaw storytelling and temporality can reframe colonial documents so that they tell a different history. Reading through colonial archives demonstrates their instability; in other words, using these documents to see

American Indian histories renders clear the narrow construction of colonial narratives.

The histories seen through this archive allow a reimagining of the past that impacts the present, as Howe’s novel suggests that engaging with these histories can strengthen a sense of Choctaw identity and nationhood. Miko Kings presents archiving as an active process of creation that has far-reaching implications across time and space.

Table of Contents Text...... 1 References...... 30

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In LeAnne Howe’s second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007),

Choctaw ballboy, postal worker, storyteller, and time theorist Ezol Day draws a picture of a tree with an eye at its base and six others floating around its seven branches, gazing in multiple directions.1 Ezol refers to this tree as a part of herself that allows her to see patterns and develop theories of relativity based on Choctaw temporality, while sometimes impeding her ability to function in society. The eye tree drawing appears in the novel on a crinkled page from Ezol’s boarding school journal (135). I read this image as indicating a particular depth of sight, representative of looking around, beyond, and through colonial archives and histories to create a Choctaw archive, an act that I argue is part of the project of Howe’s text. Drawing attention to the silencing of American Indian histories within colonial archives, Miko Kings demonstrates how a Choctaw archive can reframe colonial documents so that they tell a different story. Reading through colonial archives demonstrates their instability; in other words, using these documents to see

American Indian histories renders clear the narrow construction of colonial narratives. In this paper, I use the eye tree as a theoretical lens to examine how a new archive is created through Choctaw stories, theory, temporality, and “shape-shifting” (Howe, Miko Kings

199). Archival documents, including a map, a still from a film, journal pages, and newspaper clippings, exist within the text of Miko Kings and serve as part of the Miko

Kings archive, as they are viewed within a Choctaw framework through the eye tree and

Ezol’s stories. The histories seen through this archive allow a reimagining of the past that

1 Seven is a sacred number for Choctaws and other tribes. Seven Choctaw grandmothers participated at the Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty removal negotiations in 1829 (Reeves 222).

impacts the present, as Howe’s novel suggests that engaging with these histories can strengthen a sense of Choctaw identity and nationhood.

Miko Kings creates a Choctaw archive that positions American Indians in the center and foundation of American culture, shifting the meaning of the “All-American

Pastime” by reclaiming baseball’s American Indian history and pre-colonial existence.

Past and present meet when Choctaw and Sac and Fox journalist Lena finds a mail bag containing Ezol’s more than century-old journal, newspaper clippings, and a photograph of an American Indian baseball team buried in the wall of her late Choctaw grandmother’s house. Together, Ezol and Lena reconstruct the story of an intra-tribal baseball team that plays a championship game against the Seventh Cavalrymen in 1907, just prior to Oklahoma statehood. Within the story of this team is a story of intra-tribal political organization and resistance to statehood and allotment. The Miko Kings archive branches outward to make connections across tribal, cultural, and national boundaries.

The relationships seen through the Miko Kings archive evoke Howe’s theory of tribalography, which serves as part of my critical foundation. In “The Story of America:

A Tribalography,” Howe explains the ability of stories to create change and “author tribes,” building a sense of nationhood while also “bringing things together,”

“symbiotically connecting one thing to another” (Clearing 29, 40). Though I consider how Howe’s novel contains a tribally specific archival theory invested in Choctaw conceptions of time, my analysis of the Choctaw archive also benefits from the critical work of Diana Taylor. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), Taylor draws a distinction between the archive, which includes

“materials supposedly resistant to change,” and the repertoire, which “enacts embodied memory…acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (19-20).

She posits that the archive and the repertoire work together, “in a constant state of interaction” and are not, in fact, a binary, but that the repertoire “expands the traditional archive” (23, 26). Taylor’s framing of the written archive and the performative repertoire speaks to the interplay of story, performance, and document in the Miko Kings archive.

Taylor’s work subverts the power of colonial written archives, and the Miko Kings archive consists of the performance of Ezol’s stories and theories working alongside a written archive, encompassing these documents within a framework of Choctaw temporal, language, and spiritual systems that refutes colonial narratives of defeat.2 The view through Ezol’s eye tree constitutes new imaginings of archiving that may further the field of archival studies.

Howe’s novel contains a non-linear narrative in which the past is as fluent as the present, and there are two versions of the Miko Kings championship game against the

Seventh Cavalrymen. Ezol and Lena’s partnership allows the victorious version of the game to occur, as the women heal past destruction through their construction of a

Choctaw archive. Recently returned from working as a journalist in Amman, Jordan after losing a lover in a terrorist bombing, Lena is a storyteller who has written of many other places, but has had no interest in her hometown of Ada, Oklahoma. When Lena attempts and fails to research the baseball team, Ezol visits her at night. They discuss the Miko

2 For example, in the chapter “Acts of Transfer,” Taylor explains that the scenario includes narrative and plot, but also requires a focus on “milieux and corporeal behaviors such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language” (28). Taylor encourages the analysis of “scenarios of discovery” as “meaning- making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes,” thereby deprivileging the colonial written record (28).

Kings baseball team and its relationship to Lena’s own family lineage, as well as to

Choctaw theory, language, spirituality, and politics. Lena begins to write the team’s story, and also begins to heal her relationship to Choctaw history and identity, thus accomplishing in her own life what a Choctaw archive might achieve in the greater community.

