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A Review of LeAnne Howe's Miko King: An Indian Baseball Story LeAnne Howe. Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007. ISBN 978-1-879960-78-7. $11.95.
LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings is subtitled "An Indian Baseball Story," but with chapter titles like "Portals to Other Worlds" and "Indian Territory, As Told By Ezol Day, Postal Clerk and Experimenter of Time," it is as much science fiction as sport fiction. The novel tells the story of an ill-fated baseball series between an Oklahoma Indian team and that of the Seventh Cavalry - the same regiment that was defeated by Custer at Little Big Horn. It picks up the narrative threads spun by several narrators who meet across time, to weave a tapestry of connection. At times poetic and ultimately deeply moving, in its depiction of a traumatic past that literally haunts its protagonists, Miko Kings compares favorably with other postcolonial novels like Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) or Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In its juxtaposition of Western science with indigenous ways of knowing it recalls Amitav Ghosh's Calcutta Chromosome (2001).
Lena, long an expatriot journalist in the Middle East, has returned to her Choctaw grandmother's home in Ada, Oklahoma in 2006. During remodeling, workmen discover in the walls an old leather U.S. mail pouch containing an old journal and some yellowed newspaper clippings. Not long after, the ghost of...