Summing up Miko Kings

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What to Read This Fall (Some Unpredictable Choices)Howe is a Native American writer of aggressive politics and stylized prose. With this historical novel, she recounts the participation of the Native American league during the baseball fever of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and how the mythology constructed around the Miko Kings shaped Native American-White American relations into the Vietnam era. Howe’s narrative defies easy categorization but her mission is clear: to elevate this sports footnote into the position of prominence it deserves.About Miko KingsMiko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story is an homage to the dusty roads and wind-blown diamonds of America’s first moving picture about baseball, His Last Game. Just as Henri Day and his team, the Miko Kings, are poised to win the 1907 Twin Territories’ Pennant against their archrivals, the Seventh Cavalrymen from Fort Sill, pitcher Hope Little Leader finds himself embroiled in a plot that will destroy him and the Indian team. Only the town’s chimeric postal clerk, Ezol Day, understands the outcome of Hope’s last game and how it will affect Indians and baseball for the next four generations.Leanne HoweIn Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, LeAnne Howe combines truth and fiction in a tale that is built on historical facts and documents but stands firmly in the world of make-believe. After finding an old pouch full of newspaper clippings and a diary, the half-Choctaw, half-Sac and Fox Lena Bolin begins to track down the story of the 1907 Twin Territories' Pennant between the all-Indian Kings and the Seventh Cavalryman. Among the characters Lena meets is Ezol Day, a time-traveling post office worker whose storytelling wanders as easily through Choctaw tradition as it does physics, linguistics, and anthropology.Comment:  For more on Native books and authors, see The Best Indian Books.