Set almost entirely in Ada, the narrative swings from the women’s conversation in

2006, to 1969, to events surrounding the team around the turn of the century. In 1904, the

Miko Kings are owned by Henri Day, Ezol’s uncle. After returning from spending her childhood and early adult years in boarding school at the Good Land Indian Orphanage,

Ezol closely follows the team and works in the post office.3 Hope Little Leader is the team’s star pitcher, master of the up-down windup through which he communes with the

Choctaw sun god Hashtali. 4 He is in love with Justina Maurepas, a Black-Indian activist and once his teacher at the Hampton Normal School for Blacks and Indians.5 In 1969,

Justina is interviewed by an historian about the violent activism of her youth in New

Orleans, where she was known as Black Juice and accused of bombing a Storyville brothel during the 1900 race riots. The historian later sends his notes and an important newspaper clipping to Lena, helping to build the archive. Also in 1969, Hope is dying in a nursing home in Ada and weaving baseball stories to his American Indian nurses. A

Choctaw warrior spirit visits Hope on his deathbed to help him “shape-shift” and return

3 Goodland Indian Orphanage was originally Goodland Mission, founded in 1848 in Oklahoma by the Presbyterian Church (Hogue). 4 Hope’s name may refer to the important Choctaw Little Leader who spoke against removal (Reeves 222). 5 Lena researches and describes the school in the novel: “Hampton was originally founded in 1868 as a Normal school to educate newly-freed blacks during Reconstruction. In 1877, the school…began a program to educate Indians” (125).

to 1907 to face the Seventh Cavalrymen from the pitcher’s mound (Howe 189). Miko

Kings contains the story of Hope’s spiritual and physical destruction, but also includes the possibility of a different story, one that illustrates the triumph of hope, and is envisioned through a Choctaw archive.

Restoring “No Hands” : Unsilencing Histories and Rebuilding Memories

Miko Kings challenges colonial archives that have written American Indians out of dominant American histories. Although materials from these archives can be used to tell a Choctaw history, the novel implies that colonial documents need to be considered within the multiple vision of the eye tree in order to subvert a colonial narrative. Before

Ezol arrives, Lena has only the documents from the wall to help her understand a

Choctaw history, and she fails. The documents in the wall draw Lena in, and she is unable to turn away from working with them, as they exert power over her: “Soon after the discovery, the contents of the leather pouch began to haunt me” (Howe 15). She is especially captivated by a photograph labeled “1907 Miko Kings Champions”: “At the sight of the picture, I draw in a breath of satisfaction, a feeling so rare I am taken aback.

What a thrill to have known such men” (15). The affective response that Lena experiences renders clear the rarity of seeing her own people recorded, and speaks to the power of personal archives, to the “emotional need for history” (Cvetkovich 251) . In An

Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Ann Cvetkovich examines, in part, the importance of community and grassroots gay and lesbian archives.

The location of many of these archives in homes and as “semipublic” spaces parallels

Lena’s found archive in the walls of the house (Cvetkovich 245). The unique power of these personal archives may help shed light on how a Choctaw archive can work in opposition to, or separate from, American institutions, and thereby have unique meaning for Choctaws.6 Buried beneath the surface of the house, the documents Lena finds have been protected from colonial archiving, but they still cannot provide her with a complete history. Lena visits official archives, including the Oklahoma Historical Society, and runs into dead ends, only finding some of the players listed on a census record with the help of a woman from the Ada Historical Society. She searches “hundreds of pages of old newspapers” and realizes that there is little recorded from Indian Territory besides crimes, drawing attention to the dominant colonial archive’s limited and destructive history of American Indians, in which crime fits better than baseball (Howe 20).

The silencing of Choctaw histories is embodied by the character of Hope Little

Leader, whose name changes to “No Hands” after he throws the championship game against the Seventh Cavalrymen. Symbolically deprived of the tools to record his story, he wanders the country alone selling pencils, thus providing others with the means to record in writing, while he is unable to author any histories. The loss of his former name, which evoked both Choctaw hope and leadership, marks the inability to tell a Choctaw story as the end of hope for the Choctaw nation. Yet his other name is not completely

6 See also Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Preserving Our Language, Memory, and Lifeways (ed. by Loriene Roy, Anjali Bhasin, and Sarah K. Arriaga), which discusses the practice and possibility of tribal libraries and information centers, describing the archives that already exist as community resources and providing guides and suggestions to future work on tribal archives.

lost; since the story of the Miko Kings is nonlinear and dependent on its telling, Hope can embody both defeat and the possibility of leading a Choctaw victory.

As a child, Hope is taken to boarding school when his mother dies, and forcibly separated from his sisters, who die at other schools. Hope attempts to run away many times and defies the school’s attempt to repress his Choctaw culture by bringing offerings to Hashtali. When his stubbornness allows him to move to Jones Academy in Indian

Territory, he is placed under the guidance of the aging Choctaw warrior, Wild Buck

Taylor, who puts disobedient boys on baseball teams.7 Hope’s pitching is partly inspired by Wild Buck’s tales of heroic Choctaws, illustrating the need to “pull together” Choctaw stories to confront oppression (Howe, Clearing 42). For example, when a young and inexperienced Hope is first called on to pitch for the Jones Academy team, much to the delight of the white team and their fans, Wild Buck rallies Hope through stories of victorious American Indians: “In 1805, Pushmataha led 350 Choctaw warriors in battle against the Osage Nation. No one thought that a bunch of Choctaw corn growers could whip a mighty Plains tribe…But nerve trumps brag every time, son” (Howe, Miko Kings

93). Wild Buck also connects Hope’s pitching that day to the Battle of Little Big Horn

(“No one thought the Indians could take on the Seventh Cavalry and beat them flat. But they did”) foreshadowing the championship game the Miko Kings will play against the

Seventh Cavalrymen (93). This history of American Indian victory drives Hope’s pride in his American Indian identity, allowing him to fully embrace a Choctaw political

7 Jones Academy was established by the Choctaw Nation in 1891 and placed under federal management in 1906. Named after Chief Wilson N. Jones who was born in Mississippi and came to Oklahoma with his family on the Trail of Tears, Jones Academy is now operated by the Choctaw Nation as part of the Hartshorne School District (Lambert, Choctaw Nation 53-54).

consciousness and thereby function as the “embodiment of the center pole” on the baseball field, throwing unbeatable pitches for the Miko Kings that eventually leads him to face the Seventh Cavalrymen (39).

