Copyright by Emily Ann Lederman 2012
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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 by 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. iv Moving in Choctaw Time: Baseball and the Archive in LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story by 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 v 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. vi Table of Contents Text................................................................................................................. 1 References..................................................................................................... 30 vii 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). 1 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 2 “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). 3 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.