Miko Kings

by LeAnne Howe

Miko Kings is set in Indian Territory's queen city, Ada, Oklahoma, during the baseball fever of 1903 and simultaneously in 1969 during the Vietnam era. The story centers on the lives of Hope Little Leader, a Choctaw pitcher for the Miko Kings baseball team; Lucius Mummy, a switch hitter; and Ezol Daggs, the postal clerk in Indian Territory. It is Daggs who, in attempting to patent her Choctaw theory of relativity, inadvertently changes the course of history for the Indians and their baseball team.

Though a lively and humorous contemporary work of fiction, the narration draws heavily on Howe's careful historical research: boarding schools for Native American children, relations between African Americans and Native Americans, 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. As Hope Little Leader tells it: "This is where the twentieth-century Indian really began . . . not in the abstractions of congressional acts, but on the prairie diamond."

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