In one of two versions in the novel of the October 5th, 1907 championship game against the Seventh Cavalrymen, Hope gives in to defeat, accepting money to throw the game, and isolating himself forever from the Choctaw baseball community. Justina, who had recently worried about money and criticized Hope for his lack of activism and focus on baseball, leaves Ada just prior to the championship game. Hope connects Justina’s doubt to what he perceives as his past failure to watch over his sisters: “Then he thinks about how he couldn’t protect his sisters like his mother had asked him to do. Maybe

Justina was right, maybe he was weak” (Howe 194). The destruction of his family by federal Indian boarding school policy has rendered Hope vulnerable to self-hatred. The

Miko Kings’ best hitter Blip Bleen blames Hope’s decision on his school experience:

“Hope’s the kind that needs someone to tell him what to do. Damn boarding schools.

Some kids come out not able to think for themselves” (196).8 Hope’s oppressive schooling causes him to doubt himself and his teammates, and the Miko Kings lose.

Destruction spirals outward from this loss. Hope’s hands are severed by three members of the Miko Kings, who are killed in a fight moments later. The fact that Hope is rendered “No Hands” by his own teammates suggests that silencing and destruction can be carried out by American Indians within an intra-tribal organization. However, the novel emphasizes that boarding school education and racism have led to this violence. A

8 See Ruth Spack and Amelia V. Katanski for work on boarding school education.

white Prussian woman, Karla Yurovsky, saves Hope’s life, but also symbolically seals his silencing by permanently closing his wounds. She had previously sued Henri Day for his allotment land, claiming the land as her own, and using as evidence her husband’s grave (the couple were illegally squatting on Henri’s land when the husband killed himself) (Howe 178). While Karla saves Hope through her knowledge of how to

“cauterize veins and sew up skin over bone,” she also represents the corrupt acquisition of American Indian land through false narratives, and therefore in a way she participates in the cauterization of a Choctaw narrative, and thus the destruction of hope (215).

Also following the game, a fire kills Ezol and destroys Henri Day’s records, erasing most of the Miko Kings archive just prior to statehood and the further destruction of American Indian sovereignty. Ezol describes the trunk of the eye tree burning, the limbs detaching as she dies, connecting the coming statehood to the loss of this unique sight. Ezol’s cousin Cora, and her corrupt lover Bo Hash (who orchestrated the bribe and is mistakenly trusted by Hope because he once saved his cousin Justina from prison), are implicated in the fire and Justina’s departure, suggesting that the destruction is, in part, coming from within the Miko Kings’ community. Although Ezol’s death is a loss irreversible, she is able to pass on her theories of the eye tree to Lena, as Ezol’s power allows her to serve as a time-traveling storyteller.

A second version of the championship game occurs at the novel’s end, and results in the Miko Kings’ victory. I read this version of the game as a revision made possible through the creation of an archive that works to heal destruction caused by federal Indian policy and the silencing of Choctaw histories in colonial archives. Through theories of

baseball, a game “with no limits,” Choctaw temporality, spirituality, and language, as well as the power of storytelling, Ezol and Lena help restore a Miko Kings victory by creating an archive to be shared (Howe 199).

As a writer recording Hope’s story, Lena then also represents Choctaw hope, yet she too has suffered oppression and lost connection with her people. Ezol’s presence fills an absence created by the death and unavailability of Lena’s family members that has left

Lena rejecting her Choctaw past. Seeing a resemblance between Ezol and her late grandmother, Lena notes that her vision may be clouded by loneliness, implying both that she seeks a Choctaw grandmother’s guidance, and that she lacks the clarity of sight to see around, beyond, and through oppressive stories. In fact, Lena’s isolation is described as a lack of vision. Lena has “never been able to visualize” her Choctaw mother who died just after she was born (Howe 17). Acquiring a particular depth of sight, an ability to see beyond colonial histories and reach new understandings (as depicted by the eye tree drawing) eventually allows Lena to envision Choctaw histories, as well as to rebuild her own family history, which turns out to be intimately connected to the Miko Kings.

As a young woman, Lena suppressed her Choctaw identity; she wanted to forget

“all things Okie,” including her cultural background, aware that she could pass as

“Italian, Mexican or French” (Howe 18). Lena spent summers with her grandmother, who taught her a few Choctaw words, but her mother’s death scarred their relationship: “She just couldn’t get over the fact that I’d grown in her daughter’s body, and the shell of her gave way in order that I might live—nothing could change that between the two of us”

(18). When Lena does return home, she needs Ezol’s help to embrace a Choctaw specific

worldview and re-remember her Choctaw past.9 In “The Story of America: A

Tribalography,” Howe describes the new sight she learned from her grandmother’s stories: “Grandmother was a storyteller, and she taught me the power of story…From her story I could see what had happened” (Clearing 31). These stories provide a necessary view of what has past.

