Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

Yet these colonial archival materials may also serve as entry points to tribally specific histories. Since American Indians are both silenced and hypervisible within the colonial archive, working with the colonial archive's misrepresentations is an important part of destabilizing that archive. The devaluation of American Indian forms of archiving was integral to the colonial project; as Diana Taylor has explained, "[P]art of the colonizing project throughout the Americas consisted in discrediting autochthonous ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding" (34). [...]to decolonize the archive requires both revealing the destructive nature of the colonial archive that continues to be employed to justify state violence (such as land and resource acquisition and a militarized US-Mexico border) and privileging Indigenous modes of preserving and accessing historical knowledge. In Howe's novel, the mail pouch and then Ezoľs appearance represent an unsettled Choctaw history that needs addressing. [...]Lena's affective relationship to the archive, her state of obsession, is driven by both her own isolation and the history's larger sociopolitical necessity-its need to be told. [...]embedded in the Miko Kings archive is the promise of creating more decolonial archives, for the eye tree contains the potential to transfer its vision from one person to the next, allowing a Choctaw archive to spread outward.