NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Imagine Lennon as Choctaw Code Talker 89 MICHAEL SNYDER Imagine Lennon as Choctaw Code Talker: Indigenized Beatles in LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings CHOCTAW POET, playwright, and novelist LeAnne Howe published her third book, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, in 2007. This engaging and insightful novel tells of a Choctaw and Sac and Fox writer from Ada, Oklahoma named Lena Coulter, who in 2006 attempts to uncover the lost story of the Miko Kings, an early twentieth-century Indian Territory baseball team. As Lena’s knowledge deepens, she works at unraveling a mystery to explain why the team’s star pitcher, Hope Little Leader, who is Choctaw, becomes involved with gamblers and “throws”—that is, deliberately loses—a baseball game in October 1907. This is no ordinary ballgame: it is a symbolically charged contest upon which a great deal is at stake. For this Indigenous team’s opponents are none other than Custer’s old gang, the Seventh Cavalry, and the game occurs shortly before Indian Territory is swallowed up by Oklahoma statehood, during a period in which the Curtis Act of 1898, which imposed allotment policy upon the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, had been put into effect and was taking a toll on Choctaw tribal communalism. Lena Coulter is prompted to undertake her investigation upon discovering a mailbag full of old documents cached in the wall of her Ada home. She begins to peruse these documents, which in turn spurs her to research a broad array of materials in order to recover this piece of Choctaw and Indian Territory history. As the Choctaw author D. L. Birchfield states, “Choctaw history must be pieced together from many different sources.”1 Lena subsequently experiences visitations from Ezol Day, the brilliant niece of the Miko Kings’ co-owner, Henri Day. A prodigy, Ezol has unlocked secrets of language, time, and space that allow her to counsel Lena. Ezol’s ability to move freely in time becomes a metaphor of traditional Choctaw experiences of temporality as conjoining the past, present, and future at any given moment.2 The reader comes to see Ezol Day as the true author of the story as she guides Lena’s quest and composition , asking her questions, and offering her clues. In a Choctaw or Chahta sense, Ezol serves as the “metaphorical iti fabassa, the center pole of the story of Miko Kings, ever-in-motion, connecting multiple worlds at once,” Howe explains in an essay collected in Choctalking on Other Realities. Michael Snyder NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 90 One perplexing task that Ezol Day assigns Lena Coulter is to “find John Lennon” and to “find out what happened” to him.3 Thus begins a chain of symbolic associations between the Indigenous, in particular the Choctaw, and Lennon and The Beatles that extends across much of the novel. To some readers, the significance of the Lennon and Beatles references remains nebulous , as though the reader is “looking through a glass onion,” to quote a song Lennon penned for The Beatles.4 To others, the mystery of the Fab Four’s presence in the novel has even seemed a red herring or a missing puzzle piece. Howe seems to be “Choctaw code talking” in her engagement of Lennon and The Beatles, and without many clues, we must attempt to crack the code by viewing the novel in a Choctaw context as much as possible. LeAnne Howe herself acknowledged the novel’s intriguing lacuna in conversation and wrote in an e-mail to the author, “John Lennon is the missing chapter!”5 In our endeavor to make sense of the concatenation of baseball, Beatles, and Natives in Howe’s rich novel, we are led to engage further related topics, gender diversity and same-sex desire, which are important in both the novel’s project of Choctaw historical recovery and in John Lennon’s life. If John Lennon is “the missing chapter,” with metaphorical pages left blank, it is left to the reader to locate meaning in these references in co- creation with the author. As the reader and Lena scramble for clues, attempting to connect points into a meaningful constellation, unsure to...