Serving as this healing force, Ezol embodies cultural memory and teaches Lena that she already possesses a Choctaw specific past that she has forgotten. In That the

People Might Live, Jace Weaver defends N. Scott Momaday’s use of the phrases “racial memory” and “memory in the blood” against Arnold Krupat’s accusations that these are racist notions (7). Weaver argues that such memory can refer to “cultural codes that are learned and go towards shaping one’s identity…” and that these can exist “beyond conscious remembering, so deeply engrained and psychologically embedded that one can describe it as being “in the blood” (7). I read Lena’s relationship to Choctaw ways of knowing as existing within this place of unconscious memory. After listening to Ezol tell a Choctaw history, Lena remembers a Choctaw healing ceremony she attended as a child:

“Something she says triggers an incident I had completely forgotten” (Howe 42). Lena has trouble recalling the memory and needs Ezol’s encouragement: ““Call it to you!” she snaps. “Call the memory to you, Lena! Who was the ceremony for? You must know”

(42). Lena has blinded herself to this memory because she doubted the power of the

Choctaw healer, but once she begins to learn from Ezol, she develops new vision and can

9 Although Lena’s father was Sac and Fox, she does not speak about this cultural heritage, and seems to lack all contact with her father’s family members. She describes her father as a truck driver who was either away during her childhood or too exhausted to do anything but sleep.

recall her memories. Taylor describes cultural memory as living within the archive and the embodied knowledge (recalling ‘memory in the blood’) that is transmitted through story, as a Choctaw archive also exists within Choctaw storytellers. Ezol suggests that rebuilding history is a tribally specific strength: “Choctaws and Chickasaws are renowned for their ability to rebuild” (34). The rebuilding of Lena’s Choctaw memory parallels the archival reconstruction of the Miko Kings’ history.

Through storytelling, Ezol transfers part of the Miko Kings archive to Lena, who translates it into writing: “She would talk and I’d write” (Howe 24). In his discussion of

Muskogee Creek poet Joy Harjo in Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism,

Womack describes all the things tribal memory can do: “Memory should result in telling and speaking, and, especially, resisting, a combination of imagination, words and deeds”

(233). In Miko Kings, memory and history are built through a new sight made possible by

Ezol’s storytelling and theorizing alongside archival documents. As the writer of the story, Lena is positioned as the “the medium, intermediary, stenographer and servant to the story” who helps construct the archive, in part, through her own reclamation of

Choctaw memories (Howe 24).

Seeing Around, Beyond, and Through : Three Documents in the Text

Ezol and her eye tree help Lena develop a Choctaw lens through which she sees previously silenced histories. An epigraph that repeats throughout Howe’s text recalls the ghostly aspect of the Choctaw archive, the unacknowledged influence of American

Indian baseball lying beneath the surface of colonial histories: “And here too is the echo of baseball’s childhood memory in Anompa Sipokni, Old Talking Places. Indian

Territory.” As a reaction to something already said, the “echo” speaks to telling a history that creates a reaction in the present. This refrain also empowers a Choctaw archive by situating part of the colonial narrative as “echo,” or response, rather than a source. “Old

Talking Places. Indian Territory” may refer to a place in memory and in location where

Choctaw baseball is central.

Miko Kings immediately documents the location of American Indian baseball, as the novel opens with a map of Indian Territory focused on large areas labeled Chickasaw,

Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw that border one another, with state territories on the periphery. The facing page holds the epigraph quoted above. This map is a colonial document that marks the division of land and the imposition of federal sovereignty.

Appearing at the novel’s beginning, it sets up the need to re-narrate a space that has been defined through colonialism. Yet this map also locates the story in an intra-tribal space, giving a visual representation of the land at stake in the resistance to statehood and allotment. The map’s labeling calls attention to intra-tribal relations, recognizing a

Choctaw space that is not only relational to colonialism. The map does not indicate

Oklahoma statehood, which is importantly never reached in the novel, as the story of the team stops just prior. Reading this map within a Choctaw history may allow the visualization of an American Indian space that is seen around colonial organization, evading the pervasive colonial narrative of American Indian nation dissolution.

The text’s engagement with the 1909 film His Last Game by International

Moving Pictures further demonstrates the ability of a Choctaw archive to see through a colonial document. Howe includes a still photo of this film in the beginning of the novel and then immediately establishes the need for a Choctaw retelling by describing the filming circumstances in the novel’s Prelude. His Last Game tells the story of a pitcher for a Choctaw baseball team. Howe imagines the filming of this real movie from a

Choctaw actor’s point of view, providing a necessary counter narrative. Hope plays the starring role and has been given fake braids to wear that are woven in a Choctaw female weave. Just as he carries the pencils but cannot write, in the film Hope is an object to be recorded without the power to control the representation. He is upset by the inaccurate portrayal and almost leaves, but is persuaded to stay by the filmmaker. The filmmaker lacks knowledge of American Indian culture but has the means to create a lasting record of the team.

His Last Game is an example of a record of Choctaw baseball within a colonial archive. In her documentary of Choctaw stickball, Playing Pastime, Howe affirms that within dominant American discourse Choctaw baseball was known: “Even in 1909

Choctaws were known as great ball players” (Playing Pastime). Yet as the title suggests, this 1909 film is part of a narrative of Indian disappearance: it is interested in the final game. The film is indicative of destructive representations of Choctaws that assume their inevitable absence while prescribing the permanence of Euro-American institutions. The newspapers of the time, part of the American historical record, also disrespectfully represent the team: “Henri Day, Miko Kings’ owner, was shocked when the Chicago

Tribune published a semi-fictitious story about the team that pitted “the red man against the white man” (Howe 9). Yet significantly, Howe and Lena use these representations

(Lena reads the newspaper clippings and sends away for a copy of the film; Howe includes the still in her novel) to tell a Choctaw narrative. The vision as represented by

Ezol’s eye tree allows a Choctaw reading of a Euro-American archive that has historically excluded Choctaw ways of knowing. With the help of a Choctaw storyteller and theorist, Lena can read beyond the dominant history and rebuild from the loss that this film encapsulates, and thereby create a counter record of Indian baseball through her own writing.

