55 pages • 1 hour read
LeAnne HoweMiko Kings
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prelude-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prelude Summary
Content Warning: This section discusses racism and intense violence and includes brief mentions of sexual violence (including acts with children and animals). Outdated and offensive terms referring to Indigenous Americans are included only in quotations.
The Prelude takes place on the set of the film about the talented Choctaw baseball team: the Miko Kings. Carl Laemmle, a film producer from Chicago, has come to Oklahoma to make the movie, hiring the local Choctaw population. They begrudgingly take on a new look: “Their long hair shorn and their faces scrubbed clean, the Choctaws wear clothes cut from modern textiles, the same as any Broadway clerk. They represent savagery gone civilized” (7). Other Choctaws are put into stereotypical, racist clothing (such as fringed shirts, leggings, and braided wigs with the wrong type of plait) to distinguish them as the Choctaw team.
Hope Little Leader, the pitcher for the real-life Miko Kings, takes his place on the ballfield set for filming. He is one of the players in the stereotypical Choctaw clothing, and his teammates tease him for it. He remembers how the film came about. It started with a “semi-fictitious story about the team that ‘pitted the white man against the red man’” (9), which was based on the Miko Kings’ incredible defeat against a top-tier white baseball team from Chicago. In the story, the writer incorrectly wrote that the Miko Kings were Sioux, not Choctaw. When Laemmle approached Henri Day, the owner of the Miko Kings and a Choctaw himself, Henri agreed to let Laemmle film on the basis of “correctly identify[ing] the team as Choctaw” (9). Laemmle agreed, and the filming process began.
Now, Hope is reconsidering it all. He looks around and starts to leave, untying his horse and preparing to ride away from the set. Henri sees him and approaches. The two converse, and eventually Hope reties his horse and returns to his position. He is going to take part in the movie after all, and he prepares to pitch the ball.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Restoration”
The first chapter begins in Ada, Oklahoma, in 2006. The narrative shifts from third person to first person and introduces the protagonist of the book: Lena. Lena is a Choctaw woman who has recently moved into the house she inherited from her grandmother, “who died nineteen years ago, and [the house] has remained vacant until now” (14). One of the construction workers who is doing renovations on the house fetches Lena to have her look at something they found in one of the walls. It is an old, brown leather pouch, filled with a series of handwritten and typed papers, photographs, and, most intriguingly, a journal with the name “Ezol” embossed on it.
Later that night, when the workers have gone home for the day, Lena combs through the contents of the pouch more carefully. One of the photographs is of a baseball team, and the inscription reads, “1907 Miko Kings Champions” (15). She examines it carefully, noting that one player has a deep scar across his face and that there are three Indigenous men in the back row that are not wearing the baseball uniforms but instead are dressed in suits and bowler hats. Lena wonders who each of the men are and how they might be linked to her grandmother’s past.
Lena recalls her childhood summers in the house, which was built by her grandmother in 1907. Lena’s mother, Kit, died giving birth to Lena, but Lena’s grandmother did her best to pass down memories of Kit to her granddaughter. Every summer, Lena would stay in Ada learning Choctaw words and how to cook traditional Choctaw food. Despite the memories made those summers, there was always a disconnect between them. Grandmother would cry sometimes, and Lena knew “it was because she resented [her] for being born” (18). Grandmother would tell Lena that it wasn’t her fault, but Lena could never shake the feeling that her grandmother blamed her for her mother’s death.
Lena then recounts her journey away from Oklahoma. She left for New York in 1982, believing that she’d never return. She “wanted to forget [she] was half Choctaw and half Sac and Fox. Forget all things Okie” and start a new life in the big city (18). She started writing short news stories for several magazines and soon began a relationship “with a freelance photographer named Sayyed Farhan, a Palestinian who’d been making a successful living working abroad” (18). Lena decided that she wanted to try that for herself and subsequently moved to Amman in the Middle East. There, she worked as a freelance writer, penning stories about visiting historic sites and her own personal experience as an American living abroad. She planned to write travel books about the Middle East, but everything changed after September 11, 2001, and the subsequent US invasion of Iraq.
