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.
Themes
The Relationship Between Land and Identity
Content Warning: This section contains references to racism against Indigenous people.
One of the themes in Miko Kings is the relationship between land and identity. Many characters leave their home only to find the need to return, either literally or through memories. Additionally, since the story is set against the backdrop of the Allotment Era, there is another layer of the relationship between land and identity. This theme explores what it means to call a place home and what it means when home is stolen from a group of people.
Lena grew up feeling a disconnect with her Choctaw grandmother and ultimately chose to leave that identity behind in search of a fresh start. As a result, she became a nomad who “regularly questioned who [she] was—an Indian from Oklahoma, always from, but forever absent?” (20). It wasn’t until a shock of grief knocked her down that she heard a call back to Oklahoma. This was a pleasant surprise for Lena, who thinks, “So I hadn’t purged all my Native connections after all. Even though I’d put ten thousand miles between me and Oklahoma, the land of my ancestors had tracked me down and was speaking” (20). Upon her return, Lena unlocks the history of the land and the stories of her family that took place there.
In both of his timelines, Hope is always looking to return home. As a child, when he is sent to the Hampton School, he tries to escape. Even though it always gets him in trouble, Hope “has to find a way home. He’ll run away or die trying” (63). More than anything, Hope wants to be with the people he loves. He fights to see his sisters again. Later, when he is in the nursing home, Hope travels to his homeland in his dreams and memories. It is on that land that Hope fulfills his dreams of being a baseball player and his dreams of loving Justina.
Justina, meanwhile, has lived in several places in her lifetime. When she thinks of home, however, the place she remembers most clearly is Ada. She tells Algernon during one of their interviews, “Sometimes at night when I hear the cicadas singing, I think that I am back in Ada. Back in my rightful place with Hope” (80). Justina’s biggest regret in life is the abandoning Hope and her life with him in Oklahoma. The land is tied to the memories she has of the greatest love of her life.
Finally, the backdrop of the Allotment Era provides a supplemental layer to this theme. During this time, territory that had belonged to the Indigenous Americans was being divided and given away into plots of privatized land. The founding of the Miko Kings is an effort to return to inter-tribal community. It is modeled after
the Four Mothers Society, an organization that boasts twenty-four thousand Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Cherokees as members, they’re opposed to having the government slice up their tribal lands into squares of private ownership (116).
The land is being taken from them and given to thousands of white Americans who claim to have Indigenous blood. Lena recalls her grandmother telling her about the Allotment Era. She said, “An entire race of people is swindled out of their land by changing the pronouns? Ours to mine. We to I. Words are power. They change everything” (16). The founding of the Miko Kings is a way to reclaim a traditional Indigenous American pastime and to play on the land that was stolen from them.
The Importance of Preserving an Accurate History
In Miko Kings, author LeAnne Howe explores the importance of preserving an accurate history. The text suggests that the American history that is taught and recorded is through the white colonizer lens, and so much of the Indigenous American history is lost and forgotten. It becomes crucial, then, for the characters in the book to tell the story from their own perspective. This is done both orally and through the reading of documents such as Ezol’s personal journal. Revisiting and recording the past serves two purposes: to record an accurate history for future generations and to heal the characters from their own grief.
When Lena and Ezol begin their project together, Lena soon realizes what is at stake with what they are writing. She says, “I’ve come to understand that if she isn’t present, if I don’t stay cloistered with her, the story of Indian Territory Baseball and the men who played the game may never be told” (24). The Miko Kings have, so far, been lost to history. This is mostly due to what happened at the last game between them and the Fort Sill Cavalrymen. Ezol tells Lena, “Hope was special, and Blip and the others knew it. They loved him for it, but it’s because of his recklessness that we all ended up […] forgotten” (44). Now, Ezol has come back to the land where it all took place to pass on the real story of the Miko Kings to the next generation. Lena has the opportunity to record the truth before it is lost to time forever.
Ezol’s theories of time and space are wrapped up in the oral tradition of passing down stories. She “theorized that Choctaws didn’t have the same experiences with time as those of Europeans because we speak differently. […] What the Choctaws spoke of, they saw. Experienced” (37). These experiences are erased from the white perspective of history, but speaking them out loud gives their stories power. It restores their agency and releases the emotions that come alongside both the joyous and the painful memories.
The journalists of the book, Lena and Algernon, urge their subjects to tell them their side of the story. Algernon wonders
what becomes of living legends, heroes and heroines who’ve been frozen in time and isolated from their communities as they were lifted to eminence? Even the greatest champions are mistaken for people they never were. And as the years pass, historians have them speaking words they never said (69).
The emphasis in this quote is not just on speaking the stories aloud but also on speaking them within a community. History is not isolated but meant to be shared. When it is, more truth will come to the surface. This is proven when Lena writes about the Miko Kings on her blog and more descendants of the team members come forward with their own history to share. The project begins with Lena and Ezol but eventually grows to something much more impactful. Cora never spoke of the past due to her grief. Now, Lena and Ezol are healing old wounds through their book and creating a path forward for others to do the same.
The Intersection of Baseball and Indigenous Identity
The book explores the ancient Indigenous game of baseball and how it reflects so much more of Indigenous identity and heritage beyond the game itself. There are aspects of baseball that reflect the Indigenous approach to life. For example, Hope explains the pick-up system to his nurse, Kerwin. He gives an example of a pitcher getting sick on the day of a game. He says that this wouldn’t stop the game from happening and that they’d instead “pick up a player from the home team. That man would vow to play just as hard for the visitors as he would for his own team” (90). There is a sense of honor that is inherent to the Choctaw approach to baseball, one that is reflected in their society (such as in marriages) as well.
Baseball has been an integral part of Indigenous American culture for centuries. For them, “[s]tickball has always been a training game for warriors. The game teaches players the art of endurance” (104). There are important lessons to be learned from the game, and once again, the emphasis is placed on the game’s communal aspects. This is the inspiration behind Henri Day’s idea for the team in the first place. He sees the possibility it offers, to “be the country’s first inter-tribal business, an alliance that will spread across the whole U.S. Maybe even the whole goddamn continent” (112). He longs for something the tribes can have together—something that they can take ownership of after all that’s been stripped away from them.
With something as historic as the Miko Kings, Indigenous people will also gain national notoriety. First, “[t]he Major Leagues will have to take notice if the Miko Kings win the series” (53). Second, when the offer for the film comes about, they see it as a chance to preserve the memory of the Miko Kings forever. By playing the ancient game that they invented, the Indigenous Americans can take back, and even profit from, something that was stolen and adapted from them. They can restore the sense of reverence they’ve always had for it and reclaim it from white Americans.