Finally, the text includes pages from Ezol’s journal, including her first journal entries that are written on the text of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline. It can be assumed that early on in her boarding school experience Ezol did not have blank paper on which to write, so she chose this text. Without a blank space, or the privilege, to tell her own story, Ezol writes on a well-known American text, one that, implicitly, she has been given to learn uncritically. Instead, she critically engages with the text by writing her own story alongside it, a rebellious act against an enforced Euro-American curriculum. Evangeline is in conversation with Ezol’s own situation, as it tells a story of exile from family and home. Sent to boarding school against her will and isolated from her family, Ezol too is in exile. By writing beside Evangeline Ezol asserts the necessity of writing her own story of exile, and that of her people. Ezol positions her story as equally central to American identity as the Longfellow work. Notably, she does not obstruct the text, but writes in the margins, which visually shows her marginalization as a young

American Indian woman, but also allows for both stories to exist side by side, and thereby create an intertextual dialogue. This simultaneity is paralleled by Ezol’s eye tree vision that allows her to see many dimensions at once. Ezol’s dead twin sister was named

Evangeline, which underlines Ezol’s pairing with this character as well as supports stories as a way of connecting with lost family. At Ezol’s suggestion, Justina names her daughter Evangeline, which is also the name of her great-granddaughter, continuing this connection. An excerpt from Evangeline also appears later in Ezol’s journal, recorded as the text Ezol chooses to read to comfort Justina after she experiences Ku Klux Klan terrorism. Longfellow’s text is claimed as a narrative that responds to Ezol and Justina’s own stories of oppression (Howe 171-172). Ezol ends many of her journal entries with

“Si apela. Help me,” calling attention to her sense of imprisonment and injustice in two languages, as she uses multiple knowledge systems to tell her story.

These documents in the text render the novel itself an archive. Yet a Choctaw archival theory develops alongside these documents, and so this novel is also a theoretical text, one that destabilizes a linear notion of archive as a record of preservation, and describes an archiving that is constantly negotiating the relationship of the present to the past through an understanding of Choctaw story and temporality.

Past Time : A Choctaw Archival Theory

Miko Kings is a theoretical text because the dialogue between Ezol and Lena both explains and applies a Choctaw theory. Mirroring Howe’s own work, Ezol collapses story

and archival theory; she is both a Choctaw critic and storyteller, as she employs and teaches Choctaw temporality and language theory while relating the events surrounding the Miko Kings baseball team to Lena. Miko Kings puts into practice Craig Womack’s notion that American Indian storytellers are literary theorists: “We have gone too long thinking that storytellers cannot also talk about stories, that fiction writers and poets do one thing and critics and academics quite another” (Red 9). Ezol begins the theorization of the eye tree while a young girl at the Good Land Indian Orphanage, representing the ability of a powerful Choctaw worldview to emerge within oppressive Euro-American structures such as the boarding school. Unlike Hope, whose boarding school experience renders him insecure and vulnerable to corruption, Ezol’s unique vision seems to allow her to avoid cultural oppression at boarding school; the eye tree sometimes causes her to be “immune to her surroundings” (Howe 141). The young Ezol is identified as a genius by her teachers, and begins to develop Choctaw theories while quickly mastering French, physics and other Euro-dominated subjects. Howe refutes colonial discourse of assimilation and manifest destiny by situating Choctaw theory as a step beyond Euro-

American theorization. In addition, Ezol’s education undermines the assimilation-- resistance binary, as she learns Euro-American tools while also focusing on tribally specific theory. Ezol’s developing eye tree suggests a theory alive and growing, rather than static, speaking to the vitality and mutability of a Choctaw theory and worldview. In addition, the branches suggest a theory that expands outward from a Choctaw center to encompass many knowledge systems.

According to Howe’s theory of tribalography, native stories pull “all the elements together of a storyteller’s tribe,” connecting, among other things, “the past, present and future of the tribe” (Clearing 42). Control over time is political in Miko Kings, as linear temporality lends itself to the colonial narrative of American Indian disappearance. Ezol seeks control over time while she is unwillingly kept at boarding school; she labels her journal entries by the number of days she has been at the school, drawing attention to a linear passage of time. In one early entry Ezol considers the ability to reorder time; she recounts both a biblical story from the Book of Joshua, in which “the sun stood still,” and a Choctaw aunt’s story of a healer who cut “the wind in half” (Howe 139). Ezol declares that “time is at the mercy of the speaker,” an idea that undergirds her telling of the Miko

Kings history (139). Fittingly a postal clerk, Ezol is positioned to handle communication across time and space, as she occupies the position of transmission as a storyteller and gives new meaning to the documents from the past, allowing the past to impact the present and the present to reimagine the past.