In November 2005, her entire life was shattered when Sayyed, who’d been hired to photograph a Days Inn, was killed alongside 59 other people in a bombing at the hotel. Lena’s grief consumed her for months, until one morning when she was chanting the Salaat at sunset and she heard a voice saying, “The time has come to return home” (20). She heard it again the next morning and decided that it was time to go back to Oklahoma.
Now, back in Ada, Lena is ready to investigate this piece of history she’s found in her grandmother’s home. She starts to contact people about the Miko Kings, trying to find any useful information, but does not have any luck with her search. Lena ends up finding out more in an unexpected way, as “[i]t [is] then that Ezol appear[s]. Perhaps [Lena’s] need to know [brings] her across time and space” (22). The spirit of a woman, Ezol, who personally knew the Miko Kings comes to Lena, ready to provide answers to her questions.
The next day, Lena fact checks some of the names and stories that Ezol told her about the Miko Kings. The most important revelation is that a film about them was made called His Last Game. Lena finds the film in the database for the Library of Congress and orders a copy. When she watches it, she is shocked to see Ezol “in the final scene, crudely made up to look a man, playing one of the gravediggers” (24). Now, Lena knows that this Choctaw woman has come to her from the past to tell her the real story about the Miko Kings. A few weeks later, Ezol reappears. This time, Lena is ready not only to listen to Ezol’s story but also to write down the story with her.
Prelude-Chapter 1 Analysis
The Prelude and Chapter 1 introduce two of the three primary timelines that are tracked in this book. The Prelude takes place in 1907, the year the silent movie about the Miko Kings, His Last Game, was filmed. The lack of care taken by the white filmmakers to accurately portray the Indigenous Americans onscreen is evident from the beginning. One example is a wig that Hope Little Leader is asked to wear, which makes it “obvious to the Indians that their producer doesn’t know the difference between the plaits of a powerful warrior and those of a little girl” (7). This introduces the book’s theme of The Importance of Preserving an Accurate History, which will also serve as one of the main conflicts that the characters wrestle with in the story. Many of the characters face making a decision between having their story told by white Americans—and therefore preserved but preserved inaccurately—or passing down their history in their own words.
In the present, Lena finds their photograph and wonders how they actually felt about making this movie. She notes that they were living through the worst part of the Allotment Era. Initiated by the Dawes Act of 1887, the Allotment Era lasted for forty-seven years. During that time, the federal government privatized all of the tribal lands of Indian Territory into individual plots, much of it going to non-Indians (16).
This historical context is crucial, as the story of the Miko Kings takes place in a very specific point in history. In the early 20th century, white Americans pushed to assimilate the Indigenous Americans through institutions such as boarding schools where the children were asked to leave their cultural heritage behind. The forced assimilation of the early 20th century directly mirrors the pressure that Lena felt to leave her own Choctaw identity behind. As a young adult, she was prepared to leave Oklahoma for good and completely reinvent herself.
Lena’s introduction to the Miko Kings is the inciting incident in the book. The story unravels like a mystery, with the text revealing clues to the past one at a time. Lena, who always felt a disconnect between herself and her grandmother, finds herself wanting to know more about her family when the spirit of Ezol appears to her. The introduction of Ezol also establishes a literary language of how time and space interact with each other in the book. Lena recounts, “That night, she unwrapped the team’s stories as one might open birthday gifts. Out of order, but with a passion for celebration” (20). This quote directly reflects the book’s narrative structure and foreshadows the text’s non-linear storytelling.
Finally, the first two chapters hint at a journey of overcoming grief and how reconnecting to one’s land and history can be a healing process. Lena, who had originally left Oklahoma for good, finds that her homeland is the only answer when she is faced with the loss of Sayyed. Throughout the book, characters face significant trials and loss. It is only each other, the land, and the stories they share that can ultimately bring them out of their grief.
