Miko Kings : An Indian Baseball Story

"LeAnne's Howe's Miko Kings is an incredible act of recovery: baseball, a sport jealously guarded by mainstream Anglo culture, is also rooted in Native American history and territory...[Howe's] compelling stories and narratives...expose the political games of the 20th century that Native Americans learned to play for resistance and survival." --Rigoberto GonzalezMiko Kings is set in Indian Territory's queen city, Ada, Oklahoma, during the baseball fever of 1907, but moves back and forth from 1969, during the Vietnam War, to present-day Ada. The story centers on the lives of Hope Little Leader, a Choctaw pitcher for the Miko Kings, and Ezol Day, a postal clerk in Indian Territory who travels forward in time to tell stories to the present-day narrator. With Day's help, the narrator draws the reader into Indian boarding schools, where the novel's legendary love story between Justina Maurepas--a character modeled after an influential Black educator--and Hope Little Leader, begins. Though a lively and humorous contemporary work of fiction, the narration draws heavily on LeAnne Howe's careful historical research: boarding schools for Native American children, Native American participation in the Vietnam War, and-most centrally-the story of the little-known Indian Baseball League of the late 1800s and early 1900s.