Ezol’s theories privilege a Choctaw way of knowing of the world that undercuts a colonial ordering of history: “I questioned why we should expect our ancestors to synchronize their time with our modern clocks, which are set by the political whims of

English speakers” (39). It is significant that the stories in the novel never reach the date of Oklahoma statehood, November 16th, 1907, but rather examine its destructive aftermath and explore its possible nonexistence through a Miko Kings victory. In addition, the date of the championship baseball game is just prior to the first celebrated

Columbus Day, which both underlines the stakes of the game in fighting colonial power as well as subverts this date by not allowing it to exist in the narrative.10

Ezol develops a theory of relativity based on Choctaw conceptions of time. She explains how baseball relies on this nonlinear temporality; it is “past time,” as it runs counterclockwise and has “no time limit” (Howe 44). Ezol refers to temporal patterns that are both mathematical and important to her narrative. She describes Choctaw “healers working in collaboration with the earth’s mathematical systems” (44). In her boarding school journal, Ezol explores the ability of numbers to split and “remain unaccounted for” (140). For example, she uses the example of “1+1=4” to describe her parents’ creation of twins, an equation that becomes important on the baseball field, as Hope’s two pitches allow four runs during the Miko Kings’ loss (140). She sees zero as a “circle filled with thousands of verbs and numbers hidden inside it,” connecting numbers to language and suggesting that many other possibilities lie within something seemingly finite, as she can see multiple histories at once through the eye tree (140). Ezol also sees time as performative: “Time is like a majestic dance…Observe how I can step forward or backwards or sideways and form multiple patterns that intersect” (44). These patterns perform a temporality that is relational and creates “intersections” rather than isolates. In other words, the archive that Ezol and Lena are forming creates connections across time periods, not proceeding chronologically but rather relying on a storytelling performance that branches outward to destabilize colonial archives considered permanent.

10 The state of Colorado established Columbus Day in 1907 (Fletcher).

According to Ezol, events are dependent on the telling of their histories. A

Choctaw archive consists of the performance of story, requiring Lena’s participation in seeing history beyond that recorded in colonial documents. Rather than a record, a

Choctaw archive is constantly in the state of creation. Ezol states: “What the Choctaws spoke of, they saw. Experienced” (Howe 37). She thus refutes the idea that truth exists to be discovered and privileges an archive that is narrated or understood by Choctaw words.

Ezol’s supports Thomas King’s theorization of the relationship between action and story by teaching Lena that stories create action and explaining that “some Choctaw words are tools” that allow Choctaws to experience different “dimensions” (39). In The Truth About

Stories, King presents a direct link between story and action: “It was Sir Isaac Newton who said, ‘To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.’ Had he been a writer, he might have simply said, ‘To every action there is a story’” (28-29). Ezol performs stories and theories that cause further action. Taylor describes the potential of performance as a productive theoretical term: “…a term simultaneously connoting a process, a praxis, an episteme, a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the world…” (The Archive 15). The construction of the Miko King’s story is at once a practice of Choctaw archiving, a transmission of story, and an intervention in colonial archives. Ezol’s storytelling and theorizing and Lena’s writing perform Choctaw archiving that has immediate impact on the past and present.

A Choctaw archive is partly built through the use of Choctaw words. Ezol is identified as a nukfoki, and Howe describes nuk or nok as “a mysterious prefix that when combined with other words represents a form of creation,” and “has to do with the power

of speech, breath and mind” (Clearing 30). A nukfoki is a teacher or “the beginning of action” (30). Ezol argues that Choctaw verbs “have a much broader application, which shades the meaning in ways that English verbs cannot” (Howe, Miko Kings 37). The

Choctaw words Ezol teaches Lena contain multiple “dimensions,” visually represented by the many eyes surrounding the tree. Ezol explains the word okchamali, the Choctaw word for both blue and green: “Its roots appear in the Choctaw word okchanya, meaning

‘alive.’ Now where did our people originate? Answer: a world of blue sky and green swamplands, a watery place. So perhaps okchamali relates to ‘place’ as ‘alive’” (38).

Terms like okchamali can evoke a sense of life, place, and time at once.

Further rooting her time theory in language, Ezol explains that Choctaw verbs do not evoke fixed tenses but function as tools like numbers: “The laws of physics do not distinguish between past and present. Neither does the Choctaw language, at least not in the way that English does. Choctaw verbs have a much broader application, which shades the meaning in ways that English verbs cannot” (Howe 37). In an interview with Kirstin

L. Squint entitled “Choctawan Aesthetics, Spirituality, and Gender Relations,” Howe further explains the power of Choctaw language: “We can look at verbs and verb tenses, especially in Choctaw, as a way of moving the mountain through the act of speaking.

That speech act is as powerful as number theory to nuclear physics” (219). Here Howe emphasizes the power of words, of the “speech act,” to cause social change (219). Howe implies that continued knowledge of Choctaw language enhances a Choctaw specific view, but she does not limit understanding to those, like Lena, who speak mostly English, as long as they are receptive to the differences between the languages. Choctaw verbs can

create dimensions that English verbs cannot, and therefore contain a space for Choctaw experience outside of white, colonial definition. Ezol states: “We have evidence in our language that our people experienced different dimensions through our use of particles and verbs which attend to specific movements in and out of spacetime” (Howe 39). In other words, Choctaw language allows a tribally specific way of experiencing the world that rejects dominant American structures like linear temporality, crafting an archive that seeks continuous connection across temporal boundaries, and fostering a reality that can never be understood along a linear colonial narrative. It is Ezol and Lena’s assembling of the story of the Miko Kings that makes the team’s victory possible in the pivotal game against the Seventh Cavalrymen.

In addition, Ezol’s eye tree contains the potential to transfer its vision from one person to the next, and thus transfer the ability to build the archive, allowing a Choctaw archive to spread outward within Choctaw communities. Howe associates the power of this transfer with water and Choctaw spirituality. Ezol’s sight is connected to cataracts by an aging Justina: “[Ezol] claimed that tree branches grew over her eyes. Now at my advanced age, I have cataracts and know just how she felt” (Howe 80). When Lena considers the eye tree drawing, she returns to the term cataract: “When I look up

‘cataract’ in the dictionary I find it means floodgate (of heaven). A large waterfall or any strong flood or rush of water; a deluge” (185). This notion of a flood implies that Ezol has an abundance of sight, which points to her ability to see different time periods at once and her status as a visionary. In addition, the heavenly “strong flood” evokes an opening, an obliteration of current structures of containment and the many Euro-American stories

about American Indians. Ezol’s flood of sight is reminiscent of the dam bursting in “an awful rush” in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, allowing the world to return to a Native beginning (454).11 Similarly, once told, Ezol’s story spreads outward, encouraging Choctaw resistance and victory, and marking such liberation.

Branching Out : A Choctaw Archive’s Impact

The Choctaw history seen through the Miko Kings archive changes the meaning of Euro-American histories and American baseball. The baseball field, presented in dominant American culture as of quintessentially white American creation, becomes a site of American Indian political organization. Henri Day hopes to build a league of

Indian baseball teams that will “demonstrate that the people from different tribes can own something together…the country’s first inter-tribal business, an alliance that will spread across the whole U.S. Maybe even the whole continent” (Howe 112). Henri helps fight allotment by using the baseball games as settings and fronts for meetings of the Four

Mothers Society, whose archival records parallel Choctaw baseball: “The organization began around 1895 and lasted through 1915, roughly the same time as the heydey of

Indian Territory baseball. Both the baseball teams and the Four Mothers Society disappear from historical documents after the First World War begins” (126). By describing this under-researched, intra-tribal, still surviving organization of American

11 In King’s novel, the dam’s burst accompanies the revising of colonial and Judeo-Christian narratives through storytelling, beginning what James H. Cox has called “a process of liberation from the narrative or textual colonization of Native America” (67).

Indian resistance, Howe creates a history that refutes a discourse of American Indian surrender.12 The game of baseball itself has important political and social import, which

Lena begins to understand at the novel’s end: “I also think I understand why Henri Day was in such a hurry to build an Indian baseball league. He wanted Indians from the Five

Civilized Tribes to begin investing in themselves. To hold something in common, even if it was just baseball” (186). Baseball also speaks to a history of intra-tribal organization that pre-dates the arrival of Europeans; Lena is able to find traces of this history in archeological reports that describe “old ballfields along river bottoms and next to mound sites” (127). In Playing Pastime, Howe documents the continued important role of softball leagues in today’s tribal cultures.

Ezol also describes the game of baseball as an act of Choctaw spirituality.

According to Ezol, both stomp dances and baseball use the power of patterns to access different dimensions: “a pitcher was the embodiment of the center pole that could access the Middle, Upper and Lower Worlds” (Howe 39). In her film, Howe explains that baseball moves in the same direction as Choctaw stomp dances and in opposition to

American time (Playing Pastime). As a square containing a circle, a baseball field represents a Choctaw medicine symbol. A Choctaw archive places Choctaw spirituality onto what is understood in dominant narratives as a white American landscape. Howe

12 The Sequoyah movement, started in 1904, is another important intra-tribal social movement that is muted in colonial archives. Members of the Five Civilized Tribes, led by Choctaw chief McCurtain and Cherokee chief Rogers, advocated the creation of a separate Indian state called Sequoyah in eastern Oklahoma, governed by a confederacy of Indian tribes. The state of Oklahoma’s admission in 1906 marked the end of this possibility, but Valerie Lambert suggests that the movement “live(s) on in the hearts and minds of Choctaws and other Five Tribes Indians, who enjoy exploring the question of what our lives, experiences, and societies would look like if the movement had succeeded and we were now living in a separate Indian state” (49).

similarly locates the American Indian culture at the center of American history in “The

Story of America: A Tribalography.” She describes America as “a tribal creation story,” explaining how Euro-American leaders listened to a Haudenosaunee Peacemaker on

“how to make a united nation” (Clearing 30). A Choctaw archival theory then does not merely dismiss colonial narratives, but rather powerfully reorients them so that Choctaw stories exist at their center, illustrating both Choctaw survivance and the transparency of

American histories; their ability to be looked through as simply one strand of story.13

The Choctaw archive of American Indian baseball also transcends cultural boundaries, gathering connections to African-American activism, the War on Terror,

Muslim spirituality, and queerness. Howe has argued that Native stories thread together events and peoples: “The Native propensity for bringing things together, for making consensus…becomes a theory about the way American Indians tell stories” (Clearing

40). Ezol contrasts the “bringing together” of the Choctaw game with the exclusionary racism of American baseball: “Don’t confuse our ancient game with the one that’s been assimilated into America’s consciousness…Remember that the first thing whites did during their civil war was exclude blacks from playing on their baseball teams. Later they excluded Jews. But base-and-ball, our game, was created so that we could include everyone” (Howe, Miko Kings 43). Justina and Hope’s relationship may further indicate a shared experience of oppression, although it is Justina who is targeted by the Ku Klux

Klan because she does not live in the town’s Black section, and she is the one jailed for

13 In Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, Gerald Vizenor defines survivance as an “active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (15).

her activism.14 As an old woman, Justina speaks regretfully of her role in the bombings in

Storyville, an act attempted to stop organized violence against women and children. She explains to the historian: “I foolishly believed, as others did, that we should destroy what we could not change” (73). This violent activism is neither condoned nor vilified in the text, but Justina’s realization of the futility of destroying the enemy is central to understanding the work of a Miko Kings archive. Rather than destroying colonial archives or documents, Howe and Lena use them to tell a Choctaw narrative. Tellingly, the elderly Justina is more interested in talking about her relationship with Hope than her activist role as Black Juice, and through this privileging the novel suggests the importance of Black and Indian alliances, of working together, as well as the need for

‘hope’ over destruction.

The Storyville bombing also connects to the terrorist bombing in Jordan that kills

Lena’s lover. Lena’s stories of her work in the Middle East are marked by the events of the War on Terror, a war that can be read as organized violence against civilians. Lena, long disassociated with Choctaws, attempts in Amman to disassociate with America once the war begins: “After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, I began to dress differently…I tried to stand out in the crowd, though not as an American” (Howe 19). The war is part of the reason Lena comes home to her Choctaw past and turns away from her American identity; it is current American imperial violence that leads Lena to confront the violence

14 Howe has said that she intends “to show that blacks and Indians are in that same space,” a space dictated by violence and silencing (Squint 222). It’s important to note, though, that members of the Five Civilized Tribes held slaves before the Civil War. In addition, Justina’s violent acts may also be read as a necessary step beyond the activism of the Four Mothers Society, and it is worth considering how the novel holds up Hope’s spiritual resistance to the Seventh Cavalry as total victory on the baseball diamond while representing Justina’s history of organized resistance as far more complicated.

of American colonial histories. The novel thereby connects violence in the Middle East to violence against the Choctaw nation and Black Americans. Miko Kings links Choctaw silencing with peoples worldwide who are also directly or indirectly silenced by the

United States government. Lena hears a call to return home to Oklahoma in the Muslim

Salaat, suggesting that Choctaw spirituality can be perceived within other cultural rituals.

Lena chants “Allahu Akbar. The time has come to return home” four times and then goes home to Ada (41). Her return is both Choctaw specific and entangled in a cross-cultural framework, again illustrating the ability of Choctaw knowledge systems to engage with a diversity of experiences.

The Choctaw story is also connected to the discrimination of queer individuals, as one of the elderly Hope’s male American Indian nurses, Kerwin, is put on disciplinary leave for wearing a dress, leading to Hope’s neglect (and speeding his death) because other nurses treat the American Indian welfare patients last. Hope’s discrimination as an

American Indian is thereby linked to the discrimination of a queer individual. Reading his friend’s gender identity through a Choctaw lens, Hope calls Kerwin Ohoyo Holba, explaining that in a Choctaw past Ohoyo Holba was “a respected person…givers who had multiple kinds of powers inside them” (Howe 89).15 Hope provides a Choctaw history of gender identity that differentiates historical Choctaw social organization from that of the United States. The story of the Miko Kings forges alliances with other peoples marginalized in American society who may also benefit from a new vision of history.

15 “Ohoyo Holba” is translated as “like a woman but not” (Haag 335, 343).

Conclusion : The Eye Tree as Archive

Ezol’s eye tree envisions an archive that allows for a Choctaw history outside of a colonial narrative, yet instead of turning away from colonial documents, her archival theory actually revalues them within a Choctaw framework. I argue that this seeing around, beyond, and through colonial archives to create different histories is especially empowering, more so than creating a separate, alternative record, because it illustrates the limits and historical instability of colonial narratives, opening up space for new histories.

A Choctaw archival theory engages with Choctaw pasts that are not static, but moving past time, continuously impacting, and being enacted on by, the present. Hope’s win in the re-envisioned game against the cavalrymen has ripples of impact that spread outward through past and present, building memories of American Indian victory: “And the roar of Indians can be heard all the way back to Fort Sill, where, after twenty-two years,

Geronimo, honored leader of the Apaches, is still a prisoner of war” (Howe 218).16 After the reconstruction of the archive, Lena finds that there are “dozens of posts” on the Miko

Kings weblog “about their historic 1907 win over Fort Sill’s Cavalrymen” (220). These online reactions suggest that a participatory digital archive of the Miko Kings will generate many responses, confirming that victorious American Indian histories are influential in the present-day.

16 The Obama administration’s use of “Geronimo” as the code name for the Osama Bin Laden operation again calls attention to the connection between American Indian struggles and American foreign policy in the Middle East.

In the tradition of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, the positioning of

American Indians as champions has the potential to upset dominant American narratives of manifest destiny. As the construction of a Choctaw archive helps Lena form a

Choctaw worldview that resists dominant narratives, implicitly her written story of the

Miko Kings will impact other Choctaws. Womack has argued that nationhood is perceived through story: “To exist as a nation, the community needs a perception of nationhood, that is, stories…that help them imagine who they are as a people, how they came to be, and what cultural values they wish to preserve” (Red 26). In Howe’s novel, the eye tree’s vision allows storytelling far more powerful than any one recorded history.

Choctaw storytelling and theorizing work in conjunction with written documentation to create a powerful Miko Kings archive. In Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian

Resurgence, Valerie Lambert sees Choctaw creation stories as the starting point for learning and writing the greater history of her tribe: “To understand what we do today, how and why we do it, and who and why we are the way we are today, one must learn about and understand our history” (20). The story of the Miko Kings is its own kind of creation story for Lena, and potentially for other Choctaws, because it conveys an understanding of Choctaw past and present through a new kind of sight, as defined by

Ezol’s eye tree. A Choctaw archive that exists on Choctaw terms, and engages Choctaw temporality, language, and spirituality, becomes a powerful community resource.

The story of the Miko Kings baseball team brings together storytelling, theory, performance, and document. Ezol’s eye tree describes a circular vision of time, as past and present are constantly acting on one another. Archiving, then, is always an active

process of creation that has far-reaching implications for communities across time and space. A Choctaw archive is the eye tree, containing the creative process of seeing and telling the world through a Choctaw specific lens.

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